Partway through Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the author neatly summarises one of the more troubling questions that undercuts civilisation: is it ethical for widespread happiness to come at the expense of the discontent of select individuals? Or, to put it simply: do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few?

“Let’s assume that you were called upon to build the edifice of human destiny so that men would finally be happy”, the troubled Ivan Karamazov says. “If you knew that, in order to attain this, you would have to torture just one single creature, would you agree to do it?” 

That one question has been probed and explored time and time again in the years since Karamazov was published, most notably in Ursula LeGuin’s sci-fi story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, in which the happiness of a flourishing city depends totally on the torture of a young girl. But it has perhaps never been as thoroughly – not to mention amusingly – explored to the extent that it is in Pluribus, the new sci-fi show from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan.  

In Gilligan’s re-telling, near-global happiness is an external force: a virus of sorts, which turns the world’s population into a hive mind of mutually contented drones. The one miserable, unlucky individual whose perpetual unhappiness sets her apart from the mainstream: Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), who appears to be immune to the virus. Or rather, temporarily immune, given much of the early episodes of the show follows the rising, blackly comic threat of the hive mind searching for ways to make Carol one of them.  

“Once you see how wonderful it is….” a member of the hive mind tells Carol early on, speaking to her directly from her television set. The hive promises happiness, peace and the end of all human conflict. What they also represent: the tyranny of mainstream thought, an enforced and established consensus where majority rules, no matter how discontented outliers might be. And where happiness itself is dangerously considered the main goal of all human existence. 

The problem with happiness

One of Gilligan’s masterstrokes is to set Carol out of the mainstream even before the virus spreads. When we meet her, she’s a beloved romantasy author who can’t stand either the mindless content that she churns out, or the horde of rabid fans who adore her. In the first episode, her business/life partner Helen (Miriam Shor) mocks Carol’s dislike of adulation, teasing that she’s a perpetual miser, illogically rejecting the good time that’s being offered to her.  

But when the mainstream offers mere happiness, we should reject it, as both Gilligan and Dostoyevsky seem to suggest. A life of contentment and fitting in with the crowd isn’t an ethical good in and of itself. As the rise of increasingly deranged social media slop proves – the kind of quick dopamine fix provided by TikTok – there’s so much more to life than merely being entertained.  

The person who sits in their room all day watching Instagram reels could conceivably be very happy, but wouldn’t we all suggest that they might want more? Should they in fact pursue something greater and more important than simply having a good time? 

This is the threat posed by Pluribus’ hive. In an ideal world, happiness should be a kind of side effect of good, not something to be pursued blindly for its own sake. As in, happiness should be what happens when we achieve virtuous behaviours – when we care for others, or pursue a flourishing life. And it certainly should not be enforced by the mainstream at the expense of individual freedoms and wants.  

Even as Pluribus’ plot progresses, and it is revealed that Carol’s unhappiness is a very literal threat to the hive – when she lashes out at them, members of the hive abruptly die – the needs of those who sit in the mainstream should never be held above the deep unhappiness of those who also must operate within the world. Not only because enforcing the desires of the collective onto the individual is a harm in itself, but because sometimes – maybe even often – the desires of the collective aren’t particularly desirable. 

In praise of conflict

Pluribus slowly encourages us to be suspicious of the idea that the hive are actually as happy as they claim to be. Do we really think that happiness is only a flood of dopamine throughout our body? If so, then as the philosopher Robert Nozick once asked, wouldn’t we therefore choose to step into a machine that did nothing but probe our dopamine receptors for all eternity, living an artificial life where we submit to being little more than switches that can be flipped in order to produce joy? 

It doesn’t seem like many of us consider happiness only that. Happiness is what happens when we go to the other side of hardship; when we set ourselves goals and then achieve them. Ultimately, it’s a response to conflict and unhappiness, not the absence of conflict and unhappiness altogether.

Enforced mainstream happiness isn’t just ethically harmful for those who have it enforced upon them; it might be harmful to those who actively want it.

In the age of AI, these issues have never been more timely. In fact, Gilligan himself seems aware of this: each episode of Pluribus ends with a message, hidden in the credits, that reads, “this show was made by humans”.

We live in an era where tech companies constantly promise us that AI will bring ease, contentment, and the ability to fit in with our co-workers, friends and family – with the collective. Even if AI can do our jobs for us, or write tricky text messages to our loved ones, decreasing our discomfort, why would we even want that?  

