Apple TV+’s Show ‘Severance’ Successfully Depicts the American Workplace as a Cult
Image; Tom’s Guide
“We’re divinely discontented with customer experiences,” preaches a letter to shareholders. That line may sound like it came from the fictional dialogue of a corporate dystopia, but it’s from a real company. Let’s put a pin on the “who” for a moment. Just keep it in the back of your mind as we talk about the show Severance and how it successfully links modern corporatism to the religiosity of cults.
The corporate dystopia Severance has been a critical darling of Apple TV+. It tells the story of a group of employees for the company Lumen who have undergone a surgery called “severance,” which separates their work and life selves. Their outside selves or “outies” retain no memories of what they experience at work, and vice versa for their “innies,” creating two separate people coexisting in the same body at different times.
There's a lot to like about this series. The acting is superb, ranging from the quiet, understatedness of employee Burt Goodman (played by Christopher Walken) to the religious fervor of middle manager Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), who worships both the company and its founding family, the Eagans. Everything from the music to the over-stylized 1980s aesthetic creates a show that places the viewer constantly on edge.
Ultimately, it's the concept that keeps people talking. This premise is horrifying to some, but to others, it's merely a natural conclusion of the current American workplace. “That sounds like such a good idea,” said one friend after I explained the show's premise. “If you hate your job, wouldn’t you want to hit the skip button?”
We are so normalized to the pervasiveness of corporate culture that even satire like Severance can fly over the heads of many of us. We worship our places of work. They have become blind cults where we are willing to give our corporate owners anything they ask of us, even our minds.
The Cult of Lumen
A cult has no singular description. The country of France, for example, has no legal definition of one, but they still try to curb the influence of “cult-like movements.” Generally, cults are characterized as involving at least one person who attempts to dominate the lives of their members using psychological manipulation and other pressure strategies. That, you might imagine, is quite an expansive definition (more on this later).
Severance primarily follows both the innie and outie of employee Mark Scout (Adam Scott), someone who is already thoroughly indoctrinated into the cult of Lumen. Mark’s outie is still recovering from the loss of his wife, and he is not handling it well. He drinks excessively and has taken this “severed” job so he doesn't have to deal with his grief and is thoroughly defensive when anyone questions the morality of severance.
It's common for cults to prey on weak and vulnerable people for converts. Some research has even indicated a correlation between cult membership and addictive disorders (e.g., substance abuse and dependence), which fits the description of protagonist Mark a little too well.
Yet it's not just that Mark is emotionally vulnerable that causes me to cite this parallel. The company also socially isolates Mark by making sure he can't meet his fellow employees outside of work, or in the case of his innie, to leave at all. It subtly controls where he lives via subsidized housing. His boss Harmony Cobel even spies on him so that he can never pick up the pieces about the extent of their deception. These acts are all to control his environment so he may never gain the capacity for dissent.
According to psychologist Margaret Singer in her work Cults in Our Midst (1996), controlling a person’s environment is a key tactic cults use to hold power over their members. In fact, it's surprising how all of Singer’s six conditions of “mind control” show up on the show (I have noted them in bold below). Mark’s outie may think he’s using Lumen to defer his grief, but he’s the real one being used. While the company frames “severance” as a simple contract between two parties, Mark’s innie has been psychologically broken down to accept his enslavement.
Both his innie and outie are closed off from the purpose of their work. They do not know what they do, preventing them from understanding how they are being changed over time.
His environment is elaborately curated with maze-like hallways and more so that every aspect of his waking experience is controlled.
His innie cannot leave because he only exists within the company's walls. Mark is in a closed system, where he is not even permitted to keep a corny self-help book from the outside.
From being instructed to take precisely two tokens to use the vending machine to quietly being berated during Wellness sessions, his behavior is constantly molded through subtle acts of compliance to adopt the Lumen ideology.
If Mark ever goes against their wishes, he is sent to a place called “the break room” to be tortured, which discourages any sense of individuality.
Finally, the only way he can stop his bondage is if his outie leaves the company, and that action would effectively end his life, creating a sense of powerlessness.
Lumen is a textbook example of a cult, and we see this also in the way the company worships the founding family, particularly their charismatic founder, Kier Eagan. The Employee Handbook is written like a bible that espouses Kier’s gospel. Kier’s house has been replicated in the Perpetuity Wing — a museum that is an ode to the Eagan family. Visiting it is one of the few activities coworkers can do outside of just working.
Lumen is steeped in an intense religiosity that Mark’s innie has known his entire life. He has been brainwashed to accept the larger-than-life Lumen mythos, and until agitator Helly Riggs (Britt Lower) enters the picture, he doesn’t question it. Why would he? He was recruited into this cult from day one of his existence. This is just the way things are. To quote a line used in conference rooms across corporate America, “it is what it is.”
