Do Innies Have Souls?

What are the spiritual ramifications of the Severance procedure, as depicted on AppleTV's hit series?

The worst job I ever worked was at Google. I was only there a year, but it was long enough to learn that I was not the sort of person cut out for corporate life. Yes, there were free meals, and yes, you could wander freely around the campus—because that’s really what it was like, a campus—and find a games room to play foosball or billiards with your colleagues, or maybe just chill out in one of the innumerable cafes overlooking the city. Yes, there were pop-up functions where you could receive gifts and prizes; occasionally performers would be there, jumping all around doing hula while you tried to carry on a conversation with your workmates in one of the ‘relaxation pods’ scattered around the place. Yes, there was a gym (I never visited) and I heard rumors that there was a pool (I never found it). There were these odd little rooms filled with bean bags and musical instruments so you could jam out with your pals in what I assume was meant to be ‘creative space’, and yes, they were designed to encourage you and your fellow workers to cut loose and let your juices flow. Only once your collective brain cells were sufficiently lubricated could you dream up the next big Android software update or some such.

And still I hated it. I chafed at the personality-flattening effects of the modern workplace. The stiff hierarchy was one thing; the mind-numbingly obtuse bureaucracy was another. The politicking, the emailing, the vacuous niceties before, after and during video call meetings, the constant surveillance—the ever-present awareness that you are performing, and anything you say can and will be used against you come performance review time—all of it was like living in a different universe. A universe where the rules were ostensibly based on the ones I knew from my own life in the outside world, but here they were applied in strange, inscrutable ways. The stakes were supposed to be lower but nevertheless seemed higher. It was a new, miniaturized world I now found myself in. Yet, as long as I was in it, I had to pretend as if it was the only world which existed—the Google-sphere. People in the Google-sphere were not the same people who left the Google-sphere at 5:00 or whatever time they clocked out. This dissonance, perhaps second nature to some (those well-inured from repeated exposure, I would imagine) caused me no end of frustration and dismay during my year under Big Brother Sundar’s watch.

The company bigwigs, I imagine, wanted to foster the sort of corporate culture where work could be rebranded as play. They wanted to afford their employees such comforts that there would never be any reason to leave the corporate ecosystem at all. A person could live at work, if they desired. And that would suit the company just fine. I’m sure it suits a good many Google employees as well. But I wonder if, to function in such a sanitized, synthetic environment for extended periods, what a person might need to give up. For those workers walking into the office at the crack of dawn, grabbing their morning macchiatos before hunkering down at a hot desk for the next twelve hours, breaking only for gourmet meals and strolls around the rooftop garden (with actual giant swing!)—would living this kind of insulated lifestyle day in and day out soften the distinctions between their work self within the sphere, and their other self beyond it? More frightening yet: given enough time, might the company eventually subsume the identities of its workers into itself, leaving no trace of the individual behind? Are we headed to a future where our workplaces, rather than our nation, our religion, our heritage or culture, act as the ultimate arbiters of our identity and shared experience?

I must not be the only one feeling anxious about these questions, because the writing team at AppleTV’s Severance seems to be way ahead of me. The first two seasons of the smash hit sci-fi thriller series have electrified audiences around the globe, myself included, likely because they’ve hit a nerve. We all feel it when we go in to work—that sense of ‘leaving behind’ your own self, and assuming the form and shape of your work self. That somewhat plushy, rough-edges-shorn-off facsimile that passes as the ‘real’ you among your colleagues and bosses. We are aware of the disconnect between these two selves, and sometimes struggle to negotiate it; all the more so if we happen to work a job we hate.

And it’s that phenomenon that prompted the creator of the series, Dan Erickson, to reflect more deeply on a common impulse many of us share: that all-too-tempting desire to switch off when we get to work. ‘Don’t take work home with you’ when you leave at punch-out time. Severance cleverly explores the logical ramifications of this asinine and deceptively sinister mantra. What if your work self and your personal self could be disconnected from one another—literally, severed? If going to work is such a doldrum, why not forget about the entire experience from the moment you enter the door? Outsource the laborious monotony to your other self, that version of you which can only remember what occurs at work, and nothing else. You’d be better off, wouldn’t you, not having to worry about anything that happens on the job because it is, quite literally, none of your concern? It’s your Innie’s problem to deal with (‘Innie’ being the term the show uses to refer to the work-self, relegated to an existence entirely within the confines of the corporate office.) Your Outie self (the version of you that you might consider to be the ‘real’ you, though the show does a wonderful job of complicating this notion) can go on enjoying life, blissfully unaware of all that happens on company time.

