I thought I’d take this moment to discuss my favorite character in screen history – Rustin Spencer “Rust” Cohle from the first season of HBO’s “True Detective.” There are many reasons for this – not only is he a badass and a good detective, not only is he a damaged person with darkness in his past, but he waxes poetic about being a philosophical pessimist because he also know who he is. He knows himself. He has no pretense about the type of person he is or how he sees the world in which we live. I’m going to list a bunch of quotes of his that I carry around with me (plus some additionals), offering any clarifying opinions. The first season of this show is iconic on a whole other level, so if you can handle murder, sex, the bleakness of reality… I highly recommend you watch this. I just watched it for the second time and I’m probably going for a third.

I suspect some people react this way to me… hehe

You asked.

Yeah. And now I’m begging you to shut the fuck up.

Episode 1

People out here, it’s like they don’t even know the outside world exists. Might as well be living on the fucking Moon.

This seems rather situational, but… I think most people live “local.” They acknowledge there’s an outside world, and can even discuss it, but it seems so impersonal to them. I’m not above this myself, but I like to think I try harder than most. Of course, I also lose a whole bunch of other stuff focusing on other things… So it’s a trade-off. I can have an ego about some things, but know I’m useless in so many others… we’ll get to this later, too, actually…

This whole next batch… it’s just so much, but it’s so good… here’s a video of it. It starts with the initial quote, but then it jumps to… something slightly more bleak:

I think human consciousness was a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law.

I really enjoy this one, but it’s obviously really pessimistic. It also leans towards a potential justification from those who believe in a Creator to suggest that by my own interests such a thing exists… While I would agree that our existence as sentient meat is certainly a mathematical “miracle,” I do not contend that’s because we were created to be the central focus of an entity living outside our physical reality. I also think this one’s wildly cynical, but humanity… humanity tends to prove just how horrible it can be.

We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, this accretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody when, in fact, everybody’s nobody.

Another wildly cynical explanation of humanity, one of the things we’re learning from neuroscience is the idea that choice is, at least to a certain extent, an illusion. For me, it’s not that we’re not making choices, but that we’re lead by chemical reactions within our evolutionarily, sexually-reproduced brains afflicted by experience. So, are we really making choices, or are we just chemical interactions who think we’re actually individual people? This one gets pretty heady when you go after it, but I’m also of the mind that we exist, so this is more for the thoughtful and less for those who want to live.

I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

This is more nihilism. I can appreciate the point of this, but I include it because it’s an integral part of what makes this character who he is, and just to say I don’t agree with it. I don’t think it IS the honorable thing. I think that we’re here, as a species, as sentient beings, and that’s good enough to try.

I tell myself I bear witness, but the real answer is that it’s obviously my programming, and I lack the constitution for suicide.

This one hits close to home, because I also often feel like I’m bearing witness from a more removed place sometimes, where I can offer a wholly different perspective. However, I don’t lack the constitution for suicide, just the skill apparently… Though, now I’m back to having no actual interest in it, so reference the previous quote to get a better understanding of that. I think you’ll also get a sense of it throughout these entries, but one of the arguments against things like the death penalty or suicide is – there is no coming back. I’m just at a point in my life where I’m not ready to just stop being. It’s not just that I have people to live for, but I have my own interests that I wish to pursue – like randomly bombarding people with my thoughts 🙂

…like you can smell the psychosphere

This is the realm of human consciousness – I just like this statement. It sounds totally like somebody with a superiority complex, but it just strikes me as someone operating on a truly different level.

This place is like somebody’s memory of the town, and the memory’s fading.

When Capitalism fails an area, this seems like a perfect way to describe it.

Episode 2

…sometimes I think I’m just not good for people, you know, that it’s not good for them to be around me… And I used to… think about it more, but… you know, you reach a certain age, you know who you are… I know who I am. After all these years, there’s a… there’s a victory in that.

…given how long it’s taken for me to reconcile my nature, I can’t figure I’d forgo it on your account…

I’ve certainly felt this way, mostly because I’ve been such a depressing shit for so many years. Part of me thinks I was this way on purpose, but a larger part of me thinks it’s… it went deeper. Chemical. Experience. Existence… Now I’m really trying to get the latter part of this, where I know who I am, where I can find that victory. The last chunk of quote is actually from E1, but it fits better contextually here in my opinion. It’s all part of that victory, of knowing who you are and not bending to how other people think you need to act. I don’t mean you can be an ass to people, but don’t lose who you are once you’ve figured it out.

Quote from Corinthians. “The body is not one member, but many. Now are they many, but… of one body.”

This will seem to be a divergence for the character, especially when we get to E3, but in the context of the moment it’s something he would certainly find interesting. This refers to a section of 1 Corinthians 12, verses 12 & 14. The reason I like this is probably not why Cohle likes it, and certainly not within the given Biblical context… I like this because it’s another way to say we’re all people, but more deliberately, we’re a collection of people. We’re not separate from each other, or at least we shouldn’t be – we shouldn’t see ourselves as separate. Love one another or something, right?

…the hubris it must take to… yank a soul out of nonexistence into this meat. And to force a life into this thresher.

This follows earlier context from E1, about humanity walking into oblivion, inasmuch existence is pointless, y’know? I think it’s a deeply cynical but painfully interesting way to describe a certain ego to the procreative need brought on by biology. It grabbed onto me.

Yeah, back then, the visions. Yeah, most of the time, I was convinced that I’d lost it… But there were other times… I thought I was mainlining the secret truth of the universe.

This is what I imagine psilocybin is like…

Episode 3

This is where we dive right into Cohle’s love for religion… be warned. Also, understand I don’t share 100% of his statements.

