Watching this series on the side so far. I want to write it to understand actualized org! Feel free to join the questions.
1. ‘the One’
Ep 4 was very important in showing that experience triumphs foreseeing. The show keeps circling this: how asymmetrical the relationship is between Carol and ‘the One’.
‘The One’ says they have already experienced Carol’s nature and transcended it; Carol thinks they’re oblivious, completely unable to say the same for her. The tension is whether this asymmetry will be hurtful or liberating—and this ties deeply into Carol’s trauma (I’ll get to this later).
But, yeah, the episode underlines one thing: experience is what makes our nature thrive, and losing it feels like losing agency.
For ‘the One’, though, I still don’t understand why they’re so pressed on their own development, this place is my favorite to find more kernel of truth related to Actualized.org. It’s like they’ve transcended our idea of evolution, and I hope this series eventually ties that to the interstellar code that was transmitted.
But the real center of gravity is that they don’t want to remove something in Carol—maybe so she can be “happy,” or maybe because it’s a biological mechanism that was destined to unfold. Basically the old free will vs determinism.
Ha! Question for thought:
Is an individual created by our perspectives (as we survive), or by our interpretations (our experiences)?
Feels like higher perspectives play a part in shaping the interpretations we’re capable of.
Ep 4 ends on the question of whether we should “cure.”
This tension cure vs consequence. I have literary hobbies and I could see its resonance with Jonathan Swift’s satirical take on “development,” “technology,” and “government.”
‘The One’ is definitely outside our model of a government. They’ve centralized their system and resources and can reallocate everything in a matter of seconds—faster than any political or technological structure we have now.
So it’s weird to frame them as “conforming” to any rule—they’re more like an alien (metaphorically) technology and infrastructure, very far from our ideas of state.
2. Carol.
Carol’s experience in Freedom Camp explains why Ep 4 keeps echoing the theme of experience. Even though ‘the One’ shuns psychology as irrelevant to them, they still embody things. The episode literally shows their system dealing with physical bodies—like the hospital scene where addiction still exists.
So addiction is not “solved” by ‘the One’. Carol though indirectly misses that. Her plan to drug Raban was basically to test whether the system transmits through the body or whether they’re just mindless masks.
But in doing that, she basically commits a crime—dosing a person without understanding what might happen. It mirrors Gulliver in Book II: meeting the giants with only small scraps of power left, and resorting to ambition as if it’s still a meaningful weapon. With that tension on cure and consequence again.
