Logan’s Run and burnout culture

Posted By Mahabodhi on Sep 17, 2024 | 0 comments

Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book…

© Mahabodhi Burton

10 minute read

This is an excerpt from my chapter ‘The Woke Mind Virus.’

A Logan’s Run update on Yuppiedom

Writing in Chicago magazine in 1980, Dan Rottenberg was the first to coin the term ‘Yuppies:’

‘Something is occurring in Chicago … Some 20,000 new dwelling units have been built within two miles of the Loop over the past ten years to accommodate the rising tide of “Yuppies”—young urban professionals rebelling against the stodgy suburban lifestyles of their parents. The Yuppies seek neither comfort nor security, but stimulation, and they can find that only in the densest sections of the city.’[1]

Moving forward to 2024, Damien Walter explores the 1970s science fiction classic Logan’s Run[2] as an allegory of today’s achievement culture:

‘Take a look around your bourgeois workplace, maybe it’s a tech start-up or a tech giant, a marketing agency or a media company, a Game Dev, a business consultancy; today even banks and accountancy firms run this way. Your office … looks like the primary colour set of 1970s sci-fi movie; there’s an unlimited supply of caffeinated energy drinks and probably a foosball table; your workplace looks more like a college dorm or a child’s day-care than like a workplace place, all to persuade you that you aren’t really at work, but this job eats every moment of your waking life and you never really sleep. If this is you, then congratulations you’re a member of the creative class and you’re among the elite. Everyone in your company is beautiful, well-dressed, young, oh-so-young. But think about this, where are the old people, is there anyone over 40 in your office? What did they do with the old people? You’ll find out when your life-clock begins to flash and you get the call to Carousel.’[3]

Logan’s Run takes place in the year 2274; in a cluster of geodesic domes the remnants of human civilization live in a dome-enclosed city, run by a monolithic master computer that takes care of all aspects of life, including reproduction. The citizens live in a hedonistic utopia: no-one works or gets married; there are orgy rooms where people go to have sex and do drugs[4] but, to prevent overpopulation, all must undergo the rite of ‘Carrousel’ when they reach the age of 30; a ritual in which they are killed under the guise of being ‘renewed’ (as an infant in the city’s cloning facilities.) At birth, each is implanted with crystal in the palm of the left hand: their ‘life-clock.’ The crystal changes colour from white to yellow to green to red, until 10 days before they hit thirty the clock begins to flash black. When the clock turns solid black the citizens must undergo Carrousel. When inhabitants flee Carrousel, they are pursued by the secret police: the Sandmen.[5]

Walter comments: ‘While the population of the city are physically constrained within hermetically sealed domes and violently oppressed by the Sandman secret police, what really keeps the population controlled is a mental prison, a story or a mythos.’[6] He views Logan’s Run as a sci-fi reimagining of the early human city states: Urak, Ur and Babylon in Mesopotamia; Teotihuacan in Mesoamerica; Erlitou and Anyang in ancient China, where the population of the city and the surrounding farmlands were under the complete control of their elite, their Kings and Priests: ‘if you have lots of stone and ample manpower, but no knowledge of engineering the biggest and most impressive structure you can build is always a pyramid. And if you’re the ruling elite of a city state of a few tens of thousands of humans the best way to keep your citizenry under tight control is always a mythos.’[7]

Image couresy of Vika_Glitter on Pixabay.

‘As with the Sandman in Logan’s Run, that control was enforced with lethal violence but also by the control of ideas. These cities always had a mythos, a shared story about the city’s founding, its heroes and gods and beliefs about how the world was created and what came after death. Humans rarely made it to their 40th birthday, so the elites cultivated beliefs that kept the masses calm in the face of inevitable death: a heaven above, an underworld of the Dead, a cycle of reincarnation, rebirth and renewal.’[8]

‘As controlling as the mythos of humankind was in our ancient past, it is every bit as controlled in our present day:’[9]

‘The Great Filter is an answer to the Fermi Paradox,[10] which argues that all alien life destroys itself before it can be contacted.