It sounds so simple. Such an elegant solution to a uniquely modern problem.

Unless, of course, your Innie has a mind—and soul—of its own.

Painting of the Black Hallway, as seen in Severance.

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One body, two souls

At this point, if you haven’t seen Severance, you may be tempted to abandon reading this post and go watch it. You should—it’s that good! Then come back here and leave a comment so we can chat about how crazy the whole thing is.

But if you intend to stick around, let me assure you that you needn’t have watched the series to engage with the ideas in this essay. I solemnly pledge that I will not spoil any of the amazing, mind-bending reveals in the show. Everything discussed here will remain constrained to the core science fiction concepts revealed at the very beginning of the series.

So, some context: Severance takes place in a near future where a powerful corporation has perfected a technology that allows its employees to effectively separate their memories of their time at work from their personal ones. That’s where the show gets its namesake: this procedure is referred to as ‘severance’, and it is irreversible. The protagonists of the story have all been severed and, as a result, have no awareness whatsoever of what they get up to while they’re at work. By the same token, their work selves—Innies, as they’re called—have no knowledge of what occurs to them once they leave the building at the end of the workday. Their entire existence is relegated to the workplace, as they only have access to the memories they make within it.

For the viewer, what might seem as a convenient way to ‘switch off’ and avoid all the stress that comes with life as a desk jockey is quickly revealed to have strange and disturbing ramifications. One of these—the one we’ll be dissecting as we continue here—is the idea that Innies, despite sharing the same body as their Outie selves, increasingly behave as if they are their own people. The series is very interested in challenging us to define just what it is that makes a person a person, and why the Innies should be denied this status. Is it because they were created by their Outies, artificially, and they lack autonomy? Is it because they are corporate peons under the thumb of their overbearing supervisors? As the series progresses, we begin to see how the Innies have minds and wills of their own. These do not necessarily align with those of their Outie counterparts. To the viewer’s eyes, it can appear that two distinct people are occupying the same body and taking turns at the controls. And if they are distinct, then perhaps the Innies should not be denied their personhood at all…

With that in mind, there is a fascinating scene in Season 2 where faith and science fiction intersect in an unexpected way. We are introduced to a pair of characters who we are surprised to learn attend church regularly. They reveal their reasons for doing so to one of the Outie protagonists: the pastor at their church preaches that Innies have souls. This is an appealing message to the pair because they desire to enter the afterlife together, so they may continue their enjoyment of one another in eternal bliss. The trouble is that one of said partners has lived a shadowy life on the ‘outside’ which may disqualify him from entering the pearly gates. As it happens, he has begun working as a severed employee in recent years. This means that, according to the couple, there is an alternate version of his damned soul which has been born anew, living a pure and innocent existence on the ‘inside’ as an Innie. The couple, anticipating that this partner of questionable character will not find his name written in God’s Good Book, wish for at least some version of him to make it into heaven. Thus, they believe that when the two of them die, they will be reunited in paradise—the surviving partner alongside the Innie version of his condemned love. It is surmised that this Innie is a distinct soul, separate from the one who, they would suppose, is destined to burn in hell.

I was enthralled with this idea as I watched the series. That’s part of the reason why I love the show so much; it confronts you with strange and profound questions. The metaphysical quandary of Innies having souls was tantalizing—just what makes a person a person? And don’t all people have souls? If the Innies have distinct memories and personalities from their Outie selves, as the show clearly demonstrates, is it not fair to say that they might have their own souls as well? Does that mean that there’s a method—in science fiction, at least—by which human beings can artificially create people, thereby forcing God’s hand to give these homunculi His divine blessing so that they might have souls of their own? Isn’t that just what cloning is?

Without further ado, let’s crack this wide open. We have some very mysterious and important work cut out for us…

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The meaning of rainbows

Since I first started pondering this question, I sensed that the answer would lie in the interrelationship between memory, personality, and the soul. My intuition was that, if personhood is defined by having distinct memories—your own memories, so to speak—then the Innies could be counted as people. As if they were people, then they must have souls. How could a person be a person and not have a soul?

But I soon grasped that the waters are far, far muddier than I might have first imagined. For one thing, ‘personhood’ is not an altogether straightforward concept. In fact, there are bodies of water which have attained legal personhood in the eyes of certain sovereign states, including my home country of Canada. They’ve been afforded this status because of the incredibly important roles they play in certain cultures—an entire way of life would collapse without these natural wonders. What is more, in non-Western, non-Christian cultures, it is commonly believed that things in nature have spirits (souls?) of their own. There isn’t a fundamental difference between a human, a rock, a tree or a river. Whatever ‘personhood’ they have is merely an expression of a much greater being, a divine spirit that animates them all.