Now more than ever, we should follow Carol’s lead and become perpetual sourpusses. As it turns out, being a grump might be one of the most ethical things of all.  

When David Stratton – critic, TV presenter and hero to a generation of movie lovers – died last week at 85, he was immediately honoured as one of this country’s true soldiers of cinema: a relentless advocate who spent his life championing the artform he loved.  

Cinema had a loyal, passionate and fiercely intelligent friend in David Stratton. He was a man who worked hard to make loving movies seem serious and worthwhile – so much more than just a hobby. 

But over the course of his long and varied career, Stratton didn’t just kindly, patiently and honestly explain his passions. Along with his onscreen co-host Margaret Pomeranz, he also taught us a deeply valuable ethical lesson, time and time again: a lesson in the fine art of disagreement.  

What do Lars Von Trier and Vin Diesel have in common?

Pomeranz and Stratton were, from the very start of their time together, opposites. Pomeranz, who began her career in television as a producer, and was encouraged to move in front of the camera by Stratton, prized a curiously outrageous form of entertainment far more than Stratton.  

Stratton loved to laugh, make no mistake, but he drew a line at anything he considered tacky. Pomeranz, by contrast, loved that stuff. When they butted heads, it was over films like Team America: World Police (Pomeranz loved it; Stratton hated it); Sex And The City 2 (Pomeranz said it contained a “jacket she’d kill for” and gave it three stars; Stratton called it “offensive”).  

These differences in opinion weren’t just a casual “let’s agree to disagree” partings of ways. Once, memorably, Pomeranz gave Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in The Dark five stars, while Stratton gave it zero. When Pomeranz stood up for Vin Diesel, a performer Stratton hated, Stratton lightly poked fun at her, saying she wanted Diesel to “save her.” Possibly their biggest disagreement was over the classic Australian film Romper Stomper, starring Russell Crowe as a wild-eyed neo-Nazi. Stratton not only thought the film was terrible, he thought it was actively ethically harmful. Pomeranz gave it five stars. 

Sometimes these disagreements got a little heated. Stratton could be dismissive; Pomeranz seemed occasionally exasperated with him. But the pair never lost respect for one another, no matter how far apart their tastes pulled them – and, importantly, they never started throwing barbs at each other. Their disagreement was localised to the thing they were disagreeing about, not ad hominem snipes at the other’s character.  

Pomeranz herself acknowledged this, in a recent tribute written to honour her friend and colleague. “I think it’s extraordinary that, over all the time that David and I worked together, we never had a falling out”, she wrote. Disagreements between the two were common. But true breaks in the relationship – true threats to their working together – never were. 

The power of disagreement

Sometimes, disagreement is cast as an impediment to societal functioning. We can all be guilty of occasionally speaking as though disagreement is the enemy – as though for us to all flourish, we should all get along, all the time. That’s not to say that there are some matters where disagreement should be encouraged – the power of disagreement is not a free card to put every matter up for debate, no matter how harmful. 

But the history of philosophy shows us there’s power in sometimes parting opinion. Plato, for instance, presented almost all of his arguments in the form of debates, with characters going back and forth amongst each other on what is the correct behaviour. Plato’s “dialogues”, and thus, his entire ethical worldview, were fashioned out of disagreement.  

It is in disagreement, after all, that we get to honour one of the beautiful things about our world – difference, uniqueness, and the full richness of human experience.

It would be a very boring, and perhaps even insidious, world if we all thought the same thing. After all, a forced unity of opinion is one of the hallmarks of fascism.  

Disagreements, if handled and conducted well, can also guide us away from extremes. In some matters, truth lies in the middle of two poles. So it went on The Movie Show at least – I am not convinced we always agreed with our favourite from the pair. As viewers, our own tastes fluctuated between the extremes of Pomeranz and Stratton. In their disagreements, we could pick and choose elements of their tastes, and construct our own. 

And again, these were debates that never descended into name-calling, or anger. In this, Pomeranz and Stratton taught us another ethical lesson – that we can treat someone disagreeing with us as someone offering us kindness. Having to justify and argue for our own positions helps us better understand them. And it helps us better understand the world around us; the people around us.  

