The Ultimate Punk
The lessons of Pluribus
A long time ago I got the notion that there was some gradient of happiness that if violated a person would feel pain, that somehow we would pay a price by defying our immortal souls. I learn every day some fraction of my naiveté. It’s a sort of pain I’m getting used to.
I have been, in the back of my writing mind, considering the basic satisfaction of adhering to philosophical consistency and virtue. Honestly, it does it for me, and I accept that weird stubborn streak of my personality and psyche. I have many ways of expressing it, but stipulate that I have a desire to do good, to be the big brother. Protector. Provider. Truth Teller. I’m willing to say it’s an obsession even as it aligns with my theory of the universe — that it has order and that our best purpose is to conform to that order. Yet I also know that we have to struggle against something that is our own weakness. It’s not enough to hate your foil, because absent that enemy you become complacent and less of what you truly desire to be. So we project that superpower onto heroic fictions. Sometimes in the form our own defiance.
Shooting Bad Guys
I have spent a huge amount of time in my life playing videogames. All the way back to age 14 playing Bow & Arrow, the first pinball machine I learned on. Thousands upon thousands of hours, living in the realized worlds of a different kind of literature, entertainment and fantasy. But there has been one genre of these evolved pastimes that I feel has given my life some balance and reminded me of what kind of man I am supposed to be, even as I realized it’s like a gymnasium instead of work in the real world. That is shooting bad guys. First person shooters. Halo. Call of Duty. Dishonored. Borderlands. Witcher. Wolfenstein.
Sure I played the brilliant puzzlers, Age of Empires, Civilization, The Portal, Myst, Riven, Obduction, Limbo, Inside. Just like I used to read crime thrillers and detective novels. But there’s something in me that is hard-headed and egotistical, self-centered and obdurate and I have to destroy the bad guys who thwart my progress. In videogames. It clears my head. It gives me a steady shot of something I need to get that I don’t get in Los Angeles. Well, something I don’t get any longer because I no longer approach 8 foot surf or pickup tackle football games in strange neighborhoods.
I need to compete and win. I need to learn new games, master them and defeat my opponents. I cannot just go along to get along. For all the years I have deferred my aggressions to be a good husband and father, I still need that kick in the pants. I don’t get it from gangsta rap, or Korn style speedmetal. I don’t get it from political smearing or destructive gossip. I don’t aim to be destructive in society, but I need an arena of destruction. I won’t give that up, even in my life of bourgie comfort and modern laziness. This is a man thing. I’ll explain it at length another time. For now let’s leave the working title as “Ripping Holes Into The Fabric of Bullshit”.
The Punks
So I have been trying to categorize the necessity for destruction, not just hostility but for triumph. For victory. Not even for the thrill but for the sustenance of my indomitable spirit. I’ve been calling it ‘punk’, because I know the world does not survive on harmony alone. So I often bring the following quote to bear in my writing, which I never aim to forget.
[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flag and loyalty-parades…. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.
-- George Orwell, 1940
Similarly, Will Durant showed me Nietzsche in that same light.
Punks are the creative destroyers of the machines of conformity. They give our minds breathing room to run up and crash through Overton Windows. Not just the literal Punk Rockers, but they count too. I’m talking about the kind of holiness that is assholiness, evidenced by a stubborn resistance to compromise on one’s vision of the necessity for freedom when surrounded. This is the emergent punk. One who is merely idiosyncratic under normal liberty, but immediately gets their hackles up when pressed into a corner. Which brings us to Pluribus. The one with the woman screaming at the sky.
as freedom is a breakfastfood or truth can live with right and wrong or molehills are from mountains made —long enough and just so long will being pay the rent of seem and genius please the talentgang and water most encourage flame
— e.e. cummings 1923
Pluribus: Carol Sturka + Manousos Oveida
I am of the opinion that Pluribus is the most provocative, stirring and valuable production that Apple TV+ has delivered. It will be hard pressed to do better. If, going back to the day when Steve Jobs changed the music business with the iTunes Store, was told that one day Apple would do it for video, I would have denied them thrice before the cock crowed. Now finally the moment has arrived. Better than See. Better than Silo. Better than Severance. Pluribus absolutely nails what I have been getting at with my every use of the word ‘punk’ here at the Stoic’s Observatory.
Carol Sturka is a punk. She is two slices short of a loaf of obnoxious. So, yeah merely obstinate. She is willful and hardheaded. She is possessive and sharp elbowed. So too is Manousos Oveida. Where Carol is inquisitive and voluble, Manousos is disciplined and fastidious. Their single-minded determination is born of the extreme discomfort they experience and bear at the end of the world as we know it.
So what are they determined to do? To bring the world back from the revolution that has changed everything. Not for their own comfort’s sake, but for the peace of mind which has been entirely invalidated by the granting of everyone elses wishes (maybe) and their own congenital inability to get with the program. If you don’t know the plot and premise of Pluribus, you only need to watch the first episode to begin to get the drift. Either way I’m going to spoil the entire plot here. So put on your big boy pants.
