Andrew M. Winters
For by one Spirit, we were all baptized into one body. … For the body is not one member, but many.
—1 Corinthians 12:13–14
Who are you? This question is simply phrased but difficult to answer. It is an accomplishment to know who you are. As Rustin Cohle puts it in the second episode of the first season of True Detective, “I know who I am, and … there's a victory in that.” Here's why knowing who you are is a victory.
You are not the same person you used to be. This claim is obvious. You have aged, your body has gone through changes, you have more achievements, you know different facts, you have different ideas, and you have different social relations. Even in the past twenty-four hours, you have undergone various phases of hunger, fatigue, and arousal. All of this indicates that you are a different person from who you used to be.
Despite being a different person from who you were even just a few minutes ago, there is something oddly familiar about the person you no longer are. You know that person better than anyone else due to the range of characteristics, experiences, and memories you share. Yet, you are no longer that person. We know that you are no longer that person because that person no longer exists, whereas you do exist.
So the questions remain: Who are you? What are you? In addition to these lingering questions, there are others that highlight some of the reasons it is a “victory” when you know who you are. These questions include: How can you be so familiar with something that does not exist? How does the person you used to be make you who you presently are? In this chapter, we'll explore these questions while considering how the various aspects of Rustin Cohle help us better understand how we can justifiably think of ourselves as being one continuous person despite our having undergone various changes.
Rustin Cohle, or Rust, is identifiable as being one character by looking at the script of True Detective and seeing the lines of text that only Rust will say. Although not a necessary condition for the existence of a single Rust, the fact that Rust is played by only one actor, Matthew McConaughey, further buttresses the initial intuition that there is only one Rust. Yet, Rust is arguably not the same character throughout the first season. The radical variations between the different characteristics Rust exhibits allow us to think that there is more than one Rust. In fact, we can identify at least three distinct non-identical Rusts, whom we'll label Taxman, Belligerent, and Patient.
There are some physical traits indicative of Taxman: his bird tattoo on his right arm, a clean-shaven appearance, and a large writing ledger usually within reach at a crime scene. These physical traits are not what stir our fascination with Taxman as a character, however. Instead, we are drawn in by his mental attributes, which we come to learn about through his incisive comments.
What also draws us to Taxman is his potentially nihilistic attitude. In the first episode, “The Long Bright Dark,” he expresses this through his disavowal of human society when he states, “It's all one ghetto, man … a giant gutter in outer space.” It would be a mistake, however, to think that Taxman endorses active nihilism of the sort that incites destructive behavior. If Taxman advocated for the world's destruction, then this perspective would be at odds with his active attempt to prevent harm to women and children in the Yellow King case. But he is highly involved in the investigation, to the extent of suffering various injuries himself. Although his self-destructive inclinations might be consistent with active nihilism, his willingness to protect others indicates that he is not content to watch everything be destroyed.
We gain additional insight into how we might think of Taxman as a nihilist when he makes disparaging remarks about religious practitioners. In particular, among his many disdainful comments are his observations in “The Locked Room” about how religion assists some people in obtaining a moral compass:
If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward then, brother, that person is a piece of shit. And I'd like to get as many of them in the open as possible. … You gotta 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?
The form of nihilism that is consistent with these observations is reactionary rather than active. Instead of thinking we ought to engage in destructive acts, Taxman reacts to the apparent ugliness and meaninglessness of the world.
This reactionary interpretation is consistent with his acknowledgment that human society is a gutter filled with waste, bad men who harm others. But Taxman does not think that we should sit passively waiting for bad men to enter our homes. Rather, he states that “The world needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door” (“The Locked Room”).
Put mildly, these observations—of human society being a gutter, people requiring superstition to be moral, and recognizing our own badness—support a general view that humans are probably not the best things to come into existence. We see this view further expressed in Taxman's recommendation in “Haunted Houses” to the woman identified as having Munchausen by proxy syndrome, “The newspapers are gonna be tough on you. And prison is very, very hard on people who hurt kids. If you get the opportunity, you should kill yourself.”
