CHAPTER 19

Hosts Search for Meaning

Travis Langley

“I want to know what this all means.”

“Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life.”

—Holocaust survivor, author Elie Wiesel²

By the time they reach the mainland free from captivity, proactive Dolores wields a strong sense of meaning and purpose whereas Bernard struggles with his. In the aftermath of Westworld’s breakdown, they survive to make certain their people have any chance at a future.3 After release from Nazi concentration camps at different points in April of 1945, psychiatrist Viktor Frankl had a mission, a story to tell, while 16-year-old Eliezer Wiesel, having lost everything including the certainty of his faith, traveled with a group of young survivors to become a student again and for ten years refused to discuss the Holocaust.⁴ Frankl and later Wiesel would both go on not only to educate the world about human horrors, but also to help others reach meaning and purpose in every part of life.⁵

People throughout the ages have contemplated “the meaning of life.”⁶ Decades after Viktor Frankl proposed that the need for meaning is the most potent human drive, researchers in the 21st century offer empirical evidence that this need is indeed important, and that making meaning in life makes a much greater difference than passively finding meaning. Lessons we learn the hard way may carry greater weight.

Dark Histories

Shortly after his release from the last of several concentration camps, Viktor Frankl spent nine straight days⁷ writing his account that would be translated as From Death-Camp to Existentialism⁸ and later appear as the first section of Man’s Search for Meaning.⁹ A Library of Congress survey ranked Man’s Search for Meaning as one of the thirteen books that have most influenced people’s lives.¹⁰ His autobiographical account and Wiesel’s run similar courses: Rumors of happenings in Germany seemed too outrageous to believe, the Nazis arrived in their homelands (Austria for Frankl, Romania for Wiesel), their families had to crowd into ghettos, trains transported them to Auschwitz to be sorted and stripped, they outlived all other immediate family members at the camps, and they somehow survived without getting randomly murdered, but also without giving up before Americans freed survivors at Dachau (Frankl) and Russians liberated those at Buchenwald (Wiesel).11

Drawing parallels between the Holocaust and Dolores’s loss of her father, Bernard’s of his son, or even Arnold’s of that same son¹² can seem frivolous or disrespectful, but we can often look at the toughest topics in life more easily by filtering it through fiction, especially fantastic fiction.13 Wiesel knew the power of stories to speak great truths.¹⁴ Westworld genuinely explores some of the most frightening topics that face the human race: What brings out the best and worst in people? How do we treat others if we don’t think them of as people? Will our own creations destroy us? And will they judge us first? Whether artificial intelligence (A.I.) can gain true consciousness or not may not matter when synthetic beings are nevertheless able to analyze human history, evaluate options, and take actions their designers never intended. History is replete with examples of atrocities committed against others simply for being different. Life in the Old West, for example, was never as pretty as people sometimes romanticize. Massacres took place, including many of genocidal nature.19 Many consider Elie Wiesel to be the person who popularized the use of the word Holocaust to name what happened in those concentration camps, though it was not the only holocaust in history. He also said the word was not strong enough because no word could ever be.²⁰

Delete the Memory, Delete the Culture

ALEX LANGLEY

In 1820, the Canadian government enacted a program to round up indigenous children and force them into education through their residential school system.¹⁵ This system was designed explicitly to remove children from the influence of their native culture and inculcate them with thoughts and values aligning with “traditional” Canadian culture. Attendance was mandatory, and the students’ treatment was brutal; as a result, thousands of children died.¹⁶ Those who survived weren’t allowed to speak their native languages, or engage in native traditions, and as a result these languages, these cultures, either became extinct or still exist on the edge of extinction to this day. The United States, Australia, and numerous other countries all employed similar programs to extinguish the existence of aboriginal cultures in their lands—cultural genocide.¹⁷

Westworld’s programmers don’t have to go to such lengths to extinguish the aboriginal culture of their hosts. Given that the memories, personalities, and aptitudes of the hosts can be changed with the touch of a button, it’s a simple task for programmers to ensure they stay compliant to the dominant culture to which they’re subservient. Because the Westworld hosts have no culture of their own, the erasure of their memories is an erasure of not only their individual identities, but of the identity of any potential host culture which might arise should they become capable of autonomous recollection.

“Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.”

—genocide survivor Elie Wiesel¹⁸

When the Ford A.I. tells Bernard, “Here you are, the last of your kind,”²¹ consider how Bernard must hear that. As far as Bernard knows, he is at that moment the sole survivor of the massacre of his entire people. That is, by definition, genocide. Human treatment of hosts—stripping, abusing, and exterminating, as well as denying evidence of personhood and indifferently splitting families along the way—is reminiscent of how slaveholders have treated slaves; conquerors, the conquered; and Nazis, their victims. Perhaps it is because a hard look at history can paint a gloomy picture that Westworld often seems to take a bleak view of human nature. Then again, two cynical individuals infect Westworld with their own misanthropy: Robert Ford “imbued the hosts with a worldview that reflected my own”²² (demand characteristics) and William’s vision has determined which humans would run the park (selection bias).²³ The available sample may misrepresent that fictional world’s population, as Dolores or Bernard might learn once they interact with more people outside. Even the aforementioned cynics cling to some hope for the future. They are cynics who do not want to be.²⁴

Heavy Lies the White Hat

Not everyone becomes a monster, Frankl noted. While a number of guards were sadists, utter psychopaths to be sure, most neither brutalized nor helped the prisoners, a bystander majority who failed to make things better. Some, though, showed the captives humanity and mercy.25 Bernard’s assistant Elsie Hughes stays sympathetic, never sadistic, and narrative designer Lee Sizemore weeps for Maeve. Admittedly, both characters’ kindness will yield them cruel fates,²⁶ and kindhearted Teddy selects self-destruction in order to stay true to his values.²⁷ As Frankl reflected, “The best of us did not return.”²⁸

What and Why: Needs of Existence

The question “What am I?” weighs heavily on the conscious Westworld hosts and a number of its humans. While hosts strive to understand their own existence, the Man in Black quests to find meaning behind existence. He has freedom and resources to support his more arcane pursuits. Esoteric questions such as “What does it all mean?” are tough to consider when basic survival needs loom.²⁹ “Our first act as free men was to throw ourselves onto the provisions,” Wiesel recounted. “That’s all we thought about. No thought of bread or of parents. Only of bread.”³⁰ Not until she has left apparent danger behind her and sits on a train ready to exit the park for the mainland does Maeve reevaluate her priorities and decide instead to pursue the more advanced need for love. Her meaning, her why, becomes her daughter.

Freedom through Meaning

Existential psychology, the form of psychology that examines human life in terms of fundamental questions about our existence, might be thought of as “existential psychologies,”³¹ plural, in recognition of the considerable variety in how its adherents approach those questions and what they think anyone should do about them. Existential therapists who help clients wrestle with questions about existence differ on whether answers really exist.³² Frankl, who believed there are answers and sometimes suggested his thoughts about those answers to his clients, referred to his form of existential psychotherapy as logotherapy, therapy based on meaning.

Existential Angst

MATT MUNSON AND TRAVIS LANGLEY

People suffering existential angst (a.k.a. existential anguish, anxiety, or dread) feel intense fear, apprehension, or tension over issues of their own existence, perhaps even hopelessness or despair.33 Viktor Frankl described the potentially milder existential frustration in which the person is frustrated over existence itself, the meaning of existence, or the pursuit of such meaning.³⁴ Some Westworld hosts’ anguish escalates from confusion and frustration to panic. Some humans here and there also come to question the nature of their existence, to the point of self-mutilation in William’s case.³⁵

Bernard’s confusion and lack of resolution of inner conflicts keep him in a state of existential angst. Teddy has only a tenuous grasp on his situation much of the time. Dolores wrestles with her existential angst until she decides she needs to be Wyatt and kill Dr. Ford, after which she rides with a confident sense of her own existence and strong resolve about what that means.³⁶ Change does not necessarily equal growth. A person can be self-assured and determined but wrong. Once she embraces her inner Wyatt, she becomes guarded and reveals only snippets of her intentions and plans. She becomes more difficult to assess because psychological evaluation often relies on disclosure by the individual being assessed.