Laying my own cards on the table, I’ve always been more of a Pomeranz person (I love Von Trier, Romper Stomper, and Team America). But that’s just the thing. No matter how much I, a viewer raised on The Movie Show, found myself grumpily disagreeing with Stratton, it never made me dislike him. And when he passed, the loss I felt was not just the loss of a man I had always admired. It was the loss of a defender of art and a good sparring partner – no matter that it was one-sided sparring, through the TV. Disagreement done well is a gift. And no one more generously gave out that gift than David Stratton.

Marvel’s in trouble. The once box office-dominating brand has hit every branch on the way down as of late, from cancelled shows to thinning audiences. So, consider it a sign of the times that the folks behind the behemoth have attempted to enliven their cinematic futures not by looking forward, but instead casting their gaze way back. 

The Fantastic Four, the third attempt to make the family of superheroes work on the big screen, jettisons the usual digital sheen of superhero properties in favour of old-fashioned nostalgia. Set in an alternate, 1950s-style world, the film’s visual style and production values have been heralded as a bold break from the norm – which is funny, given how deliberately re–trotted they are.  

Not only has ‘50s fantasy been done before in, y’know, the ‘50s, but we’ve already had multiple recycles of that trend, from the glossy world of Mad Men to the screwball textures of films like Down With Love. Marvel’s “new” style is not just a throwback. It’s a throwback of a throwback.  

The antidote to irony

The film’s not alone in that open nostalgia, either. James Gunn’s Superman reboot attempts to make the gung-ho, gee-wizz character work by similarly leaning into an old-school fantasy, where journalism is heralded as truth-telling, and unabashed optimism is the name of the day. Then there’s Lena Dunham’s new rom-com series Too Much, which offsets its decidedly modern story with near constant references to Jane Austen-inflected romance, openly lusting after a bygone world where manners ruled the day, and sincerity was the default response.  

This sudden rush of nostalgia can be read, above everything else, as a society trying to shake itself free of cynicism and layers of irony. The 90s saw post-modern go mainstream, with every cinematic hero affecting a wise-cracking, subversive mode, and over the decade and a bit after, that irony only got more layered. Eventually, you end up with someone like Deadpool, who can’t take a breath without acknowledging that he’s a character in a movie. 

It was the writer David Foster Wallace who saw where this was all going to take us, writing over 20 years ago that “irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that, at the same time, they are agents of a great despair and stasis in US”. Irony reduces and destroys, and is inherently oppositional in nature – not just aesthetically, but ethically, leaving us paralysed by our own smartness and subversion, without any energy left over to actually do anything. 

And our need to do something is only greater than ever – as the world gets darker and more dangerous, it makes sense that we would turn back to the forward thinking and action of the ‘50s. The Fantastic Four and Superman come from a time where heroes actually believed that the world was a good place, and fought to make it even better. Being nostalgic for them means being nostalgic for proactive ethical agents, who, rather than spending their time brooding and moaning, fought for something. In short, it means being nostalgic for hope. 

Nostalgia’s trap

But if we seek to distance ourselves from the dangerous trap of irony, then we should be careful to not run too open-armed into nostalgia. Nostalgia, after all, is its own kind of trap. Rather than making something genuinely new – something that responds to the world as it actually is – nostalgia is inherently regressive.

Philosopher Mark Fisher wrote about exactly this, seeing nostalgia as part of the “slow cancellation of the future”; the eradication of possibility and free-thinking. No wonder that conservatives the world over, Donald Trump chief among them, have aggressively nostalgic worldviews: nostalgia, when used improperly, can be a form of ethical despair and stasis too.  

The nostalgia trap is laid bare in another film released this year – Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later. In the film, an isolated community trying to get by in a post-apocalyptic world, find their strength in visions of nostalgic Britain. In one montage, early in the film, two of our heroes making their way across a dangerous landscape are intercut with images of British soldiers at Agincourt, all scored to a Rudyard Kipling poem – Kipling being that hero of early British imperialism. The heroes in Boyle’s film try to survive and draw their strength from remembering how things used to be. And in turn, they end up trapped, locked into regressive and cruel worldviews that damage them. 

That thesis is made shockingly clear in the last five minutes of the film, where the young hero (spoiler alert), finds himself saved by a roaming gang all made up of thugs dressed like disgraced pedophile Jimmy Savile. The young hero accepts them, open-armed. The kind of nostalgia that he has been raised on has no room for nuance. It’s essentially flattening, making a sort of caricature of England’s past. 

