White Lotus and What Money Can(’t) Buy
Maybe some problems aren’t the kinds of things that money can make disappear so easily? Oh and SPOILERS
In one of the more memorable scenes of Plato’s Republic, a bickering match takes place between Socrates and a curmudgeon named Thrasymachus about justice: while Socrates is certain that justice is something real that is worth pursuing for its own sake, good ol’ Thrasymachus thinks that all talk of justice is bullshit because it “is nothing else than the interest of the stronger.” In other words, humans are nothing more than a bunch of power-hungry animals and justice is simply a set of social norms designed to hold us back from being those animals. That’s it.
As a reader, it’s clear enough which side the author wants us to side with and as a decent human being which side we are supposed to side with. But let’s face it: the entirety of the economic system that we ourselves participate in sure looks a hell of a lot like Thrasymachus’s vision of justice. After all, what else is success in a capitalist society besides the ruthless pursuit to the top of the food chain while making sure that your ruthlessness is “just” enough to not cross the line of legality or social acceptance?
Of course expressing outrage at the failings — both moral and practical — of capitalism is nothing new, but what makes the show The White Lotus stand out is that it’s able to satirize the capitalistic insanity of our times in a way that is comedically scathing without being sanctimonious or bitter, and is nuanced enough to abandon the tired script that we’ve heard repeated over and over again that roughly reads: rich people are bad, man!
For starters, for a series that runs about six hours in total, there’s surprisingly very little when it comes to plotline; instead, the show prioritizes developing its many, multi-layered characters over bogging us down with narrative detail. Of these characters, we are introduced to a combination of rich guests and working-class employees who dip in and out of each other’s lives at a luxurious resort in Hawaii called The White Lotus. There’s your plot.
Among the guests, there is the Mossbacher family: the mom, Nicole, the dad, Mark, their sixteen-year-old son Quinn and their…
