-The Misanthrope-

‘One man’s life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought, for the dominion I should acquire.’ -Mary Shelly, Frankenstein

“When we are born, we cry that we are come, To this great stage of fools.” -Shakespeare, King Lear

Many television series and films aren’t very ambitious in story or subject, and end up as banal stories that are consistently available in a different flavor. Not so with the recently released series Westworld. While there are some ways in which the story falls short of being believable or well-crafted, it succeeds at least in provoking thought on much of the subject matter it covers. Here I attempt to discuss some of the content of the first season, focusing on the philosophy of the character Dr. Robert Ford who was played so compellingly by Anthony Hopkins.

There is quite a bit to ruminate in this series, which gives us a fresh look into topics like artificial intelligence, morality, human consciousness, human agency, and the future of the human species. The new series is based on the 1973 film “Westworld” by Michael Crichton, which was a story about a futuristic theme park manned by life-like androids, which immersed a human patron into an experience that we can most closely associate with a video game. The reboot presents a refreshing look to us as consumers, the opulence of the wealthy, and the future of the theme park and entertainment industries.

While watching the first season and frequenting the weekly discussion of the community experiencing the debut of the series, I noticed much of this interesting subject matter seemed to be subverted by speculation on what the great plot twists might be. By the end of the season, the theorists proved to be correct on many of their predictions, but the revelations themselves felt hollow. The great topic of the show is not whether or not Bernard is an android, or if he is Arnold incarnate, or if William is the mysterious Man in Black, but rather the deeper conversation about human nature that was explored. In the community of plot theorists, lacking was the discourse on the subject matter that the show provided a platform for.

One big plot point to consider is that Dr. Ford justifies a mass murder by the finale of the first season, possessing a cynical disposition, and is pessimistic at best about our future as a species. This event is important because Dr. Ford is no fool – he is a narrative tool of wisdom and delivers insights about humanity throughout the series. He believes that, ultimately, his immortal creations will live a better, purer life than humans. Instead of waiting for us to slowly evolve into a better state after several millennia, wouldn’t it be best to create a new race capable of living as we cannot?

Towards the latter part of the season, Dr. Ford further reveals and details a sort of nihilism about our nature, confronting the audience with darker modes of viewing existence that we aren’t often exposed to. Of course, one could easily dismiss this disposition because Ford appears to be the villain of the series up until the very end, but the conclusion of the season turns this perception on it’s head. That we perceive the encounter of nihilism or cynicism as a bad thing, and associate it with villains, is challenged.

The series does, however, seem to offer malicious view of humans that comes off hyperbolic at times. Its depiction of the cruel patrons and furtive corporate board members do not encompass the entirety of what most of us understand about humanity. All the same, the story tries to reveal an inherent trait about ourselves that can’t be outright dismissed. The park places its patrons in a simulation of a highly realistic world that removes all consequence from their actions, and in this context reveals that, stripped of responsibility and consequence, humans are rather violent and cruel beings, and demonstrate this in relation to the park’s artificial beings.

The final speech that Ford delivered to the corporate board members as he prepared to retire reveals his true feeling about the park and humanity:

“I believed that stories help us to ennoble ourselves to fix what was broken in us, and to help us to become the people we dreamed of being. Lies, that told a deeper truth. For my pains, I got this – a prison of our own sins. Because you don’t want to change, or cannot change, because you’re only human after all. But then I realized someone was paying attention, someone who could change. So I began to compose a new story, for them. It begins with the birth of a new people, and the choices they will have to make, and the people they will decide to become. -Dr. Ford, The Bicameral Mind

Over decades of managing his theme park, Ford would had doubtless witnessed the pleasure of his patrons in committing violence and from the illusion of power the simulation afforded them, which would have informed his conclusion about human nature. Perhaps he came to understand these traits as an irreconcilable defect of homo sapiens, and from this began to surreptitiously plan for a better world inhabited by immortal beings. Through all his experiences in his long life at the park, and after experiencing so many disappointments with humankind, Ford’s disposition might be described as misanthropic: a hater of humankind. This would certainly understate the rational and meticulous manner in which he planned for the future, which would seem not to indicate the presence of any strong emotional motivations, yet there are several instances in which the disposition of a misanthrope seeps through the character as will be discussed throughout the essay.