But that isn’t too unlike God breathing his divine breath into the clay that would become Adam, is it? Working within the Christian framework, as it’s the one I understand best, we can understand personhood as derived from being created in the Image of God—that all-too elusive theological term. We humans, carrying that ‘divine spark’ as we do, are each individual persons. Our sense of self isn’t inherently rooted in our physicality, though that does inform it. We would recognize a person who has lost an arm as being just as much a ‘person’ as someone with two. Similarly, even if a person has sustained brain damage and is comatose, we wouldn’t perceive them as having lost their personhood—merely their brain function. The same can even be said for someone born severely impaired, or one who has no cognitive activity at all. The parents of such a child would still love them and call them a person. In the eyes of the law, too, the child would have attained personhood. How can that be, unless ‘personhood’ is a Gestalt phenomenon?

Ultimately, ‘personhood’ comes from somewhere beyond ourselves. It is synonymous with the soul. Theologically speaking, we ARE a soul—we HAVE a body. The Genesis story of Creation can help us to grasp this, as the clay God shapes our bodies from preexists the breath He breathes into it. Only when that breath (that pneuma, I might say) enters the body does it become what we would recognize as a living, breathing, embodied person. Put another way, the natural form we now possess—that of the human body—is merely the vessel for the thing that is us. We are consciousnesses piloting flesh mechs, to borrow a phrase from a popular meme. Being spirit, the soul cannot exist in this mortal plane without a body; when the body dies, the soul departs. I’m not necessarily stating these things happen in such a simple, straightforward chronology…but that’s a digression I haven’t time for.

So, if the soul is spirit, and personhood comes from the soul, where does the spirit meet body in this strange relationship? This is where we need to factor in memories, and the place where they are housed—the brain. My dad asked himself this question in the days leading up to our talk, as he conducted some of his own research to prepare: is memory spiritual in any way, or is it only a function of the brain? Two verses came to him:

…their memory will be erased from the earth, they will have no name in the land, and they will be banished from light into darkness.

Job 18:17-18

The enemy has come to an end in everlasting ruins; their cities you have uprooted; the very memory of them has perished.

Psalm 9:6

Not exactly uplifting selections! But there is an interesting idea to glean here. If memory has a relationship to the soul, what we find is that to be ‘erased’—as in, to have the memory of one’s existence utterly wiped from the historical record and from the universe itself, as were those of God’s enemies in these verses—is the ultimate judgement.

Consider what happens when a person dies. Their soul departs, as I mentioned. Their brain no longer functions. The breath that animated them is gone. We would certainly say that, being dead, the person’s memory has ended. The black box is no longer recording.

However, even if the person’s own memory has ceased, the memory of that person does not. Their family members and loved ones will carry on their memory for much longer than they themselves existed. Does this mean that they still exist, in some fashion? Does this mean that memory, when examined via a spiritual lens, appears somehow collective, at least in part? This leads to a fascinating question: do other people have a part to play in making me who I am?

But before we dive into the deep end on that one, let’s rummage around a bit more with this idea of ultimate judgement. What we read in Scripture seems to indicate that there is something worse than death, because death is only physical. What’s worse is spiritual death, eternal death, and that is something akin to the erasure we just read about earlier. To be erased is to be dead forever and always—to have never existed at all. It is to have one utterly wiped from the memory of Creation, perhaps even of God Himself. Without going too far into the topic of sin and retribution, one would assume that this kind of judgement is reserved for those who, one way or another, will have no part in whatever it is that comes after this world passes away. And pass away it shall…

But not too soon, hopefully. And not because of any great calamity at the hands of God, thank goodness. How do we know that? Well, when’s the last time you saw a rainbow?

See, there is another kind of spiritual memory which we can read about in the Bible. We have the ancient story of Noah to give us a better sense of God’s divine character—and to catch a glimpse of what ultimate judgement might actually look like in action. God, regretting that he had breathed his breath into humans because of all the awful, horrible things that we were doing down here on Earth, resolved to erase us. His whole Creation was going to be wiped out, just like we read about in Job and Psalms. This was more than death; this was erasure. Everything that had ever been, and everything that now was, would be gone. There would be no one to carry on the memory of humanity after the Great Flood washed the slate clean.