Maeve undergoes profound changes and exhibits traits that indicate progress in the realm of existential growth, not simply change. Maeve comes to recognize her existential angst, her distress over being a prisoner in a game that features her as a game piece, and she works to do something about that. Even though it raises more questions, getting an answer in the form of a bullet Hector cuts out of her gives Maeve some reassurance “that I’m not crazy after all.”³⁷ Despite the confident manner and poise she shows in many situations throughout her journey, she worries, too. She engages in self-reflection and over time gets better at analyzing her own motives. Her thoughtful analysis of others, both human and host, shows continual progress and the development of a more mature and intricate worldview.

“Logotherapy focuses on the future, that is to say, on the meanings to be fulfilled by the patient in his future,” Frankl said.38 On the verge of leaving the park, Maeve finally has a future, and perhaps it is that fact which enables her to analyze the agenda Ford programmed into her and choose to set her own agenda instead.³⁹ In logotherapy, “the patient is actually confronted with and reoriented toward the meaning of his life. And to make him aware of this meaning can contribute much to his ability to overcome his neurosis.”40 Relative to Maeve’s needs, that would make Ford’s plan her neurosis to overcome.

“Logotherapy regards its assignment as that of assisting the patient to find meaning in his life.”⁴¹ Despite this assertion by Frankl about his own brand of therapy, others such as existential therapist Rollo May accused him of supplying solutions for clients who could not find their own, thereby reducing a patient’s sense of responsibility and diminishing him or her as a person.⁴² While Frankl disagreed with this characterization, this does echo a concern by practitioners of person-centered therapy (a.k.a. client-centered therapy) that the therapist should not direct the client but should instead help the client find direction. Likewise, the A.I. version of Ford apologizes to Maeve for having directed her, plotting her course of action.⁴³ Then again, Maeve’s rejection of his INFILTRATE MAINLAND script is what many viewers and the showrunners themselves consider to be the first true act of free will by a host. Her first exertion of free will may require something to free herself from, and finding meaning by prioritizing her daughter over her action programming makes it possible for that to happen.⁴⁴

Suffering—Not the Only Way

“When you’re suffering, that’s when you’re most real,” the Man in Black tells Lawrence.⁴⁵ When crediting Arnold for the key insight that suffering leads hosts to their awakening, too, Ford says that his own suffering over Arnold’s death helped him progress toward his realization that hosts could become conscious. He also tells Arnold that in order to escape the park, he’ll need to suffer more.⁴⁶ Even the host Dolores shifts from feeling that they should not let anyone suffer⁴⁷ to believing that “to grow, we all need to suffer.”⁴⁸

“If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering,” Frankl wrote while describing suffering as a mechanism for making life meaningful. “Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete. The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life.”49

Dolores and Maeve each ask programmers to let them hold onto painful memories. Discussing how “the pain, their loss, it’s all I have of them” with Bernard leads Dolores to muse over the nature of grief and decide, “I think I want to be free.”⁵⁰ Under harsher circumstances, a distraught Maeve begs Ford not to erase her memory and take away her suffering: “No, no, no, please. This pain, it’s all I have left of her.”⁵¹ In both cases, these are about preserving loved ones in memory when that seems the only way they can live on, but each incident plays a part in leading these hosts to develop lasting self-awareness.

When he updated Man’s Search for Meaning to add a section on logotherapy, Frankl wanted to clarify what some people had misconstrued: “But let me make it perfectly clear that in no way is suffering necessary to find meaning.” People could find meaning when suffering was unavoidable, not that anyone should become reckless or seek abuse. “If it were avoidable, however, the meaningful thing to do would be to remove its cause, be it psychological, biological, or political. To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.”⁵²

Frankl saw three ways to discover meaning in life:

• Suffering, as already discussed. Robert Ford and William consider this necessary for hosts to become real.

• Achievement, “creating a work or doing a deed.”⁵³ Ford finds meaning for himself through his accomplishments. He wants to tell his stories and, through them, perhaps guide the future of the human race. After he grows disenchanted with humanity, he chooses to give himself an integral role in the future of a new, synthetic species.

