Mr. Robot: A Modern Analysis of Power, Insanity, and Identity
Now, I know what you’re thinking. If you’re anything like me, you know that no matter how insightful, informative, or inspirational this podcast might be, it will still be just that: a podcast. Another modern day vampire, sucking out every last drop of your attention. You tell yourself you need to stop—that everything takes longer if a podcast or YouTube video is in your ear. But then you do, and the everyday mundane nature of our society has you crawling right back.
We live in a world where production and consumption exist in an endless loop. The more we produce, the more we must consume in order to tolerate the physical and psychological strain that such production forces upon us. We spend our day working for invisible masters, then waste the rest of it playing with their toys. Constantly distracted, modern life feels empty. Our jobs are meaningless, and we’re alienated from the why behind all our actions. Then we attempt to fill the void with junk food and junk entertainment. The real world has, at last, become a myth. Plastic. Fake. A show. “A spectacle” as David Foster Wallace would call it. We’re isolated and alone—surrounded by fake plastic people and “fake plastic trees”.
Of course, all the junk and plastic and cheap, fake stuff is just there as a distraction to keep us in the loop. Keep us going. Keep the system running. Not by conspiracy or design, but merely as the natural evolution of our society. Self-replication is how all systems work. How all systems survive. The natural chaos of reality is always at odds with this; it is what creates diversity, random mutations, growth, etc.
Enter Elliot Alderson. Security software engineer by day, computer hacker vigilante by night. He’s also the protagonist of USA network’s “Mr. Robot”, which I just binge watched for the past 4 weeks. So much time lost. I fell into the trap. The time warp. Over a month without a podcast. Without writing. Without reading. Nights wasted. Mornings waking up with four hours of sleep. Tired. Long days at work. A constant longing for just one more episode. A TV junkie—just about as addicted to Mr. Robot as Elliot was addicted to morphine in season 1. Yep, I fell for it. The allure of a fantasy world that wasn’t my own. And so, what better way to pay for the time debt this show brought upon me than to sublimate that into a podcast? Deflect the time vampire onto you, the listener? Don’t you remember? The abused becomes the abuser.
I’ve quoted this before, and I will quote it again, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
For Eliot Alderson, the monster he fights is the top 1% of the 1%:
And indeed, through Elliot’s fight against the 1%, and by proxy, his fight against society itself, he ends up helping them to control society to a further degree. The financial crisis brought on by Elliot’s hack eventually leads to the US and many other nations having to use E-coin—a cryptocurrency controlled by the world’s largest conglomerate, E-Corp. Or to Elliot, “Evil Corp”. His blind rage likewise leads him to make several morally questionable decisions, screw people over to get what he wants, and lose touch with the people who care about him most. That is, in the fight against the top 1% of the top 1%--against the people he claims to have caused so much suffering on this planet, Elliot becomes almost just as evil. He develops an “any means necessary to justify the ends” mentality.
Now, I must ask, what exactly is evil?
Most “evil” in the world comes from a place of fear, desperation, or even love. This kind of evil is predictable, for it is the same kind of “evil” by which the so called “Good” have within them. Fight evil believing you’re good, and you’ll become what you sought to destroy. I’ve brought this up again and again on the podcast. “The good man sees the whole world as evil.” But then there’s a different kind of evil. An evil that’s unpredictable, chaotic, and destructive. The motives of this evil have nothing to do with fear, desperation, nor love. There are no good intentions. In fact, the intentions go beyond anything moral at all. It is destruction for the sake of destruction. As evil comes from good, chaos comes from peace—from nothingness. Chaos tricks the world into fighting amongst themselves. Good fights good believing the other to be evil. It is as such that chaos wins.
Elliot has four different personalities, which are revealed at the end of the show. For the purposes of this episode, I will only discuss two of them: Mr. Robot and the Mastermind. Mr. Robot is the father Elliot always wanted but never had. He is his protector and his motivator. The mastermind—of whom the viewer believes to be the real Elliot for the entire show until the finale—is the Elliot who seeks to fight the top 1% of the top 1%, and he always has a plan to pull it off. Going forward, I’ll simply refer to the mastermind as Elliot and Mr. Robot as Mr. Robot. And in fact, throughout the entire series, the viewer practically sees the two as different people.
