Boring Nihilism
Veganism, ethical consumption and not giving up.
I watched an episode of Rick and Morty on a plane to my friend’s wedding and it really annoyed me. The episode (s7e4) was just so lazy. It implied organ donation should be illegal and cultivated meat was morally equivalent to factory farmed. My shoulders were hunched and my fingers twitched1. The leftovers of an airplane meal stopped me from using my laptop, so I wrote the first draft of this on my phone. Get ready, because it’s about to get heavy.
Massive spoilers.
Plot summary:
Rick unites the Smith family with his fantastic Bolognese Thursdays. But it turns out the food is stolen from an alien species who turn into delicious Bolognese when they commit suicide. The show then wrestles with this moral dilemma. The family refuse to eat it, falling out. Then Morty goes to the planet and creates a business buying the bodies of consenting suicides. This leads to a capitalist euthanasia hellscape. Then Rick and Morty create semi-conscious torsos who can only kill themselves, but the spaghetti is less good. Different factions fight and blow up the spaghetti factory. Finally they try to replicate the spaghetti ethcially, copying it from the final person who wishes to commit suicide ethically by watching his whole life while he does so. He has struggled, loved, hurt and lived. Everyone is so revolted they refuse to eat the spaghetti. Rick says life is immoral and eats anyway. Next Thursday Rick brings another delicious dish and repeatedly implies it has awful ethical implications but everyone agrees not to ask this time.
This plot reminds me of capitalism, organ donation, euthanasia and veganism. And it takes lazy "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" and nihilist stances.
So first, if our world discovered we could turn profane sacrifices into value then the world would be.. pretty similar. People already have large financial incentives to sell organs to help those they love but this is illegal in Western nations. We regularly ban exchanges between consenting adults for sacred reasons.
Examples of things with clear benefits that we ban or restrict financial transactions around:
Organ sales
Surrogacy
Dying people being able to test any substances they want
Medicines that are legal in other developed nations but haven't had testing in the local country
Illegal contracts (eg selling earnings permanently)
Genetic enhancement
Cloning
Sunday trading laws
This list would be even longer if I took banned things with disputable benefits such as conversion therapy or prostitution.
Even where permitted, one man's capitalist hellscape is another man's.. Tuesday. Look at the porn site OnlyFans, which provided an on-ramp for many young women to work in the porn industry. I'll admit that I'm leery of a technology that makes it so easy, but they are acting of their own volition and I'd weakly guess the median experience is endorsed across time. I generally favour allowing beings to do what they want because people are better judges of their needs than the government. I think 'buying suicide' would be morally grey, but that isn't the same as disaster.
Examples of morally grey things we permit without the entire world going to shit (though many are a bit grim):
Advertising
Sports gambling
Sex work
Beauty influencers
Newspapers focusing on lurid crime
Porn
Alcohol sales
Tobacco sales
Loot boxes in video games (simulated gambling)
Addiction fueling many game purchases
Rick and Morty doesn't even try to wonder what would happen to this world with a huge resource injection. Cash transfers are a very effective means of support. And the results would be grisly but you'd also see grandparents sacrificing themselves for their grandchildren's education. You'd see people donating their death bounty to charity. If this shift is enough to reshape the world economy towards an industrial dystopia then there would be enough money to ensure many wouldn't want to die in the first place (the show does make nods towards the lack of mental health provision, but it's explained as a systemic failing. Oh well, I guess Rick isn't clever enough to fix those)
Examples of benefits from morally grey industries:
Las Vegas
Nobel prizes
Pubs
Sweatshops jobs
Free games
Free websites
This substack
Again I'm not saying you need to think these things are good on balance, but it isn't the collapse of society. But seemingly that's not the episode they wanted to do.
I'm gonna skip the 'people grown for food' and 'semi conscious torsos'. Both of those seem probably less ethical than consent. The show gets this right enough.
So we get to the climax of the episode. Rick tries to synthesise some spaghetti from the last remaining suicide2, but everyone baulks at this. Really considering the person involved makes this too horrible for the whole universe so they no longer want the spaghetti. And so there is no ethical consumption. QED.
No! Cultivated meat is not the same as factory farming. Yes perhaps some animals still have to suffer once for the meat to be created but then it's over. The ring is destroyed, hopefully forever3. We've had a whole dystopia of people being paid to commit suicide and now copying the remains of a man who died happy is too much? Why? Engage! Actually have some balls and wrestle with this point.