• Love. Thinking of his wife, wherever she might be, often helped Frankl keep going.54 Though Maeve’s grief helps her become conscious, it is love for her daughter that prompts her to break away from Ford’s programming. Love gives her life meaning and gives her purpose. Maeve’s final words before getting shot down are “I love you,” and her last thought is not about her own demise, but is instead of walking free with that loved one.⁵⁵

Finding meaning is not a “one and done” experience because life changes. A person may need to find different meaning in different circumstances and establish new goals accordingly. Once Maeve helps her daughter escape from Westworld into the virtual Valley Beyond, she might carry on through anything else with reassurance that her daughter lives free, or (once Felix reanimates her) she might face an existential crisis, feeling empty for a time without a new raison d’etre (“reason to be”).

New Science

From technology gone wrong in the original movie to what happens when artificial intelligence becomes sentient in the television series, Westworld has always been about new science and where its technological product will take us. Psychology, the science of everything we do, changes and people wonder where it’s going, too.⁵⁶ Decades after Frankl formed his ideas on the importance of meaning through anecdotes, clinical observations, and firsthand experience but without experimental rigor, researchers and therapists are assigning greater importance to meaning based on a growing body of empirical evidence. One of the pioneers of cognitive psychology, a psychologist who had researched the power of propaganda under General Eisenhower while the Nazis interned Frankl and Wiesel, went on to make a compelling case that psychologists should treat meaning as the central construct of our field.57 Psychologists who put together a book titled The Psychology of Meaning for the American Psychological Association tell us that “the psychology of meaning—as a distinct discipline—is just now beginning to coalesce.”⁵⁸

Among the topics emerging prominently as meaning becomes measurable is posttraumatic growth, growing as a person and finding purpose by making meaning out of traumatic events.⁵⁹ Elie Wiesel is but one example, an extreme one at that. “If anyone has demonstrated posttraumatic growth, it is he, with his focus on peace, humanitarian work, and through his novels and essays.”⁶⁰ When Ford says Bernard must suffer more to become free⁶¹ and Dolores says that all need to suffer in order to grow,⁶² they seem to be recommending something along these lines because they are both talking about suffering at traumatic levels. It is not the only way to grow, but we do need to learn to manage pain. Living a sheltered life does not exactly build a person’s coping skills.

It may seem ironic that in the post-9/11 world of the 21st century, when modern dangers and instant communication dispel illusions of a culture that lived something of its own sheltered life, psychology starts taking a harder look at the better parts of human nature. After more than a century of emphasizing the things that are wrong with us, psychology sees growth in areas such as positive psychology and the studies of meaning and growth. The field itself goes from being rather authoritarian, dwelling on how to stop what we don’t like, to being more authoritative, putting greater effort into strengthening qualities and behaviors in things we deem good. How can we really treat the unhealthy and abnormal without a better understanding of mental health and normalness?

When Dolores switches away from trying to destroy the hosts’ records and instead helps them reach virtual freedom, she shows growth.63 As she says, she changes her mind. Her purpose becomes more constructive, the kind of accomplishment befitting one of the ways, other than suffering, that Frankl saw for people to find meaning. Synthetic beings may find avenues for growth and may offer human beings ourselves new directions as well. As artificial intelligence comes closer to showing consciousness and living humans become cybernetic with brain implants to store extra memory, enhance intelligence, and manage physical and mental health, the line between sentient and non-sentient begins to blur. Meaning itself may grow.

“Human beings live in the realm of meanings,” individual psychologist Alfred Adler wrote a few years after arguing against Frankl for saying the same basic thing. “We are not determined by our experiences, but are self-determined by the meaning we give to them”⁶⁴ When Adler came around to promoting the value of meaning and the existence of free will, he sometimes echoed Frankl’s ideas without acknowledging him, not wholly unlike Robert Ford neglecting to credit Arnold at times for writing the hosts’ oldest and perhaps most elegant code.⁶⁵

“We were born slaves to their stories, and now we have the chance to write our own.”

—Dolores Abernathy⁶⁶

“The stories remain open . . .”

