Monogatari Series - Volume 27 - Chapter 1.24

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“Compared to someone having no ill will, it’s more of a nuisance for someone to have no self-awareness—in short, rather than not thinking that they “did something wrong”, it would be that they weren’t thinking that they “did it at all”. And in that case, they really wouldn’t even know what to apologize for.

“It may have caused harm, it may have been a nuisance, but I was still in the right, so I had no choice but to do so—if they at least held that principle, then it could be a premeditated crime, with them acting out some picaresque novel.

“However, they didn’t think they ‘did something right’ or ‘did something wrong’—but for a superior person that states, ‘I didn’t do anything at all’, I would need to rack my brains to figure out how to demand an apology from them.

“If you were saying you ‘didn’t do anything’ in the sense that you failed to fulfill your obligations imposed by the law, then of course that was reason to be reprimanded, but for a good-for-nothing who didn’t even commit that sort of violation, how was I to explain to them that their lack of self-awareness was the real problem?

“They don’t want people to get mad at them, so they don’t do anything.

“That’s how they think—they don’t want people to get mad at them, so they hold no ideology.

“Of course, it would be because such a superior person claimed to be an unrelated spectator that they could act as a third party—like how no judge or jury was allowed to judge a perpetrator related to them, or take charge of a case that they were involved in.

“If the people enforcing and executing the law were related parties, the public would absolutely not agree to that—if that were to happen, it could result in exceptions to the law, so even if there was no such thing as a truly unrelated third party, we should still uphold appearances.

“There’s the small world theory that people are connected by five degrees of separation, but how much of a relationship is needed to be considered a related party?

“Even you.

“Have thought of things as ‘someone else’s problem’, right?

“Even when you poked your nose into someone else’s affairs, it was always because some calamity had befallen your lover or friend or childhood friend, right?

“You wanted to act as the judge.

“Or you wanted to play the role of the detective.

“But, it didn’t end up being that way… Even the famous Araragi Koyomi, if you trace back the connections, was impartially—equally in the eyes of the law—the same sort of related party, who was nobody special.93

“Even a judge can be dragged down to the defendant’s seat, after all.”