Although Taxman's observations and his sanctimonious recommendation have much in common with nihilism, Taxman's view is more consistent with anti-natalism, which maintains that bringing a human into existence just creates additional suffering in the world. Instead of thinking that we should get rid of those humans who are already living, as the nihilist might have it, the anti-natalist maintains that we should strive to be compassionate and caring toward those who currently exist while not bringing any additional humans into existence. In doing so, we should await our own extinction. This is the view held by Taxman when he claims in “The Long Bright Dark”:
I think human consciousness is 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. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self. This accretion of sensory experience and feelings, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is to deny our programming, stop reproducing. Walk hand in hand into extinction.
To summarize, Taxman is someone who believes that human society is a waste, that religion reveals a person's weaknesses, that we are inherently flawed, and that things would be better if we didn't exist. Although we are drawn to him, even Taxman acknowledges in “The Long Bright Dark” that he's “bad at parties.” Taxman, however, is not the only Rust. There are two more. Let's see whether they'd be good party guests.
In addition to Taxman's clean-cut appearance and anti-natalist leanings, we see another Rust: shaggy, long-haired, dirty, and drunk. Let's call this Rust Belligerent. Instead of being directly involved in the Yellow King case, Belligerent is interviewed by Detectives Gilbough and Papania as possibly being the Yellow King himself. This accusation is a result of Belligerent's deceiving Gilbough and Papania into believing that he has been out of Louisiana tending to his ill father. While attempting to deceive Gilbough and Papania, without incriminating himself, Belligerent begins waxing metaphysical in “The Secret Fate of All Life”:
In eternity, where there is no time, nothing can grow. Nothing can become. Nothing changes. So death created time to grow the things that it would kill … and you are reborn but into the same life that you've always been born into. … You're trapped … like a nightmare you keep waking up into.
Although Belligerent appears to share much of the same despairing attitude about existence that Taxman expresses, Belligerent's claims are mostly directed toward himself, rather than at society and humanity in general, as expressed in “The Locked Room”:
To realize that all your life … 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. And like a lot of dreams there's a monster at the end of it.
It is here in his depression that he hides behind Lone Star beer and American Spirit cigarettes, appearing to no longer want to know any deep truth about the world or reality or himself. As he explains in “The Secret Fate of All Life”:
Fuck, I don't want to know anything anymore. This is a world where nothing is solved. Someone once told me that time is a flat circle. Everything we've ever done or will do, we're gonna do over and over and over again. And that little boy and that little girl, they're gonna be in that room again and again and again forever.
These metaphysical musings are consistent with the crises that one has in realizing that to confront the existential abyss is to converse with Friedrich Nietzsche's (1844–1900) demon, who constrains you to eternally reexperience your horrors and says:
This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!1
Such an experience could certainly lead one to a state of mental and emotional paralysis of the kind we observe during Belligerent's interview. If Belligerent is right in thinking that anyone's efforts to save those doomed children are futile, then we would expect Belligerent to abandon the Yellow King case altogether. Yet, Belligerent actively deceives the interviewers into believing that he has been out of Louisiana tending to his ill father, when, in fact, he has been developing his theory about the whereabouts of the Yellow King and the missing children.
This deception provides insight into who Belligerent is. Rather than thinking of Belligerent as a deceitful drunk, he is perhaps better characterized as a vigilante, willing to go against his previous training and commitment to the police force. It is in this vigilante attempt to preserve future generations that Belligerent differs from Taxman. Whereas Taxman appears to welcome the demise of humankind while at the same time adhering to the general ideology of the police task force, Belligerent schemes to ensure that the future is secure without working within the confines of his professional obligations.
Both Taxman and Belligerent are defined in terms of their relationship to the Yellow King case, but there is more to a person than professional activities. There is also a set of character traits that shape the values that result in Taxman's and Belligerent's willingness to pursue the Yellow King case in different ways. In Taxman's case, it's his anti-natalism and concern for professional duty that lead him to adhere to professional protocol, while Belligerent's vigilantism leads him to overthrow professional mores. But what happens once the case is over? What remains of them when there is no longer a case? What remains is quite different from either Taxman or Belligerent. We get an insight into what, or better yet who, remains in our consideration of the third identifiable Rust.