Now, Mr. Robot believes the means always justify the ends, and his plans are often morally flawed, i.e. they might involve killing people, blowing up a building, etc. The mastermind, on the other hand, believes the ends only justify the means if the means are limited in the harm they do to bystanders. In many ways, while Mr. Robot isn’t totally amoral, he certainly has the attributes of chaos while Elliot has the attributes of the good man fighting evil. Throughout the series, both Elliot and Mr. Robot slowly meet in the middle and begin to see the flaws in their motives and actions.
As a disclaimer, I wanted to mention that I don’t necessarily believe in an objective “good” or “evil”, and when I mention these topics, I mean them in context of society or as a character sees them. Notably, I am referring to Elliot and Mr. Robot’s view on good and evil.
When Elliot quote un quote “meets” Mr. Robot, we sort of learn Mr. Robot’s view on morality along with his role in Elliot’s psyche: play from 1:59-3:50.
That is, Mr. Robot believes that everyone either steals or is getting stolen from. So why not steal from those who steal the most? Again, he is the motivator and the protector. “I’m gonna break you out, Elliot.” Mr. Robot is acts as the Morpheus to Elliot’s Neo. He shows him not the truth, but rather a way towards the truth. And in fact, later on, Mr. Robot almost directly quotes Morpheus but without the symbolism:
MR. ROBOT: You're here because you sense something wrong with the world. Something you can't explain. But you know it controls you and everyone you care about.
ELLIOT: What are you talking about?
MR. ROBOT: Money. Money hasn't been real since we got off the gold standard. It's become virtual. Software. The operating system of our world. And, Elliot, we are on the verge of taking down this virtual reality.
In the Matrix, when Morpheus is about to give Neo the red pill, he says,
“I know exactly what you mean. Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know, you can't explain. But you feel it. You felt it your entire life. That there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there. Like a splinter in your mind -- driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?”
Yet, to Mr. Robot, the thing controlling the world that can’t be explained isn’t the matrix but rather money. Money is the thing that is forcing people into an endless mundane loop of going to work, eating, sleeping, then going back to work. Money is the matrix. It is the simulation. It is the thing in which the AI, or for Mr. Robot’s case, the top 1% of the 1%, are extracting from humankind. FSociety, the hacker group formed by Mr. Robot, i.e. Elliot, is then akin to the group of rebels working outside the matrix. They know about those who control the matrix and want to take them down.
Mr. Robot goes on to explain their entire plan: That is, they will hack e-corp, delete all financial records, steal the money from the wealthiest people on earth, then redistribute it to everyone.
Now with that said, I definitely think this show is basically the marriage between Fight Club and the Matrix. And if you love these movies as much as I do, then I know for a fact that you will love Mr. Robot.
Going back to the topic of morality, both Mr. Robot and Elliot believe they are good people and that the people they are fighting against are evil. Mr. Robot’s determination to defeat this evil force is more chaotic while Elliot’s is controlled. They both, however, seem to slowly become the monsters they are seeking to fight. There is a great scene in season 4 that expresses this. Elliot essentially blackmails a woman named Olivia who works for the bank of the main antagonist, Whiterose: https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxE6Dw2lwxC_QxncqJPwUVeZNpD6MRvZdr?si=9NmlX_ymGSzjNwPW
“I may work for monsters, but you are one. And you’re the worst kind because you don’t even know it.”
Elliot started off as an idealist with lines he wouldn’t cross. But overtime as the monsters he sought to destroy kept evading him, he slowly kept moving those lines further and further away.
It is here that we can take a closer look into the quote un quote “morality” of Elliot and Mr. Robot. Is this their fight against evil or is this their fight to regain power over themselves? That is, are they doing this for the good of society or are they doing this to obtain a sense of power—a feeling of control? Part of Elliot’s anger towards society is the fact that society controls his and everyone else’s lives. There’s an illusion of choice surrounding every decision. Work is slavery with extra steps. And life is an endless repetition of the same. Indeed, society does feel as though it is controlling our every minute. Whether it be our jobs, the media we consume, the entertainment we enjoy, the politicians we listen to, the laws and social constructs we abide by, or the taxes we are forced to pay; we have little to no say over the matters of the world. We are fish living in the water of society. There is no escape.