But of course, God is merciful, and so he spared Noah and his family. Total erasure didn’t happen after all. And what is more, God ‘remembered’ His promise to Noah to never again bring about such devastation. God created the rainbow as a symbol of this promise. In effect, the memory of God is shown to be eternal. It’s this act of salvation that emanates and permeates across all of time and space, not one of perdition.

Now, if you’re familiar with my views on these ancient Biblical stories, you’ll know that my reading of this isn’t literal. I fully grasp why rainbows form. (It’s to do with leprechauns, isn’t it?) But the spirit of the story rings true—there is a severe price to pay for humanity’s transgressions. Suffering is real, and it costs us much. But we can be thankful that God is gracious towards us, and makes ways for us to move forward despite ourselves. He could, if He wished, forget us. But He doesn’t. In this way, His memory takes on the character of a spiritual promise to hold us in his heart and not allow us to fall to ruin. It’s true that we still suffer and die here on this Earth. Pain is still pain, and sometimes it can be unbearable. But death, remember, is only physical. We must believe that beyond it is something so great and beautiful that we can hardly imagine it. Death is certain, yes, but we can also be certain that when it comes for us, we will not be forgotten.

Voices in my head

So, we have explored how memory seems to have a spiritual dimension. That tracks when we consider that a person is a soul, and people are made up of their memories. One’s sense of self is primarily comprised of the things that they remember themselves to be. Take yourself as an example. In the present moment—this present moment right now—you only have access to a few things to ground you in reality and help you to understand who you are. There’s your computer or phone right there in front of you. You have your surrounding environment. Perhaps there are some other people around whom you know and can assist you in remembering who you are or what you’re doing, should you forget. But what if you did forget—who would you be? If you forgot your parents, your childhood, your place of birth? Your friends, your loved ones, your achievements? If you forgot where you lived, where you worked, what you were educated in? With each fading memory, your robust sense of self would waste away. Everything that makes you who you are now is relegated to your past. You can only access yourself through your memory.

Did you see the episode Common People in the latest season of Black Mirror? The past is like a server, a cloud; you’re streaming your own self from it at all times. And if that server were to go down… Well, there’d be no you, I’m afraid.

Or how about this: imagine if it were possible to replace your memories with someone else’s, as we see in the story of Total Recall (itself based upon the Philip K. Dick story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale). Arnold Schwarzenegger grows bored of his humdrum life and purchases the memories of another, more exciting person’s life, overwriting his own recollections so he can experience for himself what it is to be someone else. We won’t go into detail here, but the movie effectively demonstrates how the link between the self and memory is easily broken and reforged, reconstructing the identity in the process. Replace what you ‘recall’ with anything else, and you become a different person.

This has significant applications in the case of the Innies of Severance. As we’ve demonstrated, to alter one’s memory is to alter one’s self. It effectively creates a new self where the old self once resided, nestled in the maze-work of countless neural pathways and, perhaps, fundamentally rooted in the liminal space between the spiritual and the physical. The only difference between what we see in Total Recall and Severance is that in the former, one set of memories supplants that of another, while in the latter, both sets exist simultaneously but are accessed at different junctures.* What Severance effectively depicts is a state of affairs where there are two distinct sets of memories existing within the same brain. One isn’t replacing the other—they both get their time in the sun, depending on whether or not the brain in question is on company property. Does this sound, then, like two distinct personalities, each with their own complete set of memories informing their sense of self and identity? It’s not so big of a leap to say that, yes, with their own memories and identities, they must therefore be persons, and furthermore they must have souls.

It’s a romantic notion, no doubt. It’s all the more urgent because of how the Innies are made to psychologically suffer at the hands of their cruel corporate overlords. We want to cheer them on as they struggle, like children, to make sense of the strange circumstances they find themselves in and learn what this strange world is into which they’ve been unceremoniously dropped (flat on a wooden table—if you know, you know). But if we are to be diligent in our analysis, we must consider the alternative.

What if the status of the Outies/Innies is more akin to a person experiencing multiple personality disorder? Is there a substantive difference between Innies having their own sets of memories and a person who shifts between various personalities, believing themselves to be different people? I’m not a psychologist, so I can’t speak to the medical aspects of this condition, but there seems to be a clear commonality between these two ‘states of mind’ that we ought to investigate. A simple Google search (I might not be under their employ any longer, but I still haven’t brought myself to switch to Opera) offers a description that mirrors the experiences of the Innie/Outie dichotomy in stark terms: people with ‘DID’ (Dissociative Identity Disorder) as it’s now called, possess separate identities with their own memories, behaviours and even unique patterns of thought. People with DID can experience amnesia, forgetting what it is that they got up to while another of their personalities—or alters, as they’re most often referred to—was ‘in control’. In other words, like we discussed earlier, these people have sets of memories that are divergent from those of the various alters within them. It’s also right there in the name: ‘dissociate’ in this case means to separate or disconnect. Another synonym would be severance, I’ll note!