Take away the raped and tortured victims, the occult imagery, and the catacombs of Carcosa, and what is left of Rust? Toward the end of the first season of True Detective, in “Form and Void,” we meet a Rust who awakens from a coma after having been stabbed by Errol Childress. Let's call this Rust Patient. From his hospital bed, Patient reports on his experience of the coma:
There was a moment, I know, when I was under in the dark, that something … whatever I'd been reduced to, not even consciousness, a vague awareness in the dark, and I could feel my definitions fading … I could feel, man, and I knew, I knew my daughter waited for me there. So clear. I could feel her. … It was like I was a part of everything that I ever loved, and we were. … And all I had to do was let go and I did. I said, “Darkness, yeah, yeah.” And I disappeared. But I could still feel her love there, even more than before. Nothing. There was nothing but that love. Then I woke up.
These ruminations of slipping into darkness and seeing love are similar to reports given by mystics who report losing themselves to experience the love of God, the Universe, or All—whatever their mystical framework happens to be. For example, the Persian mystic Mansur al-Hallaj (858–922) poetically explained his own mystical experience:
Love is that you remain standing
In front of your Beloved.
When you are deprived of all your attributes,
Then His attributes become your qualities.
Between me and You, there is only me.
Take away the me, so only you remain.
I am the Supreme Reality.2
Although al-Hallaj writes about the mystical connection he experiences with God, we see something similar in Patient's experience. Instead of coming to see God once he dissolves into the darkness, Patient comes to experience only the love of his daughter. It is here in the darkness that he comes to see that the only thing that exists is that love. By experiencing only that love, he comes to see that he is that love. It is in this mystical experience that he not only awakens to the deep truth of who he is but is also filled with hope that awakens him from the coma. The hope he feels after having experienced the deep truth of who he is remains with him once he convinces Marty to take him from the hospital. No longer anti-natalist, no longer vigilante, but now a mystic who has awakened to the oldest story of light versus dark. It is from this mystical stance that Rust claims in the season finale, “Once there was only dark. If you ask me, the light is winning.”
We should not be surprised that the first season of True Detective ends on a mystical note. From the very first episode, the show is infused with mystical and occult tones. For instance, when we are shown the body of Dora Lange, who has been ritualistically murdered, her head has been crowned with antlers and thorns, her hands have been bound, and her body has been surrounded by devil nets. In the last episode, Rust's character makes connections to occult lore that incorporate three-faced or three-headed gods (the Slavic three-headed god Triglav, for example). Whereas each Rust is distinct, they are all properly thought of as Rust because they share many of the same characteristics, experiences, and memories. For example, all three are originally from Texas, transferred from Louisiana, have divorced parents, and were traumatized by the accidental death of the same daughter, Sophia. They also share in the experiences of having killed a meth dealer who injected his own daughter with drugs and having spent time in a mental hospital in Lubbock. So, like mythological three-faced figures, Rust has three distinct features while at the same time it is appropriate to think of him as a single individual.
We shouldn't, however, think of Rust in mystical terms. Because Rust is similar enough to each of us in his development of these distinct personae, we shouldn't explain these disparities in a way that is not applicable to us. We do not seek mystical explanations to understand how we undergo changes, and so we should not seek a mystical explanation to understand Rust.
The beginning of this chapter posed multiple questions that provide insight into our understanding of what it means to be a person. The most prominent is the “reidentificaiton question”: What are the conditions under which a person at one point in time is properly reidentified at another point in time?3 When applied to the case of Rust, the question becomes: What are the conditions under which Rust at one point in time is properly reidentified at another point in time? In particular, how might we identify Taxman, Belligerent, and Patient each as properly Rust despite them existing at different times and having different characteristics?
One attempt to answer this question is the brute physicalist account—the self goes with the body. There are two key components of the view. First, according to Bernard Williams (1929–2003), the physical body is necessary for there to be a self.4 What happens to the physical body can be taken to be what happens to the self. Second, according to A. J. Ayer (1910–1989), our identity through time is dependent upon the identity of our bodies.5 We can then apply these two points to our understanding of Rust. When Rust's body received the bird tattoo on his right arm, it was Rust who received the bird tattoo. Rust continues to be Rust so long as he has the same body, which can be identified as the body with the bird tattoo on the right arm. We might be inclined to think that Taxman, Belligerent, and Patient are the same person since each one bears the same bird tattoo.