In this way, Boyle criticises the nullifying effects of nostalgia: it casts the entire past as something to return to, without remembering its horrors and its shortcomings. If all we ever want to be is what we once were, then we will never truly change.

Nostalgia might be useful to energise us, but only if it’s used selectively and critically – if we aim to be better than what we once were, not merely the same.

As with so many things, we find our way forward through the mid-ground. Not just recreating the 50s, but taking what we want from it – the hope, the energy, the sense of optimism – and jettisoning what we don’t. The way to avoid the cancellation of the future, after all, is by believing that the future exists – that there’s still room, even now, to use the past to create something that has never occurred before.

Back in 2020, pop star Harry Styles caused a stir when he made the supposedly taboo move of appearing on the cover of Vogue magazine wearing a dress. 

The stir was probably to be expected, sadly. Though such fashion choices used to go largely uncommented upon, sexuality and gender has become a hot topic issue, and any public suggestions of gender fluidity or queer sexuality tends to prompt hysteria from conservative commentators. But it wasn’t just this group who had something to say. Styles’ dress also prompted a wave of discourse amongst progressives around “queerbaiting”.  

Like so many contemporary culture clashes, at the heart of these arguments lie questions about the self: how much of someone else’s identity are we entitled to? 

Queerbaiting and the demand for the entire self

At its heart, queerbaiting is a term applied to a suspected marketing strategy. The claim is that some artists and public figures court the attention of queer and allied audiences by pretending to be queer – or at the very least, suggesting that they are – in order to increase their fanbase, general public standing, and sales.  

But knowing whether a public figure is actually queerbaiting, or if they are indeed queer, requires demanding access to key aspects of their identity, that once upon a time, we might have been more okay with them keeping private. Queerbaiting thus normalises our desperate hunger for, and perpetuation of, gossip – but here, it casts feeding that desire for gossip as some kind of moral act. 

The least harmful examples of these investigations into public figures’ identity markers are basically just online gossip. For example, discussions around the sexuality of actors like Hugh Jackman, or filmmakers like Baz Luhrmann, have existed for a long time. The most harmful examples resemble old-fashioned “outing”. For instance, just a few years ago, one of the key players of the TV show Heartstopper felt pressured into publicly revealing their sexuality to avoid accusations of queerbaiting. “I’m bi,” he wrote. “Congrats for forcing an 18-year-old to out himself. I think some of you missed the point of the show.” 

The need for a private self

Discussions about queerbaiting have tricked us into believing that we are not just entitled to a celebrity’s personal life because we are snoops, but because we gain something morally through that demand.

While it might be a well-intentioned, certainly – we should be suspicious of the behaviour of the ultra-rich and public figures trying to gain more capital, particularly when it comes to the harnessing of marginalised identities – that suspicion does not undo the need for privacy. 

The demand that people must “out” themselves has always been problematic – but now, in an increasingly dangerous international political climate, such as the Trump administration emboldening anti-LGBTQIA+ groups, it has become actively harmful. When we try to convince ourselves that  the entitlement to someone’s sexuality or gender is  “logical” or reasonable, we start sliding down a pretty slippery slope, at risk of ending up in a place where marginalised groups have no right to privacy, in a world that has the potential to become only more hostile. 

More than that, queerbaiting enforces a categorised, inflexible and outdated understanding of gender and sexuality that progressives have done a lot of work to abandon. Demanding that someone label themselves, when they might not be ready to do so, or might not even have the personal language yet to decide what precise label that they would use, makes the spectrum of sexuality seem unnervingly rigid.  

After all, experimenting with a fluid sexuality and gender can be, in some cases, a slow process. Forcing someone to label themselves, when they may just be at the beginning of that journey, goes against so much good work that progressives have done to create a freer culture. The worry is not, necessarily, that celebrities themselves are being harmed by queerbaiting – but that the direction of the public discourse will have a trickle down effect, one that will normalise non-ideal practices and behaviours.  

It was the philosopher John Stuart Mill who most carefully laid out the importance of the “private sphere.” For Mill, every person should be entitled to thoughts, beliefs, and sometimes even actions, that were outside the remit of the state and others – that belonged only to them. Mill foresaw that trying to police such a private sphere was akin to a kind of intellectual fascism: as soon as we let go of our private selves, we make our whole selves controllable.  

Importantly, Mill believed that actions and beliefs in the private sphere stopped being ungovernable when they harmed others – he did not think that we were just free to do whatever we liked, under the guise of our privacy. But he did believe that we were entitled to a self which was ours and ours alone. 