I see a propensity for obesity, poverty, a yen for fairy tales, folks putting what few bucks they do have into little, wicker baskets being passed around. I think it’s safe to say that nobody here is gonna be splitting the atom…

I’ll be touching upon religion in a future entry so I won’t go into much detail here, but I’ll say this much – I was raised in religion, I know exactly the people he’s talking about. I also accept that most people are looking for hope, something to hold onto, so religion is mostly comfort that people need. Without it, they might think life is without purpose or direction. Or, they just don’t know any better and their circumstances and surroundings and family and friends all adhere to a singular notion so there’s no cause for them to question any of it. Cohle’s point here is that the people are also not really questioning anything else it would seem. Yes, cynical, but when you rely solely on faith for so many things, you can lost track of other realities

…if the common good has got to make up fairy tales, then it’s not good for anybody.

What’s it say about life, hmm, you got to get together, tell yourself stories that violate every law of the universe just to get through the goddamn day? What’s that say about your reality…?

People so goddamn frail they’d rather put a coin in a wishing well than buy dinner.

Been that way since one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey, “He said for you to give me your fucking share.”

Facts are without feeling, without remorse. Truths can be prodded in a direction, to reduce you to the pointless cretins we are or to raise you to the miraculous beings we also are. Where I disagree with him is that I actually think we DO need fairy tales, but we need to recognize them as such and not treat them as fact. We also need to be more skeptical of the people trying to use faith and fear for THEIR benefit, and not the benefit of those who truly believe.

If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward, then, brother, that person is a piece of shit…

…or the fear of eternal damnation.

Transference of fear and self-loathing to an authoritarian vessel. It’s catharsis. He absorbs their dread with his narrative. Because of this, he’s effective in proportion to the amount of certainty he can project. Certain linguistic anthropologists think that religion is a language virus that rewrites pathways in the brain, dulls critical thinking.

We want to hear from an authority that speaks to our own biases. We want to feel assured that the person or people we’re looking to are confident and can carry the burdens. We want… we want to be able to be left alone and not be afraid all the time. Reality, however, doesn’t work this way…

The ontological fallacy of expecting a light at the end of the tunnel, well, that’s what the preacher sells, same as a shrink. See, the preacher, he encourages your capacity for illusion. Then he tells you it’s a fucking virtue. Always a buck to be had doing that, and it’s such a desperate sense of entitlement, isn’t it? “Surely, this is all for me. Me. Me, me, me. I, I. I’m so fucking important.”

We’ll get into logical fallacies at some point in the future, but what tickles me is when I was in the hospital, in our lockdown unit group therapy session, when the facilitator brought up the idea of a light at the end of the tunnel, I suggested it was a train… Curiously, most of the people, including the facilitator, had never heard that particular take.

At any rate, this goes further into the notion of faith over fact, and how it’s really all about us individually – when it comes down to it, it’s all about me, right?

People… Each one is so sure of their realness, that their sensory experience constituted a unique individual with purpose, meaning… so certain that they were more than a biological puppet. Well, the truth wills out, and everybody sees once the strings are cut, all fall down… so certain that they were more than the sum of their urges, all the useless spinning, tired mind, collision of desire and ignorance.

“On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” That’s from Fight Club, and it sums up the point I think is being made here. When it comes right down it, everything we do in this life only matters in this physical existence, and our choices are limited by our chemistry, our experience, our surroundings, our resources… we do try, though. We do.

I don’t think that man can love, at least not the way that he means. Inadequacies of reality always set in.

…yeah…

This… This is what I’m talking about. This is what I mean when I’m talking about time and death and futility. There are broader ideas at work, mainly what is owed between us as a society for our mutual illusions.

This begins a longer talk where he goes into staring at pictures of murder victims and how “they saw for the very first time how easy it was to just let go.” He goes on to the important bit:

In that last nanosecond, they saw what they were, that you, yourself, this whole big drama, it was never anything but a jerry-rig of presumption and dumb will and you could just let go finally now that you didn’t have to hold on so tight… to realize that all your life… you know, all your love, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain… it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream, a dream that you had inside a locked room, a dream about being a person…

Read this once or twice and you see the bleak cynicism in it… but if you pull it apart, the idea of just letting go is wildly powerful. Not completely, as suggested above… somewhere. Yet, to recognize that all the love and the hate, etc., are all the same, to be able to look at it from a perspective removed from yourself, to understand that while on the whole there’s a futility in existence, it opens the door to be free from focusing on the emotions and instead focus on those moments that really matter. Let go of the things that don’t matter, because if it’s all the same, we get to choose what really matters, what parts of the dream we focus on.

Episode 4

This is the halfway point, and we’ve been here for a bit, so I may save the second half for a different entry… but let’s get through this episode.

Kids are the only thing that matter… They’re the only reason for this whole man-woman drama… Men, women… it’s not supposed to work except to make kids.

From a biological perspective – he’s right. I want to delve into things like marriage and monogamy in a different entry, but I think the relevant piece here is that all the drama you may go through within a relationship, I would plead that you spend more focus on the kids. Not just “stay together for the kids” because that’s not always the best situation for them. Who wants to grow up with parents who are miserable together? My youngest will talk to me about how I “used to be married to mommy” or even say “I wish you were married to mommy” or “I wish you lived with us” and it’s hard to hear, but it’s also the reality and I explain that this is better for everybody and that mommy and I love both of our children immensely and that’s not going to change. My ex and I also don’t hate each other, so that’s helpful, too.

Episode 4 is pretty heavy on the action, but this is a good spot to take a break. We’ll get to the last four episodes soon enough.

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All quotes, which I hand-wrote in my notebook, can be found here: https://transcripts.foreverdreaming.org/viewforum.php?f=185