This is a topic brought up by Mark Fisher in his book, Capitalist Realism. It seems there is no way out of this society, and whenever people try to think of one, they are so hopeless that such a world seems “unrealistic. Going back to the comparison with the Matrix, we see that this is precisely the type of thinking that is going on in Mr. Robot. For Neo it is the Matrix, and for Elliot it is Society.
Money and society are more or less similes to Elliot. These two forces control one another and consequently they each control the individual.
To demonstrate just how much money controls people, I once did an experiment. I was in an educative role in my fraternity for a semester. One day, I wanted to discuss the importance of money. 10 of us stood in a circle, and I pulled out a dollar bill. I then ripped the dollar bill in half and asked, “How did that make you feel?”
The interesting thing about this is that the person who I knew had the wealthiest family likewise had the most shocked and disgruntled reaction. “Why would you do that!?” he said. The others barely cared.
Money controls us. And what Elliot recognizes right off the bat is that the top 1% of the top 1%, although being the most powerful people on Earth, are still controlled by money. In fact, no matter how powerful you are, there is always something else that has an influence over you.
Now, let me take a few minutes to go on a Nietzsche power rant: “The "non-free will" is a mythology; in real life it is only a question of STRONG and WEAK wills.” - Friedrich Nietzsche, from Beyond Good and Evil.
More or less, Nietzsche is trying to tell us that the question of “free-will” is one that clearly can’t be answered. We cannot prove that one has full dominion over all of their decisions. In fact, the premise to “free-will” and “non-free-will” is likewise a mythology, as it presupposes that a person has a unified “will” and that “will” either does or does not have full dominion over its decisions. Nietzsche argues, to the contrary, that individuals have a multiplicity of wills within them. He goes further to suggest that these wills each have a certain “will to power”, i.e. an instinct to dominate whatever body or space they inhabit. According to this argument, happiness and sadness are both “wills” within the human mind. They both strive to be the dominant will for an individual, but one or the other always ends up being more powerful –depending on the day.
Besides emotions, there are physical wills. For instance, if you are hungry and, at the same time, have to go to the bathroom, you will do whichever one exerts the most power upon your decisions at that moment. As individuals, we likewise face the multiplicity of wills within other people as well as natural forces, physical laws, global and microeconomics, the laws and regulations of governments, social customs, etc. In other words, everyone and everything contains within them a multiplicity of wills that are either stronger, weaker, or equal in strength to other wills, thus determining their presence in the current moment. In this context, a “will” is more or less a physical or non-physical force. To think of it another way, if you are exerting your will upon something, all this is really saying is that you are affecting it in some way, shape, or form. When considering the will in reference to the “will to power”, we are then implying a goal behind the exertion of the will. That is, one exerts their will in order to obtain power. Yet, since this is not necessarily a person–and most usually is not–the “will to power” is the exertion of a force which leads to the increase of that force’s power over something else. Nietzsche argues that this is what all wills tend towards.
So, according to Nietzsche, it is neither us nor cause-effect relationships that determine our decisions, but rather a heathing swarm of indeterministic variables. Systems are dynamic. His largest argument against this is the myth of causality. The reasoning for the myth of causality is given more or less with the why game. That is, when a child learns how to use the word “why”, they will continuously ask why to each answer you give to their question. This will go on and on until the parent eventually either gives up and tells them to stop or the child gets bored. Nietzsche explains it more so with the fact that we cannot prove there to be an original cause to everything; we can’t draw our line of cause-effect relationships all the way back to the beginning of time. Likewise, if every event has infinitely many causes, then it would be equally valid to say that every event has no causes. And hence, it is a question of weak and strong wills, not causality. I recommend reading “The Four Great Errors” from Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols for a better explanation on this.
Now, with each will having a “will to power”, according to Nietzsche, he likewise proposed that the fundamental driving factor behind each organism is that very same will to power.
But what exactly is power?
What does it mean to be powerful?
Just as the will is multi-faceted, I believe the definition of power is likewise multi-faceted. Like “God”, “love”, or “happiness”, Power does not have a single definition. One might define it as having control–either of yourself, others, or a situation. Or one might say its defined by your ability to change your reality. A materialist might define it as one’s ownership of objects, lands, or peoples–whether that be by law, force, or manipulation. The spiritually inclined may consider power as nothing more than a feeling–a powerful feeling such as love, hate, or joy. In many ways, I think Nietzsche’s definition of power is simply the act of overcoming something, which fits nicely with his theory of wills. When we are happy, the will of happiness has overcome all other emotions to make it so. Power is the driving force behind overcoming and becoming–of positive change.
