afterlife Archives - The Cracked Door

A Letter from a Retiring Medium (A Piece of Complete Fiction)

I have been a median for many, many years, and as I sink into the relaxation of retirement, I want to explain medium-to-medium the secret annoyances of the job that we mediums don’t normally talk about.

Clients usually almost always want to talk to the recently deceased. These young dead with their constant problems and unresolved issues from their mortal lives are by far the most annoying: desire for revenge, love, unfinished business, or whatever. All of this makes them needy and moody. Of course, living people who remain caught in the thralls of life tend to gravitate towards them. Moody attracts moody.

The older the dead the more interesting they get. After one has lived longer than one’s lifetime in the world of the dead, they start to get hit by the fact that their life here is a less significant portion of existence than their afterlife. It takes time, but even those most impacted by fame on earth will eventually seep into indifference about their mortal existence, engulfed by the eternal wave of their afterlife now in front of them. This gives them an insightful perspective about our world, which rash clients, caught up in whatever earthly need or desire they might have, never seem to appreciate.

My absolute favorite to talk to are those who have been dead for tens or even a hundred thousands years. They can be hard to find, but when you manage to summon them, their life on earth is a distant memory that they may not even recall from the piles of eternity that has already buried itself on top of it. Their voices, encapsulating all they once were, all they once sought, synthesizes into a singular, beautiful hum, a single note they beam with the melodious brightness of a distant star.

So good luck as you enter this deadly profession. Your customers will be annoying. Fulfill their desires; resurrect their lovers, their mortal enemies, their family and friends, or whoever they request. But before you get tired and burnout from the drama, make sure to take time to slip into the deeper wells of humanity and rest in the solace of the vast ocean of humans past. It’s your best break from the constant waves of the whims of those who still strive.

Now is finally my time to begin my retreat into this same vast expanse that is existence. I start with retirement from the world of production and sustaining before I, too, will eventually take the plunge into the great expense of eternity. May you take up this mantle well.

Sincerely,
Your fellow retiring medium

What The Good Place’s Ending Leaves Out about Ethics (Reflection #9 in “The Good Place Miniseries)

Eleanor helps comfort Tahinni through her family trauma.

This is my final article reflecting on the Good place (see the previous article and my whole series). It’s been an insightful ride. To be clear, the Good Place is one of my favorite sitcoms, both for breaking new ground in what is possible in a sitcom and for encouraging people to think through what it might look like to truly heal from wrongs in an afterlife. Yet I think its ending leaves something crucial out: only individuals receive resolution and improvement in the afterlife itself, denying any kind of collective rectification of the moral problems facing our world.

In the show, the main group of characters manage to reconfigure the afterlife from a punitive system where literally every human in the last 500 years gets eternally tortured in the Bad Place to a refining system where each individual must work through their moral failings so they are able to join all other perfected individuals in the Good Place. This changes the thinking around justice in itself from one of punishment to self-improvement for all.

One could analyze this shift in itself, but here, I will focus on a crucial aspect of justice that this leaves out: any discussion of rectification of the world to resolve the problems we have created. Broadly speaking, this rectification could look like seeking to fix or repair what an individual has destroyed through one’s immoral acts and more broadly like trying to resolve the structural issues built on the accumulation of immoral and destructive decisions by multiple humans. They get let out entirely in the show’s resolution. Instead, the show’s new afterlife implicitly encourages individuals to focus on themselves as the exclusive or primary focus of what it means to develop morally. Let’s break them down further through some examples.

One day when I was a little boy, I did not want to eat whatever my mom served me for dinner that day, so what did I do? When she went to the kitchen for a second, I threw it all on the floor. When my mom returned, not only did she scold me for throwing my dinner on the floor, but she made me clean it up. As part of rectifying what I did, I had to clean up the mess I made. There could be many situations where fully rebuilding what was destroyed due to the immoral life is impossible (arguably full rectification is never possible), but a person who has done something wrong and feels guilty for it will often try to do the best they can to repair things for whoever they hurt through their actions.

