Truth and Its Discontents

Vince Gilligan's new TV series, Pluribus, premieres tomorrow. It's about an author, Carol Sturka (played by Rhea Seehorn), who is immune to a virus that has transformed everyone into content and optimistic citizens. As Austin Considine writes in the New York Times, "the heart of 'Pluribus' is a person who is told she should be happy but fights hard to have the freedom not to be."

The show is inspired by Gilligan's hard-won relationship to his creative discontent: “This general level of unhappiness and this dissatisfaction that I’ve learned to live with—it took me years, decades, but I finally realized this—is what gets me up in the morning." A wonderful paper on lack and creativity that I highly recommend is Mari Ruti's The Fall of Fantasies: A Lacanian Reading of Lack.

Bion articulates a similar connection between truth and growth. In Learning from Experience he writes, "Healthy mental growth seems to depend on truth, as the living organism depends on food." But in the preface to Seven Servants, he reminds us: "I think it's 'better' to know the truth about one's self and the universe in which I exist. But I do not wish to imply that it is 'nicer' or 'pleasanter.'"