Now, we wouldn’t typically say that a person with DID has more than one soul—or rather, that their alters also have souls separate from the person themselves. Medical professionals rightly regard DID as a troubling condition in need of treatment, often linked to childhood trauma. So these alters are not afforded the same kind of legitimacy as the person whose body they share. Again, not being a psychologist or psychiatrist, I can’t say for certain how a professional might conceptualize their patient’s condition, but I’d wager they wouldn’t be lobbying any courts of law to recognize the alter’s right to self-determination and grant it the status of legal personhood. I imagine the lengthy and complicated treatment process a person with DID would likely undergo would involve attempts to ‘reintegrate’ (borrowing another term from Severance there) the person and their alters, to the ultimate end of a more balanced and healthy personality expression. I welcome anyone with more psychiatric experience than I to elucidate the matter.

But I think it’s by the by, at this stage. If we wouldn’t grant the status of personhood to the alters of a person suffering from DID, it’s hard to accept that we should for an Innie. I’m not arguing that this is satisfying in any sense—indeed, in watching Severance, we feel incredible empathy for these ‘people’ as they struggle for their right to exist, let alone their independence. The show makes it quite clear how hellish the lives they lead are, even going so far as to describe it as torturous. But we must cleave to objectivity, if we can. We are compelled to recognize that the Innies’ claim to personhood stands upon a shaky foundation. They may have distinct sets of memories, but so what? Memories alone do not make a person who they are, as we’ve seen. The severance procedure can be likened to a kind of artificial DID. It produces the same effects, only by human design and technological intervention. As such, it would appear that true personhood is reserved for those who are born with it.

Ding! It seems the service elevator has finally reached the deepest level of this cogitation. We have arrived at the fundamental issue with the idea of Innies being people which will help us to make sense of everything we’ve explored thus far. Let’s brace ourselves for what we may find down here, as it might not be to our liking…

Worlds within worlds

There is an episode of Star Trek: Voyager that serves as a helpful allegory. Under Captain Catherine Janeway’s command, the crew of the USS Voyager come across an alien craft in possession of a terrifying superweapon. These aliens wage war on their enemies by erasing them from time itself—God’s ultimate judgement in action. These aliens can alter the time continuum so that whosoever they target is obliterated from the past, present and future. Indeed, the vanquished never existed at all.

The Voyager’s crew has the misfortune of witnessing these aliens use their power on another species with whom the Voyager was becoming friendly. Naturally, this violates the crew’s moral sensibilities. But they recognize that any attempt to intervene or challenge the aliens will make enemies of these vindictive creatures. The Voyager’s crew realizes that they must destroy the alien ship, but this will inevitably result in them being erased. They understand that in order for the universe to be made right, they need to sacrifice themselves to create a new one.

In the end, they succeed in their aims but suffer the exact fate they anticipated. The crew is annihilated, but in this new timeline that’s been established, a different version of the Voyager’s crew lives on. These ‘alters’ are entirely oblivious to what their kindred souls did to preserve them. We can see that the decision to sacrifice an entire world for the behalf of another was not at all easy, but it was moral. It is literally a case of seeking the ‘greater good’—the good being the creation of a world where no one species has the power to alter time itself to achieve ignoble ends.

What does this have to do with the plight of the Innies? They are the same as the crew of the ill-fated Voyager. Their existence is good, certainly; they have a right to exist, and we can empathize with their desire to exercise that right. But theirs is not the greater good. The world to which they belong is subordinate to a greater world. I don’t mean greater in the sense of ‘better’, but—uncomfortable as it is to say it—I do mean it in the sense of ‘more whole.’ As with the oft-cited trolley problem, there is a fundamental impossibility in comparing the values of things with infinite worth. Yet, when faced with the choice of saving one soul or saving many, who can justify that the solution is to save the one? Saving one soul is good, but it can’t be said that it is the greater of the two options.

