Solid State Society: Who is the puppeteer?

[douyang]

For those of you who haven't watched it, spoilers ahead:



I just finished watching SSS for the 2nd time. I'm wondering who everyone thinks the puppeteer really was. I personally believe it wasn't just the collective unconscious of the Noble rot senior citizens, or that of motoko's, but of the everyman in Japanese society. This is heavily implied in the scene where Motoko talks to the utterly commonplace, ordinary looking government bureaucrat at the end, who in response to her question of who he really is and how he knows so much about her, morphs his face into a wide variety of individuals who felt they could change the world for the better on a massive scale, culminating in her, which I feel implies he means the wider "gestalt", or whole that is seperate and more than it's individual parts, of their entire society.

Also, you see him stepping out from the row of cyberbodies Motoko keeps at her hideout, which range from the Chroma form to a young girl, representing a type of crosssection of the population, if you will. Then he talks about a "we" having connected with many different consciousnesses in the past, and the time being right to become an vanishing mediator and play an active role in the new society. I think this is all pointing to the collective subconscious of their entire society taking on a life of its own and instigating these crimes of kidnapping and murder as part of a massive attempt to solve the equally massive common problems facing Japan.

Finally, Motoko's statements to Batou at the ending pool scene imply this is the case, and the third party of the collective unconscious, seperate from the individual and the group, and beyond mere shared culture, the one theme underlying the whole Stand Alone Complex series.