Now this also applies at a larger scale. Humans have collectively built systems that destroy the environment and impoverish many through stifling inequality, and to fully make up for these, we also need to collectively repair their damage. But in The Good Place, all individuals no longer have to fix the problems they create once they die from that when they die. Once they die, they get to go through their own inner perfection and go to the Good Place, even if the systems they were a part of while alive remain just as destructive on earth. As a matter of fact, they would have to undergo an internal transformation after they die whether they do anything to fix the damage they have caused, meaning that the damage they caused does not end up mattering to their existence anyways.

Any positive reformation of anything in this world does not matter in the reformed afterlife system they created at the end of the series. Take, for example, an individual who commits some kind of atrocity, ranging in severity from a parent abusing one’s children or an orchestrator of a mass genocide. That person dies, enters their purgatory, which presumably teaches them the error of their ways and makes them into a better person, and then they go to heaven. That’s great for them, but they do not need to take any concrete action in the world itself to deal with or fix the intense suffering their actions have caused. Genocides and even abusive parents unleash cascading suffering into the world (both to humans and nonhumans) that can take several generations to heal. The show makes clear that the victims of atrocities from others will experience a healing during the afterlife, but that is long after the fact. Why must they suffer in the first place?

Healing occurs only by literally removing people from their environment into a make-believe world. For example, both Tahani and her sister experience healing from the trauma of their parents’ constant abuse, which allows them to overcome their lifelong competition between each other. They then get to experience positive relationships with each other and their parents all as healed people. Instead of fixing their relationship dynamics together, their reformation seemed to occur in their individual purgatories, where they presumably learned the error of their ways and grew as people (with the entire show being Tahani’s transforming state). In the show, they did not know what the others would be like after getting through their purgatories demonstrating that they were not together in any of it. This is innovative in many ways, but its portrayal of healing is entirely individualistic. Each human goes through purgatory in isolation outside of the social systems in which they existed and both created their virtues and vices. For example, for a familial conflict like this, I would love to see them go through purgatory together, probably in a way that changed some of the unfair power dynamics latent in the abuse and resolved everything together.

Also, what about non-human entities that suffered? For example, there is no reformation or healing in this system to animals that humans caused to suffer. A dog abused or neglected by its owner presumably was left on earth to die with no redemption. It also ignores any healing to the suffering of more collective entities like human communities and the environment. Instead of the humans experiencing renewal in a make-believe purgatory, I would love to see humans have to come back to the earth (maybe as some kind of ghost or other supernatural spirit) to reform the suffering their actions have caused in this world to mitigate how much suffering future humans and the environment in this world have to suffer. For example, if someone led a genocide, they would have to spend the next part of their afterlife healing all the damage this caused the world since. As a child, if I spilled something on the floor, my parents, as part of me having to learn my lesson, usually made me help clean it up, instead of whisking me into another room for a lesson, and then sending me on my way.

All of this points to its human-centered individualistic view that does not consider any systematic change to society or the ecological world and ignores the plight of animals and other nonhumans in this world as inferior and cosmically irrelevant. All that is necessary for “moral” perfection is a change in the characters of individual humans, which ignores the calls for systematic justice in both the social and environmental contexts. Even though The Good Place takes a courageous step in the right direction in helping people rethink justice, I think if we were to reimagine the afterlife to better address the injustices of humans, it would need to include the entire world and involve a fuller rectification of what humans have destroyed in this world.

Is “The Good Place” Really Good? Using Foucault to Explore Afterlife Engineering (Reflection #6 in “The Good Place Miniseries)

I recently rewatched “The Good Place” (spoiler warning), one of my favorite shows from the last ten years, and I noticed so much more about the show the second time around. I decided to write a miniseries analyzing different facets of the show – some complimentary, some critical – as a tribute to one of the most thoughtful and interesting sitcoms on mainstream US television. Here are the previous reflection and next reflection in the series. I hope you enjoy:

The Good Place’s vision of personality reform is certainly innovative: Humans upon death go to a type of purgatory where a group of supernatural beings (made up of both demons and angels) force them to confront their biggest flaws and grow as people. Once these imperfections have been fixed, and they have been perfected, they get to go to heaven, where they can enjoy the remainder of their existence. This seems like an improvement from torturing everyone for all time that modern humans endured up to that point, but it still feels insufficient. This reflection will use the social philosopher Michel Foucault to analyze this new system.