Aliens come to earth via an encoded radio signal that any sufficiently sentient species will understand as a very particular DNA sequence. That DNA sequence, once built into whatever microbe can carry it, eventually will mutate humans into a particular species of … let’s call them meta-humans. These meta-humans share a single hive mind. What anyone knows or remembers, now everyone remembers with perfect clarity and recall. Everyone has every skill, although it’s unclear how children are affected. Everyone is everyone else and this basically the realization of John Lennon’s song ‘Imagine’ and then some. There is no crime. There is no killing. There is no herding of animals or cultivation of crops. Meta-humans are incapable of deception. They are incapable of violence. In fact, if you scream at them with enough hostility, they collapse into a seizure and the weaker among them will die.
It is because of this last vulnerability that Carol Sturka who hates what this hive-mind creature has done to her life, discovers that her cursing them out has killed something on the order of 11 million meta-humans. On the whole of the planet there are only 12 others like Carol, including Manousos, who are immune to the wicked DNA. But in the course of taking over the entire human population of Earth, over 800 million humans died. Talk about a new world order.
The show poses the philosophical, political and cultural questions of the value of individual humanity. Would you accept heaven on earth if all you had to lose was your individuality? If you could vibe with everyone, literally 24/7 would you?
What is stunningly brilliant about Pluribus is that it retains the singular reality of the actual finite planet, which is that the resources necessary to sustain human life are in limited supply and availability. Under the new world order, no one owns anything. More people die than are born. The constraints are a combination of those of the films Soylent Green and Logan’s Run. It’s a limited utopia. Moreover it is the same utopia promised by various proponents of Artificial Super Intelligence. There is a super genius way to run the planet, if everyone is anesthetized and conforming to The Program. You cannot harm anyone, but people will still starve to death, but people are valuable after death — well at least their nutrients are. Yes Virginia, you can eat the rich. You can dream delusional dreams of infinite fulfillment, but life is not a dream. Being does not pay the rent of seem. Freedom is not a breakfastfood.
The Other Omega Man
The other fantasy offered by the meta-human hive mind which must cater to every whim and desire of the immune punks is exactly that. You want champagne and caviar every day? You want all of your old girlfriends back who now willingly do everything they never did before? You want a perfect vacation anywhere on the globe, maybe with your own 747 jet to pick you up and fly you there? You want to play GTA5 in real-life with no cops or enemies? The question becomes how long can you masturbate in the Matrix? Probably forever. For some people it is exactly what their entire life has prepared them for, as it is for the one character Mr. Diabete.
So he goes along to get along. What could go wrong? Nothing. Everything is on the table. It’s all a charade, after all. What the meta-human hive-mind really wants is to figure out a way to integrate you. They are the seductive Borg. They want to make you as happy as humanly possible and then tell you that it only gets better if you join with us. And while they are stymied for the moment on how exactly to do it without your consent, basically every mind of meta-humanity is working on a way to sucker you in. It’s only a matter of time.
How Punk?
So you as a viewer have to ask yourself, how punk are you? You start to realize the same things that Agent Smith was saying of the Matrix. Humans need a bit of dysfunction. We need to feel that we win stuff by cheating sometimes. We need people to push back. We need to exist on the nerves of people who piss us off, even when we’re just being arbitrary. We need to struggle in order to make our triumphs feel well-earned. We cannot exist as pets. And yet some fraction of us do. Something in us wants to be mothered. To be read in on the conspiracy. To be given a list of all the unwritten rules. To get it. To eat and sleep and live off the fat of the land. Like the pigs on the 70s t-shirts. Wake and bake and be makin’ bacon. When do we get sick and tired of ourselves and really want to get inside other people’s heads? When do start carving initials in our arms and legs out of sheer boredom? When do we stop wanting the challenge of being an individual? When the Others avoided personal contact with Carol Sturka she lasted 40 days and 40 nights alone in her own wilderness until she begged them back.
As always, the trick the Devil plays while staying out of sight is to have people doubt his existence. When all you have are sinful and sinister games for people to play, people will self-destruct against the cardboard walls of the demonic dungeon. Especially if they don’t look up, or within.
Thus the invention of God and the Devil. That deeply sustains humankind to engage the limits of the Earth. We will always believe in saints and demons. They are us.
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Ultimately
Carol Sturka and Manousos Oveida are objectionable people. Unless I was a pod person, I don’t think I could stand their company. They distrusted each other on sight. But it was only the assured catastrophic destruction of self that got Carol motivated to fight back. She bought the illusion for just long enough to realize that in the end, she was a mere mote to the meta-human Others. She was one of the last niggling unanswered question of the meta-mind that would have its way with every last human. So, knowing they couldn’t say no, she ordered from them an atom bomb.
Sturka became the ultimate punk. She has thus decided that she is unequivocally one of the last individuals on Earth, the place of her native evolution. This DNA was not a part of the natural order of things and the meta-human hive mind was not the God of nature. It was a hostile invasive parasite, who as Manousos fully understood from the beginning stole the souls of every human being, save the final few.
We face this very challenge in foggier and smaller dimensions. Some demons are trying to seduce us and steal our souls. They are calculating ways to stifle our dissent without coercion, to cajole us into their simmering pots of individual destruction. We will find out how punk we need to be. Hopefully many more of us before it takes atom bombs.