The first chapter lade it on a bit too thick but it's gotten better since then. This is pretty good!
The government are certainly acting rationally setting a trap for the heretics by publicly executing E ranks . Does that mean Lowell was somewhere nearby speaking with his real voice?
I quite like these kinds of stories but I think they produce a big overreaction in young audiences where they think that all rules, authority, hierarchy and state are automatically bad then they waste some portion of their life with naive , utopian, juvenile ideas.
and it's a huge imbalance. there are tonnes of stories like this about how all authoritarian states are bad, and very few stories about authority-less states or anarchy is bad. Even in stories where there's a breakdown in law and order, there's rarely a connection spelled out between the character's suffering because the government lost control. Instead the character's suffering is blamed on some freak natural event (e.g. virus outbreak, natural disaster) or evil individuals , not the fact that the government has lost control and a state of anarchy has been reached a state of maximal liberty that libertarians and anarchists want. On the other hand in all of these stories it is authoritarian government itself that is thematically blamed . Simply the government being in control and restricting the freedom of the citizens is itself the source of evil in these stories.
It's an unbalanced story landscape. It's often bad when there's a government with a lot of control and people don't have freedom, it's even more often oft bad when there's anarchy because without government control there's no law and order , no services and people suffer even more. Why even more? Because even under a very controlling government, there will usually at least be enough order to sustain a large population. When there is no order and no authority then the human carrrying capacity of that area goes way down because efficiency goes way down because people's general safety is at risk and people can only make themselves secure in small local areas which means food can't be grown and distributed as efficiently and people need to spend much more on their own security which means you can't support nearly as many lives.
So actually anarchy or libertarianism is a greater source of human suffering or evil than authoritarianism, yet this is not represented thematically in the landscape of stories at all.
thanks for all the chapters