Severance: The Office as Cult

What if your day job could amputate your soul? Apple TV+’s Severance opens on a woman waking atop a conference table, asked to name herself and failing. From that instant the series turns the modern workplace into a psychological petri dish, exposing how far control, intimidation, and manipulation can push the human animal before something ancient fights back.

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The Split Self—A Laboratory of Obedience

Lumon Industries cleaves employees into “outies” who sign the contract and “innies” who live it. Inside the windowless maze, the innie’s universe begins at the elevator and ends at the time clock. Isolation breeds dependency; dependency ripens into obedience. Management needs no chains—only the threat of the break room, a fluorescent confessional where recited apologies become ritual humiliation. Over time, workers slide into learned helplessness: resistance invites punishment, compliance yields meaningless perks. A finger-trap toy here, a five-minute “Music Dance Experience” there—Skinner-box psychology dressed in business-casual.

Ritual, Myth, and the Anthropology of Submission

Severance’s horror isn’t just the surgery; it’s the culture that follows. Lumon feels like a high-control cult wearing a corporate lanyard. Portraits of founder Kier Eagan glow like stained-glass icons. Employees memorize his maxims, tour the “Perpetuity Wing” as pilgrims, and compete for the exalted Waffle Party, a masked pageant equal parts office pizza day and secret-society rite. Anthropologists call these “costly signals”: odd, time-consuming acts that prove loyalty by making defection expensive. The weirder the ritual, the tighter the bond—and the harder it is to admit the whole thing is absurd.

Stone-Age Wiring in a Silicon Basement

Why do grown adults accept such indignities? Our brains still run hunter-gatherer firmware. Obeying dominant figures once kept us alive in hostile savannas; ostracism meant death. Lumon exploits that wiring. Supervisor Milchick’s smile is never angry, always alpha—an unmistakable signal that trouble lies beyond defiance. Even fiery newcomer Helly freezes when the pack’s approval hangs in the balance. The show weaponizes our reflex to avoid social pain: better to play nice, trade autonomy for acceptance, and hope the alpha spares us.

Corporate Totalitarianism in Miniature

Peel back the sci-fi and you find a familiar political machine. Lumon monopolizes information, monitors every hallway, punishes thought crime, and sanctifies its mission as salvation for humanity. The innies are effectively a captive underclass whose labor enriches outies and shareholders above. In the real world we call this wage exploitation; in Severance, the class divide is literalized into two severed consciousnesses inhabiting one skull. Consent exists only for the privileged half. The other half never had a vote.

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Echoes in the Real World: Elon Musk’s Dominion over X

When Elon Musk closed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter in late 2022—quickly scrubbing the bird and christening it X—he inherited more than a platform; he seized a laboratory for unilateral power. Within days, nearly 3,700 employees—about half the workforce—were gone in a single Friday purge. Less than two weeks later a midnight email demanded staff pledge to an “extremely hardcore” regime of long, high-intensity hours or take severance and leave. On his first full day, engineers were ordered to print out 30–60 days of their code for in-person inspection, then told to shred the stacks—a performative loyalty drill straight out of Lumon’s break-room playbook.

Power consolidated fast. Musk dissolved the board and installed himself as sole director, erasing the last internal check on his authority. He then gutted the global trust-and-safety team that once moderated content, severing another line of governance. The platform’s first transparency report under his tenure logged more than five million account suspensions in the first half of 2024—several times higher than pre-takeover levels.

Musk’s feed became both pulpit and gavel. In March 2023 he publicly mocked a laid-off Twitter employee with a disability, then apologized after backlash—a digital stockade witnessed by millions. Two months earlier he had suspended multiple high-profile journalists over a dispute about jet-tracking data, proving a single impulse could silence critics worldwide.

Inside the user ecosystem, Musk occupies a Kier-like charismatic apex. Social-psychology research shows that followers often absorb a leader’s vocabulary and framing, spreading linguistic tics and moral cues through mimicry. X displays the phenomenon daily as devotees echo Musk’s slang, memes, and targets within minutes of a tweet. The platform begins to resemble Lumon on the surface web: one man’s thumb on the scale, guardrails stripped away, dissent recast as sabotage.

The result is a self-reinforcing us-versus-them crucible. Every external critique—whether from regulators, journalists, or former staff—tightens the bond between leader and loyalists, mirroring how Lumon teaches innies to distrust every corridor but their own. In this real-world sequel to Severance, the break room is a timeline, the finger trap a blue checkmark, and the lesson is identical: charisma without guardrails extracts its price in autonomy and truth.

Keep Your Outie Awake

Severance warns that autonomy is fragile. Trade a slice of self for convenience, and soon the slice devours the whole. The same holds outside fiction: whether in fluorescent corridors or digital town squares, the mechanisms of control thrive on isolation, ritual, and charismatic certainty. The antidote is memory—keeping your “outie” perspective alive even when the elevator doors close. Question the founding myths, skip the forced dance party, hold power to account. Otherwise, we may all wake up one day at a conference table, unable to name ourselves, waiting for a voice overhead to tell us who we are.