In my two part series on Ted Kaczynski’s “Industrial Society and its Future”, Ted describes power as a process involving “goal, effort and attainment of goal.” I’m including this definition of power because it relates to many of the themes involved in Mr. Robot, specifically, how modern society strips us of our ability to feel powerful. That, and of course, Elliot’s stark similarities to Ted Kaczynski. Indeed, how does modern society infringe on Kaczynski’s “power process”? If we cannot pursue our “will to power”, if we cannot feel autonomous in our lives nor have any ability to set our own goals and pursue them, then how are we to feel any sort of fulfillment? How does powerlessness affect our psyche and interpersonal relationships? How do power dynamics affect us, our relationships, and society as a whole? How does mass powerlessness affect society?
One of the main arguments for capitalism is all the free choices we have in capitalist society. While we have the freedom to choose, we are economically forced to do so. We have to have either this or that job, pick this or that school, eat here or there, buy this or that product. If we don’t, we will either be left homeless on the street, in jail, or as an outcast of society. We buy fake food that fills us up but doesn’t make us feel satisfied. We download social media to connect with others yet never shake the feeling of loneliness. We constantly exercise to rid our body of the multiplicity of toxins, additives, and preservatives in our food.
And boom, this brings us back to Mr. Robot.
Queue society rant:
KRISTA: What is it about society that disappoints you so much?
ELLIOT (In his head): Oh, I don’t know, is it that we collectively thought Steve Jobs was a great man even when we knew he made billions off the backs of children? Or maybe it’s that it feels like all our heroes are counterfeit, the world itself just one big hoax. Spamming each other with our running commentary of bullshit masquerading as insight, our social media faking as intimacy. Or is it that we voted for this? Not with our rigged elections. But with our things, our property, our money. But I’m not saying anything new. We all know why we do this. Not because earrings or the Hunger Games books makes us happier. But because we want to be sedated. Because it’s painful not to pretend. Because we're fucking cowards. Fuck society-- but I’ve said that already.
Now, what’s interesting about Mr. Robot, is that in the show, Elliot attempts to take down the society that controls him and everyone else. Yet, as he does so, he is likewise controlled by his social anxiety, drug addiction, split personality and schizophrenia, along with several other factors. We see that even after he pulls off the hack, he is still controlled by these things. To add to this, he feels controlled by the movement he started.
The thing is, as one of the greatest hackers on planet Earth, Elliot has control over society and big public figures, yet he struggles to have control over himself. This parallel is seen with other characters of the show, such as the executives that work for the conglomerate Elliot took down. They have power over their work, yet coworkers, higher-ups, and their own personal insanities have control over them.
Tyrell, one of these executives, is very wealthy, yet feels controlled by those above him. He is likewise controlled by his wife and her interests. While being a seemingly powerful man, he feels incredibly powerless.
As I watch the show, more and more I am realizing: it’s not that society controls us, but rather the various things that come with living in society that control us. Sure, while large investment companies like Blackrock exert quite a lot of power over society, it is not Blackrock that is exerting this power. It’s the multi-faceted soup of desires and wills held within each and every individual that works for Blackrock along with all the rules and regulations set forth by past and present executives, the government, market pressures, etc. It’s not society that controls us, it is the ideals and wills that are forced to exist and interact within the bubble society created. We are controlled by money, health, social status, addictions, mental disorders, and infinitely many things in this world. While society allows for some of these things to exist and perpetuate, it is these things existing and perpetuating that likewise allow society to exist and perpetuate.
It's a perpetual motion machine on a planetary scale. This is what Elliot discovers after accomplishing his hack. The world went into chaos and hundreds of thousands of people went into poverty. Meanwhile, the people in power took advantage of the situation to make themselves more powerful. One thing cannot take down a conglomerate. According to Mr. Robot, “If you want to take down a conglomerate, you have to take down each and every little piece of it.”