Though it may seem a bit obtuse, one can sympathize with a misanthrope in some ways when studying history. Violence, cruelty, suffering, and poverty all present themselves as a salient trait of our species. It is not only in Ford that misanthropy exists, but perhaps in every person to varying degrees. A murder causes hate for the murderer, though he is still composed of the same DNA as you and I, and may share more qualities with us than we might like to acknowledge. Maybe it is that we share so much with what we find vile that we hate, and this provides a need for comparison and distinction rather than a need for discovering what is common in us. Most in our contemporary world will never kill any living thing large enough to see an emotive response because there’s no need to, but one cannot simply dismiss the record of our ancestors, nor the fact that we indifferently participate in violence and cruelty as consumers of multinational corporations and as citizens of a state.

As a species, homo sapiens have been the largest blight on the earth in terms of animal and plant extinction, as evidenced in the Global late Quaternary megafauna extinction. Continents like Australia and the America’s were once home to several species of large animals whose extinction has been linked directly to modern humans. Also, at one point we also had many cousins: homo neanderthalensis, homo floresiensis, and homo habilis to name a few. Now, we are the only species on earth that solely inhabits a genus, and a species with a track record of over hunting and making radical changes to the environment. Our culpability in their extinction is at the least likely. In ways small and large, violence still accompanies our species, and in some cases justifiably so, and it is at least clear that we have not evolved the ability to be rid of it, if such a trait could be acquired.

It is an interesting question, then, to delve into the subject of who we are at our core, if such a thing exists. As it relates to Westworld, I would posit that that the human social experience has been defined so much by having consequences to our actions, that to create a new environment where this quality is removed would not necessarily reveal anything inherent about ourselves, but instead would simply be introducing humans to a foreign environment. While violence and cruelty might occur in this new environment, it wouldn’t necessarily reveal anything about our core per se. In any society, even one as foreign to ourselves as a hunter-gatherer might be, consequences are a reality. To kill a member of a close-knit tribe will not come without repercussions, especially considering that for most of our history as a species our groups rarely exceeded a range of about 50-100 members [1]. Our powers of deduction about the common life of these early sapiens are limited to fossils, skeletons, and works of art that these bands produced. Keeping this in mind, surveys of about 400 skeletons in Israel, Peru, and other regions of the world revealed violent trauma on some of the skeletal structures [1]. If these ratios are taken at face value, they reveal levels of violence both below (>1%) and slightly above (~4.5%) our current rates of violence, indicating perhaps differences in culture or environmental conditions. Though we cannot know if the trauma observed is the result of war or a general assault, the implication remains that our propensity for violence has been with us on the same levels more or less for millennia.

It is still important to remember, however, that Westworld delves into the question of human nature when it is relieved or deprived of consequence, which should be considered a foreign environment to our reality. A person observing this environment for so long as Ford might be disappointed in this expression of the human mind, yet it is perhaps only an expression of minute importance. Our brains are shaped by the reality we inhabit, constantly corrected or excused by our environment.

The story might be more relevant as a commentary on power. Humans who acquire power in a political position or as a business magnate corrupt very easily, and are excused far more for their depravity than the poor. The corruption index for modern states reveals concerning insights for developing and developed nations alike. While the ruling class are not traditionally violent, the indifference to the suffering of millions of their fellow sapiens may be a cause for a Ford-like cynicism all the same.

Dr. Ford approaches these subjects empirically, that is, the problem which he observes has material causes. The deficient outcomes homo sapiens experience are due to deficient parts of which they are made up of. For example, Ford expresses his misgivings about the human brain, but not without a theatrically portrayed darkness that a drama might demand. The following quote is an example where we see not only a rational thought process, but a tinge of the misanthrope. One could picture this one in particular coming from a depressed philosopher speaking to his imaginary drinking partner over a fifth glass of wine:

“The human mind, Bernard, is not some golden benchmark, glimmering on some green and distant hill. No, it is a foul, pestilent corruption. And you were supposed to be better than that. Purer.” -Dr. Ford, The Well Tempered Clavier

[1] Harari, Y. N. (2015). Sapiens: A Breif History of Humankind. Harper.