 

‘The Mid-Career Filter explains why there are no old people in your oh-so-cool office because these creative careers are the peak of what philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls the Burnout Society. 21st century Society is no longer a Disciplinary Society but rather an Achievement Society. Also, its inhabitants are no longer obedience subjects but achievement subjects: they are entrepreneurs of themselves.’[11]  (My emphasis)

Han is the author of more than thirty books, the most well-known are treatises on what he terms a “society of tiredness” (Müdigkeitsgesellschaft), a ‘society of transparency’ (Transparenzgesellschaft), and the concept of shanzhai, a style of imitative variation, whose roots are, he argues, intrinsic to Chinese culture, undermine the distinction often drawn between original and fake, and pre-exist practices which in Western philosophy are called deconstructive. Han’s current work focuses on transparency as a cultural norm created by neoliberal market forces, which he understands as the insatiable drive toward voluntary disclosure bordering on the pornographic. According to Han, the dictates of transparency enforce a totalitarian system of openness at the expense of other social values such as shame, secrecy, and trust.[12]

‘Byung-Chul Han is one of the most important living philosophers, renowned for his critiques of the digital age. In response to the idea that new technological devices expand our freedom, he argues that they lead to burnout and self-absorption and that we must redevelop contemplative practices which slow us down and open us up. He has brought to his thought forms of deep cosmopolitanism developed from both Zen Buddhism and a renewed Romanticism.’[13]

The disciplinary society is a reference to the ideas of Michel Foucault. ‘Byung-Chul Han builds on Foucault to argue that the external controls of discipline have been replaced with the internal controls of achievement.’[14]

‘A half century ago, when Logan’s Run was made, the controlling mythos of our civilization was still disciplinary; we were still told to conform to massive powerful institutions, government, military corporations, universities, hospitals and more, but it’s not coincidental that the primary-coloured imagery of Logan’s Run looks much like an advertisement for Apple’s iPhone. In the 1970s the new cultural mythos was already emerging: the mythos of achievement, individuality and creativity. Our 21st century mythos has been rewritten around the internal control mechanism of achievement and pumped out to us through our infinity of screens, smartphones, laptops, headsets, screens on the street, screens in your home, all communicating the new mythos: instead of the institution, achievement, culture valorizes the entrepreneur: found your start-up; find your side-hustle; develop your brand. Your achievements are constantly rated on social media; your holiday is now a chance to score likes; your work is a way to link to the next tier of influence; and at the peak of achievement culture is the creator: master your MP3s; edit your video essays; boost your content, to please the all-powerful algorithm. The Divine reward of an afterlife or reincarnation is replaced with the imminent reward of A NEW YOU: a you who exists on the other side of the great achievement: happier, fitter, more productive, renewed.’[15]

‘But the inevitable outcome of achievement culture is not the imminent reward of renewal but the real condition of burnout.’[16] Han comments in 2021:

Buy here.

‘Why do we feel so tired? Today, tiredness seems to be a global phenomenon. Ten years ago, I published a book, The Burnout Society, in which I described tiredness as an illness afflicting the neoliberal achievement society. The tiredness experienced during the pandemic has forced me to think about the subject again. Work, no matter how hard it might be, does not bring about fundamental tiredness. We may be exhausted after work, but this exhaustion is not the same as fundamental tiredness. Work ends at some point. The compulsion to achieve to which we subject ourselves extends beyond that point. It accompanies us during leisure time, torments us even in our sleep, and often leads to sleepless nights. It is not possible to recover from the compulsion to achieve. It is this internal pressure, specifically, that makes us tired. There is thus a difference between tiredness and exhaustion. The right kind of exhaustion could even free us from tiredness.

 

‘Psychological disorders such as depression or burnout are symptoms of a deep crisis of freedom. They are a pathological signal, indicating that freedom today often turns into compulsion. We think we are free. But we actually exploit ourselves passionately until we collapse. We realize ourselves, optimize ourselves unto death. The insidious logic of achievement permanently forces us to get ahead of ourselves. Once we have achieved something, we want to achieve more, that is, we want to get ahead of ourselves yet again. But, of course, it is impossible to get ahead of oneself. This absurd logic ultimately leads to a breakdown. The achievement subject believes that it is free but it is actually a slave. It is an absolute slave insofar as it voluntarily exploits itself, even without a master being present.

 

‘The neoliberal achievement society makes exploitation possible even without domination. The disciplinary society with its commandments and prohibitions, as analyzed by Michel Foucault in his Discipline and Punish, does not describe today’s achievement society. The achievement society exploits freedom itself. Self-exploitation is more efficient than exploitation by others because it goes hand in hand with a feeling of freedom. Kafka expressed with great clarity the paradox of the freedom of the slave who thinks he is the master. In one of his aphorisms, he writes: “The animal wrests the whip from its master and whips itself in order to become master, not knowing that this is only a fantasy produced by a new knot in the master’s whiplash.” This permanent self-flagellation makes us tired and, ultimately, depressed. In a certain respect, neoliberalism is based on self-flagellation.[17]