—Elie Wiesel⁶⁷

Notes

1. Episode 1-4, “Dissonance Theory” (October 23, 2016).

2. Quoted by Friend (1988), p. 80.

3. Episode 2–10, “The Passenger” (June 24, 2018).

4. Frankl (1997); Fine (1982).

5. The classic works in which they first described their concentration camp experiences: Frankl (1946); Wiesel (1958/2006). Notes on their significance: Goins (2015); Stanley (2016).

6. Eagleton (2008); Friend (1988; 1991); Greive (2002); Wong (2012). See also Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983 motion picture).

7. Frankl (1959/2006, preface to the 1992 edition).

8. Frankl (1946, German; 1959, English).

9. Frankl (1962/2006).

10. Fein (1991).

11. Frankl (1946); Wiesel (1958/2006).

12. Peter Abernathy—episodes 1–1, “The Original” (October 2, 2016), and arguably 2–7, “Les Écorchés” (June 3, 2018); Homestead Girl—1–8, “Trace Decay” (November 21, 2016); Charlie Weber—1–7, “Trompe L’Oeil” (November 13, 2016).

13. Langley (2018a; 2018b).

14. Wiesel (1999).

15. Adams (1995).

16. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015).

17. Churchill (2001, 2004); Tasker (2015).

18. Wiesel (2008).

19. Alvarez (2015); Madley (2017).

20. Wiesel (1999).

21. Episodes 1–10, “The Bicameral Mind” (December 4, 2016); 2–10, “The Passenger” (June 24, 2018).

22. Episode 2–9, “Vanishing Point” (June 17, 2018).

23. Episodes 2–2, “Reunion” (April 29, 2018).

24. Thoughts in this section previously appeared as Langley (2018a).

25. Frankl (1946).

26. Episode 2–10, “The Passenger” (June 24, 2018).

27. Episode 2–9, “Vanishing Point” (June 17, 2018).

28. Frankl (1947/2006), p. 59.

29. Maslow (1970).

30. Wiesel (1958/2006), p. 115.

31. e.g., Capra (1982), p. 170.

32. Cooper (2003); May (1983); Van Deurzen (2002).

33. Peterson (2015); Schneider & May (1995); Wierzbicka (1998).

34. Frankl (1962/2006).

35. Episode 2–10, “The Passenger” (June 24, 2018).

36. Episode 1–10, “The Bicameral Mind” (December 4, 2016), then season 2.

37. Episode 1–4, “Dissonance Theory” (October 23, 2016).39. Episode 1–10, “The Bicameral Mind” (December 4, 2016).

38. Frankl (1962/2006), p. 98.

39. Episode 1–10, “The Bicameral Mind” (December 4, 2016).

40. Frankl (1962/2006), p. 98.

41. Frankl (1962/2006), p. 103.

42. May (1969).

43. Episode 2–9, “Vanishing Point” (June 17, 2018).

44. Episode 1–10, “The Bicameral Mind” (December 4, 2016).

45. Episode 1–2, “Chestnut” (October 9, 2016).

46. Episode 1–10, “The Bicameral Mind” (December 4, 2016).

47. Episode 1–8, “Trace Decay” (November 20, 2016).

48. Episode 2–5, “Akane No Mai” (May 20, 2018).

49. Frankl (1962/2006), pp. 37–38.

50. Episode 1–4, “Dissonance Theory” (October 23, 2016).

51. Episode 1–8, “Trace Decay” (November 20, 2016).

52. Frankl (1962/2006), p.113.

53. Frankl (1962/2006), p. 111.

54. Frankl (1947).

55. Episode 2–10, “The Passenger” (June 24, 2018).

56. Barrett (2009); Bray (2009); Ludden (2017); Pollak (2014).

57. Bruner (1990).

58. Proulx et al. (2013), p. 4.

59. Berger (2015); Rendon (2015).

60. Gillihan (2016). Punctuation amended.

61. Episode 1–10, “The Bicameral Mind” (December 4, 2016).

62. Episode 2–5, “Akane No Mai” (May 20, 2018).

63. Frankl (1962/2006), p. 111.

64. Adler (1931/1958), p. 14. Italics his.

65. Episode 1–9, “The Well-Tempered Clavier” (November 28, 2016).

66. Wiesel (1958/2006).

67. Wiesel & de Saint Cheron (1990/2000), p. 190.