But if a company can be a cult, as I think this show demonstrates pretty well, where do we draw the line?
Corporate America is also a cult
In contemporary labor circles, modern jobs are sometimes pejorative referred to as “wage slavery” because of the power imbalance between employees and employers. You may “voluntarily” enter into a job, but often only because you need a wage for resources such as food and housing. And besides a few guidelines, your boss dictates what you can and cannot do (tell your boss “no” enough times and see what happens). To condense a phrase from philosopher Engels: “Capitalism is just slavery with extra steps.”
Severance takes this wage slavery critique and collapses it in on itself. The severance floor of Lumen doesn’t just take your body for those hours at work (like Engels argues our current system does), but your mind and memories as well. In this way, Severance strains the credulity of the traditional argument defending wage slavery — that the participant agreed to it — by demonstrating how contacts can be weaponized to coerce consent. The company preyed on an unwell man to do an experimental medical procedure and then framed it through the lens of individual agency.
However, Mark was not in a place to make this deal, and furthermore, his innie did not agree to be enslaved by Lumen, any more than someone starving and desperate can agree to a coercive job. There is no contract to hide behind, not for the viewer. We see precisely the horrors that this type of logic leads to, and it is shockingly mundane.
The scariest thing about Severance is how unsurprising this entire setup is. There are a lot of surreal elements on this show: workers spend hours editing emotions out of a document, there is a department devoted to nursing goats, and workers who meet their numbers are rewarded with a BDSM waffle party. All of these things are off the wall, but the willingness of a company to take someone’s mind and mold it in their image is very believable. It seems only like a natural extension of the current environment.
Companies constantly twist reality to lie to their employees (and the public). Major firms have lied about everything from the existence of Global Warming (see ExxonMobil) to the harms of smoking (see Big Tobacco) to the destabilizing effects of social media on Democracy and our collective mental health (see Facebook). We exist in a world where we have allowed many companies to peddle falsehoods.
However, it's more than just about the lies. We are conditioned to accept most companies as benevolent forces in our lives. They are our family, a part of our team, and a member of the community. That is, until it's time to argue for our own self-interest. When this happens, we are not being a “team player.” We are labeled as difficult, lazy, and unproductive.
“No one is irreplaceable,” goes the famous corporate saying. “So stop complaining,” goes the part unsaid. The sense of powerlessness and groupthink many firms perpetuate is strikingly similar to Lumen, even if they can’t trap most people in a room and torture them into compliance (that’s just something most of us “choose” to do).
Furthermore, many of these companies are centered on a charismatic CEO or founder. From Jeff Bezos to Steve Jobs to Elon Musk, we worship the words and opinions of these men. We praise people for “creating” these companies while simultaneously ignoring the many workers who helped build them up. You could swap Kier out for any of these men, and the effect would be the same, albeit far closer to home.
These firms have constructed entire realities that are just as religious as Lumens. That “divinely discontented” line I pulled from the beginning came from a 2021 letter Amazon prepared for shareholders about how they live to serve their customers. It was not the only line in that document that rang some Lumen-sized alarm bells. Referencing a quote from the Foo Fighters song “Congregation,” the letter preaches:
“When you invent, you come up with new ideas that people will reject because they haven’t been done before (that’s where the blind faith comes in), but it’s also important to step back and make sure you have a viable plan that’ll resonate with customers (avoid false hope).”
What Amazon is preaching here is a doctrine just as religious as any Church. The doctrine of innovation and customer service: one utterly divorced from the harm it is doing to its workers and the planet.
All that matters is the work; Bezos be praised.
A severed conclusion
In Severance’s season one finale, severed employee Hellie R realizes that her outie is an Eagan. She’s chatting with her outie’s father and Lumen CEO, James Eagan, who thinks he’s talking to his daughter. James remarks almost casually about pushing the severance procedure onto the rest of the American workforce. “Everyone in the whole world should get one,” he says matter-of-factly about the severance chip in a way that chills my very bones. “They will….They’ll all be Kier's children.”
We might think this statement is mere fantasy, but corporate America is not far removed from the religiosity Lumen depicts beyond closed doors. Nor is it immune to maliciously propagandizing people to accept its version of events. Many people right now probably consider themselves a part of Amazon’s family or Google’s community. It scares me just how much this show seems like a window into a possible future rather than a distorted kaleidoscope of events that “could never happen here.”
After all, corporate America has already taken our privacy and environment. Why not our minds?