We would do well to remind ourselves of Mill’s argument. Celebrities sign up to giving a great deal of themselves to the public eye – but that does not mean that they need to give all of it. Even a public figure is allowed a private self. And when we forget that, and we start demanding more and more, we normalise the harmful attitude that privacy is something that can be given up, rather than an inalienable right that we should all enjoy. 

Adolescence, the exemplary new Netflix series that has become immediate water cooler conversation fodder, is built around a filmmaking decision that might have, in lesser hands, felt like a gimmick. Each of the four episodes of the show are filmed in one continuous, unbroken take. 

Here, the decision is not just an inspiring feat of filmmaking verve. It also has a thematic point. Adolescence concerns the murder of a female high school student – the accused is 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper). The show carefully explores the fallout of that violent crime, in particular, what it churns up in the heart of Jamie’s father, Eddie (Stephen Graham, also the show’s co-creator).  

The themes of Adolescence are laid out early, and clearly: misogyny; the anger in the heart of teenage boys; and, in particular, the forces that influence adolescents. These themes coalesce in one of the major questions of the show: who shapes the identity of young people, and, pressingly, young men? Is it their parents? The world around them? Or, most worryingly of all, the bad ethical actors who have made their careers through stoking the fires of hatred? 

That unblinking, never-cutting camera allows us to explore this question with striking clarity. The camera never looks away. So painfully and shockingly, neither can we.  

Who makes our children?

Unlike many other works of art based around crime and murder, Adolescence is not, particularly, a whodunit. It is more like a whydunit. We do have questions early on as to whether Jamie actually committed the crime of which he has been accused, but this is not the focus of the show. Instead, the mystery is a broader, harder, more probing one: why do young men commit acts of violence against women? More specifically, who formed Jamie’s ethical identity?  

Eddie, Jamie’s father, seems to worry that it might be him. He spends the show wracked by guilt, confronted with the knowledge of his son’s suspected crime, and terrified that he did not do enough to stop him from walking down a very dark path. But is he solely to blame? The beauty of Adolescence is that it instead leaves those “responsible” for the dark parts of Jamie’s personality nebulous. 

In his groundbreaking work, Sources of the Self, philosopher Charles Taylor provides an answer – albeit a worrying one. He argues that identity is formed by a collective. In his view, human beings are defined and constructed through their relationship with others – we become who we are, by virtue of who we interact with. On this view, parents are of course responsible for the shaping of their children’s ethical makeup – but they’re not solely responsible. 

And they’re particularly not responsible when adolescence hits. Every parent to teenagers knows that rebellion against the older guard is inevitable – and parents are often the last people that children will confer with. That, according to Taylor, leaves children susceptible to other formative ethical forces – and in the case of Jamie, those are the bad misogynist actors that he is surrounded by, from his schoolmates, to the ever-pressing threat of online radicalisation. 

The spectre of the other

Taylor’s view is particularly troubling when combined with the writings of another philosopher, Giorgio Agamben. In his major work, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben argues that ethical identities are especially formed by the rules of inclusion and exclusion. People become who they are by deciding who they are not, forming an in and an out-group that gives them a sense of security in their own personhood. 

In Adolescence, it’s exactly that exclusionary nature that seems to lead Jamie down his dark path. His world, like the world of far too many teenage boys, is defined by strict and dangerous binaries: boys versus girls, winners versus losers. His worldview, when we get to hear it, seems defined by hatred for what is different, and a desperate clinging to that, which he sees as the same as himself. When such strict battle lines are drawn, violence is a natural endpoint. 

What then do we do to attempt to get our teenage boys back on the right path? Away from violence, hatred, and exclusion? Adolescence, bravely, doesn’t offer a solution. In fact, that’s exactly what Taylor and Agamben show us – that one simple, pat, generic solution doesn’t have the power to change anything. 

After all, if we take the work of those philosophers to be true, then we see the entire social environment as constitutive of identity. That means parents. It means friends. It means the entertainment young men consume. It means what they hear in the playground.

Our gaze must significantly broaden – and we must not consider the likes of Jamie to be an outlier. Instead, we must see him as a product of an entire social system.

When, in the final episode of Adolescence, Eddie asks his wife, “shouldn’t we have done better?”, the initial impulse is to assume he means the two of them. The better read is that he means all of us.