Walter:

‘Psychological and physiological pressures become overwhelming by our late 20s or early 30s; the burnout rate begins to rocket and any who cling on into their 40s are eventually purged out of the system by the few old people you will find in the creative economy: the managers and partners the business owners who police the young creatives like the Sandmen police the citizens of the city in Logan’s Run.’[18]

 

‘There’s a reboot of Logan’s Run that needs to happen which isn’t set in a near future domed city, but a science fiction story set right in the here and now of the 21st century, about the 21st century mythos of achievement and the reality of burnout culture; or almost in the here and now, in a hyper-real edition of our reality, with a sneaking paranoid suspicion that our reality is more than it seems. And the story of the Runners who hit burnout and go searching for something they can never have.’[19]

Peter Ustinov appears in the film as an old man surrounded by books of wisdom and babbling cat poetry, indicating that to escape burnout the direction we must run towards is not away from our mortality but towards it.

[1] Luke Seeman. ‘The Yuppie Turns 35.’ Chicago. 3 June 2015. https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/june-2015/yuppie-dan-rottenberg/

[2] ‘The 1970s science fiction classic that actually needs a reboot.’ Science Fiction with Damien Walter. YouTube. 30 August 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe8vxyEAFlE

[3] Ibid.

[4] Laura Barcella. (2019) The End: 50 Apocalyptic Visions From Pop Culture That You Should Know About…Before It’s Too Late.’ Zest Books.

[5] Most residents accept this mythos: this alleged chance for rebirth; those who attempt to flee: the ‘Runners,’ are hunted down by the secret police: the Sandmen, who pursue and terminate the Runners as they try to escape. One Sandman: Logan 5 discovers through Jessica 6, a secret group whose members help the Runners find the ‘sanctuary,’ a mythic place where they will be safe to live out the rest of their lives. The computer instructs Logan to find the sanctuary and destroy it, but he must keep the secret from the other Sandmen. Then, the computer changes the colour of his life clock to flashing red, suddenly making him four years closer to Carrousel. After seeking unsuccessfully to restore his life-clock, Logan is forced to become a Runner. Logan meets Jessica and they meet with the underground group that leads them to the periphery of the city. They come out into a frozen cave, with Francis following closely behind. In the cave, they meet Box, a robot designed to capture food for the city from the outside. Logan discovers, to his horror, that Box also captures escaped Runners and freezes them for food. Before Box can freeze Logan and Jessica, they escape, causing the cave to collapse on the robot. Once outside, Logan and Jessica notice that their life clocks are no longer operational. They see the Sun for the first time and discover that the remains of human civilization have become a wilderness. They explore an old, seemingly abandoned city that was once Washington DC. In the ruins of the United States chamber, they discover an elderly man living with many cats. His appearance is a shock to them, since neither has ever seen anyone over the age of thirty. The old man recounts what he remembers about what happened to humanity outside the city, and Logan realizes that Sanctuary has always been a myth. Logan and Jessica persuade the old man to return to the city with them as proof that life exists outside the domed city. Leaving him outside, they enter the city via an underwater tunnel to try to convince everyone that Carrousel is a lie and unnecessary but are captured by other Sandmen and taken to the computer, which interrogates Logan about if he has completed his mission. When Logan insists that ‘There is no Sanctuary’ and that all he found was exposed old ruins, an old man and that the missing Runners were ‘all frozen,’ the computer cannot accept it. Yet after scanning Logan’s mind, the computer  realizes what he is saying is true; it then overloads, causing the city’s systems to fail violently and release the exterior seals. Logan, Jessica, and the other citizens flee the ruined city. Once outside, the citizens see the old man, the first human they have met who is older than thirty, proving that they can, indeed, live their lives much longer. See ‘Logan’s Run. Wikipedia.

[6] ‘The 1970s science fiction classic that actually needs a reboot.’

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence. ‘Fermi paradox.’ Wikipedia.

[11] ‘The 1970s science fiction classic that actually needs a reboot.’

[12] Steven Knepper, Ethan Stoneman, Robert Wyllie. (2024) Byung-Chul Han: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity.

[13] Ibid.

[14] ‘The 1970s science fiction classic that actually needs a reboot.’

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Byung-Chul Han. ‘The Tiredness Virus.’ The Nation.

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/pandemic-burnout-society/

[18] ‘The 1970s science fiction classic that actually needs a reboot.’

[19] Ibid. Apparently Ryan Gosling was involved in talks of a reboot; he has since pulled out.