Although this view is intuitive, it does not accommodate all our intuitions about the self. In particular, the brute physicalist view fails to accommodate the intuition that someone with the same body can change. So, although we might want to say that Taxman, Belligerent, and Patient are the same person because they have the same body in the relevant sense, the brute physicalist account does not account for how they each have different mental attitudes. For example, Taxman has the desire to successfully close the Yellow King case while working within the protocol of the police department and lacks the desire to drink alcohol. Belligerent exhibits the same desire to successfully close the Yellow King case but is not concerned about whether or not he is doing so within the purview of the police department, and he certainly desires alcohol. Both Taxman and Belligerent exhibit the same bird tattoo and, therefore, are taken to have the same body, but they have different desires and preferences. Contemporary philosopher L. A. Paul would say these different desires and results are likely the result of them having undergone transformative experiences—those experiences that shape one's desires and preferences, which can alter future decisions.6 These sorts of experiences, however, do not require any physical alteration to the body. It would appear, then, that the brute physicalist account is not sufficient for understanding how there are three different Rusts while each possesses many of the same physical characteristics as the others.
If it's not the body that determines who we are, perhaps it's our psychological states. This is a view that goes back to John Locke (1632–1704): “personal identity consists not in the Identity of [Body], but … in the Identity of Consciousness.”7 In other words, it's the relationship between mental properties (such as memories) and personality traits that determines how we should go about identifying you as the same you at two different times.
In the case of Rust, all three Rusts have the same memory of Sophia dying in a car accident and, despite their many differences, they also share the common personality traits of quick-wittedness, focus, and diligence. The changes in Rust's mental characteristics over time would accommodate our intuition that people change despite having the same bodies, which allows us to understand how Taxman, Belligerent, and Patient are different individuals. At which point, though, do they become different people? Since they share many of the same experiences, characteristics, and memories, it is unclear how we are to differentiate them. Furthermore, since they are mental instantiations and not physical bodies, it is possible to have all three Rusts existing in the same body and, oddly, at the same time. By appealing to the psychological account, there is no restriction on how many Rusts there can be in a single body at any moment. This, too, is an odd way of thinking about the self. For this reason, the psychological continuity account does not adequately accommodate our intuitions about what a person is and how persons change.
A third possible solution, the narrative account, states that we should think of our selves as narrators of a general storyline that we can think of as our lives. This allows us to create and recreate ourselves anew throughout our lives. It is important to consider this third alternative since both the brute physicalist and the psychological continuity account result in unintuitive descriptions of the self. The brute physicalist account does not accommodate the intuition that we can undergo changes even when our bodies remain the same. The psychological continuity account allows for the possibility of multiple selves occupying the same body at the same time. The narrative account overcomes these difficulties.
First, the narrative account can explain how we undergo changes even when our bodies remain the same. For example, Taxman chooses to quit the police department the day he and Hart have their fist fight. After leaving the department, he goes on to become a bartender, and, in effect, chooses to become the individual we've labeled Belligerent. Both Taxman and Belligerent have the same identifiable body, but they are very different people. The narrative account can explain how Rust made a decision to change his main occupation, give into his desires to drink, and become even more of a recluse.
Second, the narrative account does not result in the possibility of multiple selves occupying the same body at the same time, since it does not state that we are only our psychological characteristics. By thinking of our selves as the sole narrator of our lives, we can then understand Rust as the narrator of his life, which results in him becoming Taxman after having the traumatic experience of his daughter dying and spending time in a mental institute. Through the choices he makes while a detective in Louisiana, Rust then becomes Belligerent. Similarly, Rust then makes the choice to further pursue the Yellow King case in a way that results in him landing in the hospital as Patient, which results in his mystical revelations. But all of these are the same narrator, Rust, because this is the same story lived and told, in which each instance of Rust is a different phase or, to continue the literary metaphor, chapter of his life. Each chapter, however, occurs at a different time. For this reason, the same challenges facing the psychological continuity account do not befall the narrative account.
Rust, in many ways, is like us. He has gone through significant experiences that shape his various preferences, desires, and characteristics. Each component modifies the very choices Rust has made in his life in a way similar to how our experiences modify the sorts of choices we are willing to make. The choices we make, however, shape who we become. We should not forget, though, that we make our own choices. Like Rust, we have the capacity to make choices that will make us very different people from who we might otherwise have become. In other words, we are the narrators of our own futures, with the ability to shape who we want to become. The difference between Rust and us, however, is that Rust's story is over. What will be your next chapter? To answer the very first question of this chapter, you need to answer: Who do you wish to become?