Throughout the series, we slowly find out where all the roads of power lead to, i.e. Whiterose. Whiterose is the alter ego of Zhi Zhang, the Chinese Minister of State Security. While Zhi Zhang is a respected, powerful male government official, his alter ego, Whiterose, is a woman who is in charge of an extremely powerful hacker organization called the Dark Army. Elliot’s organization, FSociety, utilizes the support of the Dark Army to pull off their hacks. What plays even deeper into the “there’s always a bigger fish” trope is that Whiterose more or less uses FSociety to take down ECorp, thus securing more power for her.
What Mr. Robot does well is showing us the stark parallels between Whiterose and Elliot. Both have similar identity issues. Both have spent a good amount of their years trying to not feel powerless. Both are lonely and desperate. Both believe that what they are doing is good and that their means justify their ends. Etc. etc.
Their differences are that Whiterose is essentially the representation of society itself, or more so the person who controls society. She IS at the very top of the top of the top of the 1%. She is the invisible hand that controls everything. While being the head of society, she does not want to preserve it. In fact, she wants to destroy the entire universe with a nuclear fusion reactor. Elliot, while claiming to hate society, genuinely wants to save it along with everyone who lives within it. While these motives oppose one another, their efforts to attain them equally help one another.
From here, I want to discuss identity. Identity is perhaps the biggest theme explored in Mr. Robot from seasons 2-4. Who is Elliot Alderson?
“How can the human being know itself? It is a thing dark and veiled; and if the hare has seven skins, the human can slough off seventy times seven and still not be able to say, ‘Now that is what you really are, that is no longer outer shell.” – Friedrich Nietzsche – Untimely Meditations.
The human being, like almost everything else in this world, is multi-faceted. It’s just like the conversation that Shrek had with Donkey:
“Ogres have layers.”
Ogre’s and humans alike have layers. We have several wills, desires, and urges that all seeking towards different thinks. Similar to how a tree has hundreds of branches and thousands of leaves, yet one trunk in which it all stems from. We all have many different sides of ourselves that are expressed when we are in different situations, around different people, etc. I spent much of my life being a totally different person around different people. Not entirely a different personality, but I certainly talked differently, said different things, and related to people in different ways. This was problematic when I introduced different friend groups or a girlfriend to my parents, as I wasn’t sure how I should act.
And to be honest, I don’t think I even knew who I was at all. It took leaving home for college and being alone, meeting new friends, and the like to slowly learn who I was. My therapist told me that what I was struggling with was psychological integration. I didn’t know how to combine the different aspects of myself into one fully integrated person—to be the same person around everyone—to an extent. Obviously, we are all going to naturally act differently around different people. You’re not going to interact with your significant other the same way you interact with your parents or your friends. But there’s a certainly a point where being too different around different people can make you feel restricted—like you aren’t fully being yourself around anyone. And that can be painful. Why do people hide parts of themselves from different people?
Now I discussed this topic in depth on my Severance and the Self episode. Part of this is fear. Notably, fear of what Jung would call, “the shadow”, i.e. the subconscious mind. From a psychological integration standpoint, one might show parts of their shadow to some people and none of it to others. Part of this is fear of rejection, some is embarrassment, and some is simply out of habit. In Elliot’s case, he shields parts of his “shadow” from himself.
Much like Severance, he is two different people. Mr. Robot and Elliot. The show, through his therapy sessions, reveals that this is due to his childhood trauma. He has compartmentalized the different aspects of himself to protect against things that part of him isn’t ready to confront. Mr. Robot, again, acts as the protector. And at the end of the show we find that another part of Elliot has been essentially trapped in a fantasy land where everything is perfect while Mr. Robot and the mastermind are wreaking havoc on the world.
Elliot doesn’t know who he is, and he wants to both integrate his many selves while also wanting to get rid of them; or more so, each part of himself has a love hate relationship with each other part of himself. He is totally unintegrated, confused, and filled with self-loathing which he projects onto the world. All caused by childhood trauma that forced him to compartmentalize. This lack of integration is something his therapist tries to convince him to fix. When Elliot pleads that he needs to destroy Mr. Robot, she replies that Mr. Robot is a part of him—that destroying him will only destroy himself. And in the audience’s discovery that what we have known to be Elliot the whole show is actually the mastermind personality, we realize that the mastermind is the personality that seeks to take over and become the one, true Elliot. It is, indeed, the mastermind personality that locks the true Elliot away. It is the mastermind personality that wants to kill Mr. Robot. Mr. Robot, while wanting to take control over Elliot, doesn’t want to kill him, nor does Mr. Robot ever claim to be the true Elliot.