A good starting point is to ask, “What are someone’s flaws, and how can we be certain that another can both know these flaws and put them in a situation where they must confront and fix their flaws?” These flawed supernatural beings can objectively know someone’s flaws and with enough time (not a problem in the infinite afterlife) eventually chisel humans down until they change who they are in a way that addresses that flaw. The show thus answers yes to both of these, but I find both ideas, especially the first, rather debatable.

The show presents this as good, because everyone eventually gets to go to heaven, and sure, such a universalism is certainly better than universal damnation, but it ignores the complexity of determining someone’s fundamental flaw. What if the supernatural beings have it wrong, interpreting something as a flaw that is not? Does a person’s flaws exist objectively in the first place? For example, historical figures receive intense debate about what about their lives are “good” or “bad”, virtues or vices, understandable, criticizable, or somewhere in the middle? On a practical level, these same beings had been so unable to empathize with humanity that they condemned all modern humans to damnation. How could such creatures really work through the complexities of a person’s entire life to weed out their weeds and their chaff? The sitcom depicts them as a positive, lively reform, but in say a horror, supernatural beings that use their control over us to try to remake us into what they desire would be nightmare fuel.

Let’s consider what Michel Foucault, the French philosopher in the middle of the 1900s, would have to say about this. He extensively analyzed how modern Western societies focused on human reform, in order to “improve” people, fix their flaws, and make them supposedly useful or productive members of society. One key example is his book, “Discipline and Punishment,” where he discusses a shift in modern Europe a few hundred years ago from the state publicly and violently beating and executing criminals to a focus on locking them into reforming prisons to reteach them, all to remake them into useful members of society. For him, the punishment of criminals shifted from a vagrant punishment for daring to defy the government and the society at large by doing crime, an intense yet skin-deep attack on their bodies, towards the more “civilized” prisons, where instead of intense, physical violence but must experience the thousand little cuts of the state trying to reform the prisoners’ very selves.

The beings in the show make the exact same change. The demons of hell tortured humans with brutal physical violence (like forcing strange creatures into their butts and genitals), relishing their power over the humans’ bodies. The torture was extensive seemingly to punish people for their evilness. The new system, however, focuses on reforming their very selves, in order to fix their flaws. In the episode where the demons learn how to construct these learning experiences, they teach the demons how to use each human’s flaws to psychologically torture them: to put the human in high-pressure situations where they must encounter their biggest psychological insecurities, all in the name of reforming them. This may have a pragmatic pedagogical strategy to wean the demons off the mentality and slowly over the course of the lessons encouraging more positive ways to engage with people’s flaws, but either way, this illustrates how spiritually dark the idea of forcibly reforming people can become.

Now these differ from the states that Foucault in important ways. The Medieval and early modern European states that Foucault wanted to warn against threatening their social order by making a public spectacle of mutilating their bodies; in contrast to the demons seemed to do so partially to entertain and humiliate and partially because they thought the humans they were torturing were incorrigibly awful and deserved to suffer for it. More importantly, the new purgatory state at the end of the series was decidedly not a punishment but a refinement, and after they passed through it, each human got to live in heaven on their own terms for their own ends, not to benefit the community, in contrast to the idea of remaking prisoners into productive members of society.

At the same time, however, it is not a coincidence that the show writers would construct a similar process to a reformist prison. They are subconsciously tapping into the similar energy that Foucault was analyzing in contemporary Western societies. This energy makes the idea of changing people into what everyone else considers the best versions of them. It can also manifest as an energy to pressure people into optimizing themselves to perfect themselves either for their own good or the good of their communities, and contrasts with, say, the idea of engaging with people how they are and take collective responsibility for our role in shaping the so-called “bad people” into who they have become. My question is, Would such an afterlife, where supernatural beings who have absolute control over our entire selves (including of our very consciousness and memories) and use that control to remake us how they see fit, really be such a good world after all?