To me, this is the heart of the discussion. How do we deal with 'sacred'4 suffering?
Accept it:
Limited animal testing of cute animals in many products (I think)
Children killed in car accidents
Addiction as the price of alcoholism
Solitary confinement in prisons
Have massive culture wars:
Child vaccination
Child gun deaths
Sweatshops
Abortion
This episode's answer is so lazy. There is no ethical pain. Not with consent, not for money, not even just one time. I disagree, but worse, there is no engagement. Everyone just universally agrees that despite how much they liked the spaghetti, despite how much money there was, no deal can be done.
Imagine the same bit on gun violence. It imagines one mass killing so awful that all of America decides to give up their guns. It happened in the UK and Australia, so just find a killing bad enough and everyone will agree. I don't buy it. Maybe there is no sacred experience deep enough to draw America together here. Sometimes it seems each killing pushes everyone apart. Perhaps it's tradeoffs all the way down.
But there is another shoe yet to drop. Rick still eats the spaghetti. He says that every living thing steals from others. Life is a zero sum game. It's a dog eat dog world and this dog wants spaghetti.
Again, this just isn't true. Not all living processes involve causing suffering to current conscious beings. Live somewhere without insects and be vegan.
But isn't the universe ultimately zero sum? Isn't there a limited amount of energy for conscious beings? Aren't I stealing your lunch?
I don't think so. Firstly depending on when and how we claim the lightcone there may be more or less energy/matter available. And currently most energy isn't currently used by anyone. While it might be zero sum between humans, it seems likely that the universe is vastly positive sum for consciousness right now. There is a ton of energy around and noone to experience it. Let’s work together to solve it!
In short, Rick is wrong. Life isn't dog eat dog all the way down, it's cow eat grass.
Things that are positive sum for consciousness even if they have zero sum elements:
New materials
More efficient ways to build things
Uninhabited planets
The future
The shoes have not finished dropping. The show ends with the Smiths eating a another morally dubious meal but this time they don't want to know. There is no ethical consumption, so ignorance is bliss.
And so we have the two spirits of bad discourse. Revolution and ignorance. Those are the only options. And this from Rick, the supposed smartest man in the universe. Disappointing.
If we can never make gradual improvements all we are left with improvements, all we
People who think things are so broken we must have Revolution:
Communists
Many socialist influencers give lip service to this Idea
Crypto exit bros
Landian accelerationists
NeoReactionaries, I guess
Issues where humans have considered things so broken that we should give up, that no solutions were possible
Flight
The entrenchedness of the class system5
Racial gaps in competence
Gender representation in many fields, I guess
Feeding the world
All of these turned out to be wrong with awful results. Whether you think you can or whether you think you can't, you're probably right. We can say problems are unsolvable and leave them to the next generation or try now and often succeed.
Finally, some people may counter that the world is complex and we have to be pragmatic. But if that was the message they’d have made worse clone spaghetti. Or duplicated the bolognese perfectly but found some people were only eating it to be edgy. Nope, I see only revolution (rejected) and the acceptance of nihilism.
Nihilist is sometimes useful. It's worth being able to stare into the abyss so you aren't so damned scared of it. But sometimes we can win. And at that point nihilism is self-pitying and boring. It is, to misquote Lewis, "like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.".
Rich Sanchez is supposedly the smartest man in the universe. He can make ethical spaghetti. Do better.
Also, for those wondering, I had a lovely time at the wedding. Congrats to the bride and groom!
I don’t really know how to imply I am not necessarily telling the truth, but sometimes I speak very loosely when describing anecdotes in substack posts. On twitter I’d use lower case and then everyone would think I’m divorced/gay/dating Scott Alexander know I’m joking
That they ‘run out’ of suicides doesn't upset me because it's part of the episodic structure. You're allowed to run out of suicidal people in a TV show, it's a different kind of thing than the above laziness
Some people worry that ending farming will lead to less animals, but the show isn't even close to engaging with that
The type of suffering we normally say is unacceptable to do anywhere for deontological reasons
We don’t often sing this verse of “All things bright and beautiful” but it shows what people thought of class struggles at the time.
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.
Good piece