I recently put together a trilogy of essays exploring systemic cruelty and complicity—so, all light and airy stuff, then. But, this being a pop-culture blog, I tackled the subject through a few different mediums—weaving together comic books, video games, and academic theory alongside lived experience. It was a slightly different direction for the site, but I wanted to try something new.
By bringing together all three pieces, I hoped to construct a unified thesis on how modern systemic cruelty operates across every scale of society. My first essay was on Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow and examined macro-level community complicity through Hannah Arendt's concept of the "banality of evil". Below is my second essay on systemic cruelty. Enjoy!
As a Muslim man, travelling through international airports alongside my white wife and biracial children, border control has long ceased to be a simple administrative formality. Instead, it has evolved into a dark, running family joke.
Whenever we join the airport queues, my family instinctively knows the drill; without fail, I am the one pulled aside for "random selection"—enduring the extra bag searches, the chemical swab tests, and the thorough wand-down while my family waits patiently on the other side of the barrier. This happened once again this Summer when I travelled up from Devon to Scotland. Now, I am not suggesting these security protocols are entirely without merit, but they occur with a rather comic, exhausting regularity.
This personal ritual always brings to mind Lucas Pope’s 2013 indie masterpiece, Papers, Please. The game traps you behind a grey, suffocating stamp desk in the fictional authoritarian state of Arstotzka, tasking you with an agonisingly tense job: inspect passports, visas, and entry permits against a constantly moving target of fickle bureaucratic rules. Beyond your booth, an endless line snakes off-screen, populated by travellers armed with forged names, mismatched genders, impossible dates, and altered photos.
Because your earnings depend entirely on how many people you process, the system explicitly favours speed over accuracy. One slip-up triggers the sharp, mechanical print of an official citation; make enough mistakes, and your meagre pay is docked—leaving you unable to feed your family, heat your home, or buy vital medicine. In Arstotzka, bureaucratic error carries a immediate human cost.
For most players, Papers, Please serves as a sobering exercise in systemic empathy and moral compromise. For me, it strikes a far more intimate chord. Pope captures with terrifying precision how border control functions as security theatre—a performance designed to manage public anxiety by projecting absolute control. The moment a foreigner steps up to the booth, they are transformed into a convenient scapegoat for societal and economic crises that existed long before they arrived.
This anxiety is constantly stoked by the state newspaper, ironically named ‘The Truth’. Far from an objective paper of record, it operates as pure propaganda, manufacturing public consent for increasingly hostile, xenophobic policies. By weaponising fear of the "other", the regime keeps an open flame beneath society, steadily raising the temperature until institutional prejudice boils over into full-blown authoritarianism.
At any border, real or pixelated, the most powerful document in the room is the passport belonging to whichever nation sits on the other side of that invisible boundary. Yet, even with the right paperwork in hand, systemic suspicion alters how that document is read depending entirely on who is holding it.
What makes Papers, Please so unsettling is its quiet role reversal. In real life, I am the person standing under the scrutiny of the official light; in Arstotzka, Pope forces me behind the glass, making me wield the heavy red DENIED stamp, weigh human desperation against my own family's survival, and act as the administrative cog. It demonstrates with terrifying precision how easily ordinary people become complicit in institutional cruelty just to protect their own domestic peace : Political theorist Hannah Arendt called this the "banality of evil".
Rejoining my wife and kids on the other side of the security barrier after yet another "random" inspection—adjusting my jacket while the queue shuffles endlessly past—Pope’s bleak satire feels less like a pixelated dystopia and far more like the world we have quietly learned to accept.
LINK: Japan: My Journey to the East
LINK: Please Save My Earth - Cult Manga Review
LINK: Thomas Was Alone Video Game Vinyl Soundtrack Review
LINK: Akira Soundtrack Vinyl Review
LINK: The Power of Stories and How They Are Manipulated
LINK: The Message by Ta-Nahisi Coates - Book Review (and Some Thoughts)
LINK: The Anxious Generation: Book Review (and Some Thoughts)
LINK: Utopia for Realists- Book Review
LINK: Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties- Book Review (and Some Thoughts)