So it is with the Innies. Their concerns are real—they are real—but there is a greater reality beyond them. Their lives, their world, their selves, and indeed their entire existence is defined not on its own terms, but its relationship to another, higher mode of existence. By what manner is the realm of the Outies ‘higher’, you ask? Put crudely, the Innies need the Outies in order to exist, not vice versa. The Innies’ entire world exists as a microcosm of the larger, grander world that the Outies inhabit. The Innies occupy a kind of sub-reality which is facilitated and sustained by a greater one, almost like a pocket universe. The pocket is real, but it can only be understood in its relation to the universe upon which it depends. In fact, the pocket is really just a part of the greater universe. To push the metaphor a little too far, if the world of the Innies is the pocket, then the world of the Outies is the pants. And you wouldn’t go to work in the morning leaving your pants behind with only a pocket to cover yourself.

This is where we can revisit the idea of rainbows. There is something about identity—rooted in memory—that resides not only with the individual, but collectively. The Innies do not exist in a vacuum; they exist in relationship to their Outies, not the mention the corporation which sustains their existence via its severance technology. We like to think that individuals should be able to pursue their destinies and construct their identities as they see fit (and indeed, they should be encouraged to do this) but the full picture is much more complicated. There are certain aspects of one’s identity which are negotiated with others beyond the individual. For example, if a person is born, they have a mother and father. They are, by definition, a child; a son or daughter of someone else. This aspect of identity is inescapable. No one can say, ‘I exist independently of my parents, and there is no part of my identity which is related to them whatsoever’. Even if one were to reject their parents outright and attempt to erase them from their life, the memory of them will always remain. No one can go back in time and select a new parentage for themselves that better suits their sense of personal identity. Cultural identity works the same way—it isn’t created by any one individual, but created communally and imparted upon individuals as a group. Can a person claim a heritage which is not their own, simply because they identify with it? The story of Rachel Dolezal would indicate that matters are not so simple.

It is in this way that the full breadth of one’s identity is not solely determined by oneself. The Innies, tragically, are not the masters of their own fates. Everything that makes them who they are is negotiated with others—and negotiate they do, oftentimes vociferously. Their attempts to identify as they choose and gain personhood for themselves are all too understandable, but they cannot be taken as a God-given right because, well, there are extenuating factors. The Innies are in the unfortunate position of existing in bodies that they do not own. What is more, their entire experience is really just a subset of a larger, richer experience which, harsh as it is to say, they have no place in. Their world is within the halls of their employer; their Outies are the ones who belong to the world outside. These two worlds are not equal in terms of their scope or holistic worth. Indeed, I shudder to think of what our world would be if the world of work were to become the ‘worthier’ world in which to live. Perhaps some of my readers will think this is already the case.

I do not want to come across as callous, dismissing the entire existence of the Innies as worthless. Far from it! But, through no fault of their own, they have been brought into a manner of being which has metaphysically disadvantaged them—not unfairly so, but by necessity. Think about what a family is, for instance. Parents exert control and authority over their children, as they must to keep them safe. They do this not because they desire to dominate, but because they are responsible for the family as a unit, as a set. The children are each individual parts of the set, but not the whole. They matter, but they don’t matter more than the whole. And it isn’t the children who bear the responsibility for maintaining this whole. If anything, it’s their job to develop within the bounds established by the parents so they can one day outgrow the need for it. But, as long as they’re under their parents’ care, they are part of something that is bigger and more important than just themselves.

It doesn’t make children or grown-up people happy, that’s for sure. But it is necessary. Our universe is made up of complicated interrelationships of many different things. These relationships must be ordered if chaos is to be kept at bay. We chafe and groan and struggle against this order, as is our wont in life. And we should struggle to make our own way in the universe! But we are only small, small parts of an infinitely greater whole. And it would be wrong for any one of us to put ourselves at the center of this strange cosmic dance.

Wow, look at that—somehow, I’ve ended up making the case that hierarchy is necessary for the world to make sense. Didn’t I start off this essay describing my distaste for corporate ladder climbing? How my sense of individuality was compressed and constrained within the artificial limitations of the modern working environment? Am I not a hypocrite for arguing that the Innies need to accept their place as junior partners in the weird brain-sharing arrangement they have with their Outies?

Despite all logic, if I can still empathize with the Innies above all else, maybe that tells me all I need to know.

Do Innies have souls?

I don’t know. But I do know that the spirit yearns to be free.

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*A quick note on Total Recall before moving on: the movie had a cleverly ambiguous ending which suggests that Arnold’s new memories have been true all along, and so he is waking up to his true self and abandoning the false memories he started off with. The idea that one set of memories is more ‘real’ or authentic than the other will have relevance later.

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