With each of Elliot’s personalities, he is always a totally different person with an entirely different set of memories. This is actually so extreme that he talks to the different versions of himself. His adversary, Whiterose, on the other hand, is, again, two identities: Zhi Zhang and Whiterose. She has the same personality between identities, and she considers Whiterose to be her true identity. Much like how Bruce Wayne believes Batman is his identity and Bruce Wayne is the mask, Zhi Zhang is Whiterose’s mask. He is public figure that handles foreign diplomacy and business deals. Whiterose, meanwhile, is the mastermind who lurks in the shadows—playing puppet master to society itself. It is only when she has nothing to lose that she decides to reveal her “true self” to the world.
The psychologist would argue that all the different personalities of Elliot combined is Elliot’s true self. Likewise, Zhi Zhang and Whiterose are the same person. Just as Batman and Bruce Wayne exist as one man. Elliot separates his personalities as a subconscious defense mechanism. Whiterose separates her identities out of fear of what the public might think.
Much like how murder splits the soul in the world of Harry Potter, trauma and fear split our personalities as human beings. There are sides of us that we cannot trust in the hands of others—or in Elliot’s case, himself. In fact, in the third season, Elliot and Mr. Robot work behind each other’s back in secret—both trying to thwart each other’s plans. I find the symbolism of yourself being your greatest enemy as something that truly stands out here. Neither of them can defeat the other, and in a game of chess they would always reach stalemate. In the season 3 finale, their working against one another eventually leads to something far worse than either of them had anticipated.
When one has conflicting desires or fears, such conflict can force us into a situation where we feel trapped, isolated, and alone. If you cannot act on something because you are afraid to act, yet likewise terrified of not acting, than such a situation is akin to being stuck in a prison cell. There have been many times in my life where I have felt trapped, and in those situations, I have often resorted to coping mechanisms such as playing video games, watching TV, working out, eating, or smoking weed. The options and potential decisions lay before me like a storm, and it becomes too much to bear. Instead of acting on any of it, I simply tried to forget I had anything to act upon at all. In Elliot’s case, he is able to simply separate the conflicting parts of himself, thereby allowing him to accomplish both tasks. However, such impressive multitasking only leads to his increasingly unstable mental state. Psychotic episodes increase, his morphine addiction gets worse, his relationships continue to dwindle, and his moral standards deteriorate.
His lack of integration tears him apart.
In his 1933 book, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Jung writes:
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
According to this, neither Elliot nor the mastermind, nor Mr. Robot are the true Elliot. These are all only part of Elliot. And if these were to interact with one another, such an interaction would transform each personality. That is, in communicating with the different aspects of oneself, one is able to see where each personality aligns. In so doing, each personality becomes more and more connected to one another. Just as in a relationship between two people, communication forces differences to diminish and similarities to increase. The two personalities transform into one another.
We see that in the final episode of the show, it is only when Mr. Robot and Elliot work together that the “real Elliot” is finally revealed.
The philosophical depth of this show is something I have only scratched the surface of in this podcast. It is truly a masterpiece that highlights the struggles of modern man in a world controlled by power, plagued with insanity, and shrouded in widespread identity crises. Indeed, who don’t you know that doesn’t have some kind of mental disorder or identity issues? Mr. Robot shows the flaws of modern society, while also demonstrating the issues related to stopping it.
I will leave you with the words of Elliot Alderson:
This whole time I thought changing the world was something you did. An act you performed, something you fought for, I don’t know if that’s true anymore, or if changing the world was just about being here. By showing up, no matter how many times we get told we don’t belong. By staying true even when we’re shamed into being false. By believing in ourselves, even when we are told we’re too different. And if we all held onto that. If we refused to budge and fall in line. If we stood our ground for long enough, just maybe, the world can’t help but change around us. Even though we’ll be gone, its like Mr. Robot said we’ll always be a part of Elliot Alderson. And we’ll be the best part, because we’re the part that always showed up. We’re the part that stayed. We’re the part that changed him. And who wouldn’t be proud of that?
Peace out.