15 Million Merits

I'm very careful about watching television. After all, I have read Jerry Mander's seminal Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, and Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. I've also lived without a television set for the most part of my adult(erated) life. I actually resent the fact that not having a television I am not only in the tiny minority (which doesn't bother me) but that I am considered suspicious for doing so. This comes in the form of the threatening letter (with bold capitalized words in red ink!!) that the TV Licensing folk send out every two years to make sure you still do not have a television set. I resent the insinuations that I am somehow considered abnormal and thus defective for doing so. Alas! the palaver mindful and considerate human beings have to put up with.

At any rate, last night I did watch a TV program (at a friend's house in case the good folk at TV Licensing are watching) called Black Mirror, and specifically an episode called 15 Million Merits. I had come across it by accident as I was looking at an actor's resume on the Internet movie database site. The actor was Daniel Kaluuya who was in the news for his performance in the film Get Out. I was kind of wondering why he had been nominated for a best actor oscar since his performance here was not all that wonderful. So I searched out what else he had done and found this episode here, set in the near future where the hoi polloi cycle on treadmills in windowless gyms (hamsters in a lab) to earn enough credits to set themselves free. 

A wonderful piece of television, though I haven't seen any of the other episodes... which illustrated the gulf of difference not only between 'wild-cycling' outdoors and cycling in a gym in front of a television, but which offered an insight into the state of modern day affairs, and its talent-laden trajectory. 

So, forget about merit and talent.... and focus on genius.... 

As the latter day saint Simone Weil once wrote, genius is 'the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought', whereas talent is marked by a pride that exalts personal achievement and never reaches 'the impersonal good'.