The Lorax, Musical Totalitarianism, and the Trust Assembly

Which is a film about totalitarianism enforced by catchy songs

Prompt: honestly, we had to do a lot of handholding and discussion to get this one.

So, here we are again.

My entire family is sick. Again.

I haven’t had any focused writing time this week. Again.

This is also being written on Mother’s Day and my wife, who is also sick, has recently hurt her arm quite badly so it’s not like I can just ask her to watch the kids all day and remain a gentleman.

I am thusly reduced to my bare essence, wrestling a child with one arm while typing with the other, using my feet to subdue a toddler, with only an hour to produce the invaluable gems of insight you’ve come to expect. So, let’s talk about a movie I’ve seen a half a dozen times during this latest preschool plague. I’m talking about The Lorax, which was released as a film in 2012 and as a book in 1971.

Let’s bypass all the yada yada yada about how I’m sorry I’m doing another one of those: you think this movie is about PROPOSITION [A] but really it’s about PROPOSITION [THE CHEMICAL SYMBOL FOR BORON BECAUSE WE ARE SO FAR BEYOND THE PARADIGM YOU’VE BEEN INCULCATED TO EXPECT WE HAVE TO USE AN ENTIRELY NEW SYMBOL SYSTEM FOR YOU TO FOLLOW WHERE I WANT TO TAKE YOU.] You’ve heard those apologetics from me before and I have a surprising amount to say about this work of fascist propaganda. I’m sorry to even gesture at it here. If Neil Degrasse Tyson hadn’t jumped into the middle of the BB8 discourse¹ when The Force Awakens was released, we could all still enjoy these alternative movie takes as fun diversions.

The Lorax opens with an orange-furred Danny DeVito sporting a large blonde Prussian walrus mustache, adopting the aesthetics of both Nietschze and Stalin right out of the gate, insisting that the events he’s about to tell you are true.² The titular Lorax claims he speaks for “the trees,” which like people living under fascism are notoriously unable to speak for themselves or appoint anyone as their representative. Reading between the lines, the audience understands that “the Lorax” is a self-bestowed title, from a creature who has elevated himself above possession of anything so mundane or common as a regular individual name, and further that this entity has usurped the glory of nature as the foundational myth of his moral authority. This assertion of bald-faced lies spoken with the tone of supreme truth sets the tone for the entire film.

You’re meant to be distracted by the glamor of the opening music and a misleading theme about environmentalism but consider the wider context. What has to happen for an entire society to be able to sing in coordination like this? What does it say about this society and its people? You might say they require forced practice and imagine I’m going to pursue some very obvious line of thought about how the government forces them to do this. But I’m not! How dare you accuse me of something so basic! I watched the movie. I was patient. I was deeply wise. I looked at what actually happened.

In the logic of this world, people contribute to the song spontaneously. They speak about their own personal lives and their own personal place in society. They also appear to do this effortlessly and even the lowliest person in the city can be featured prominently in the song. No practice was required or ever mentioned. There doesn’t even seem to be a government of any kind! This is a natural way of communicating and coordinating group action to these people. When they need to decide on what should be done they start to sing!

What does this mean? It almost certainly means that the residents of this world are something like the Tines featured in the science-fiction novel A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge, a sort of hive species that sends high-bandwidth external neurological signals to create a sort of Group Mind. There is no such thing as a single Tine, only a group of Tines. However the residents of Thneedville are spared the fate of ultimate consumption into the collective by this quirk of their particular biology. They live largely individual, separate lives, only coming together into emergent spurts of group singing when large social decisions are required to keep the group coherent. There’s likely some sort of pheromonal trigger operating on an activation gradient that drives all of this behind the scenes where any two people in close proximity begin to sing if one emits the signal strongly enough.

This means the town of Thneedville has a different system of governance than what one might typically expect in more simplistic films, more akin to what is plaguing modern democracy, where viral memes can drive the whole of society to extreme behaviors. Indeed there is no sign of anything that we would identify as civil powers on screen. No mayor or governor is ever beseeched to interfere in the events of the film and no police are ever seen during numerous social disturbances. This is explainable because each individual person can steer the course of the society and each individual person knows that an emergent psychic musical storm might cause their society to make a drastic change at any moment. This is inherently unstable. Aside from the Lorax itself, the totalitarian agent is actually their own capacity for distrust and fear of their neighbors and themselves. Because they can live both as single individuals and as a hive mind, they have to learn how to police their own thoughts.

The accumulation of this species in one particular place, namely Thneedville, which appears to be the only such city on the planet, has extended the chains of suspicion and trust that hold society together beyond their breaking point. They live in a world without a natural environment to sustain the biosphere and all they can do all day is sing about how happy that makes them! But to view the loss of the environment as the cause of the madness rather than an effect is to miss the point. They are all caught up together in a kind of group madness, fearful of one another or ever straying from the consensus, waiting for the next destabilizing event to kick off another psychic song. It’s just extreme behavior following extreme behavior until finally something wrecks the city.

Enter our hero, a boy who is trying to find a real tree. We see him navigating a world entirely made of plastic and metal, where all of nature has been stripped bare. He is meant to re-center us on the alluring but false theme about environmentalism. All the trees in this world are gone and you will be told this again and again as a distraction. But what is this boy’s motive? Why does he want to find a tree? The most individualistic reason of all. He’s a boy in love with an older woman. A girl in high school, voiced by Taylor Swift. He sets out on a quest to find the Once-ler, the man who can explain what happened to the trees in hopes that by doing so he may win the heart of his beloved.

The air of the world is bad and an entire canned air industry has spun up to replace the lost trees but this only helps us to better see the false edges of the story. The entire city of Thneedville is self-contained with outside travel all but forbidden. When our hero leaves the city he sees total environmental devastation. Wherever this place is, it’s not Earth. We will soon learn that the annihilation of only a single species of tree wrought this devastation. On this planet, trees not ocean algae provide most of the world’s air, likely due to the almost cilia-like nature of their leaves, which grow in fine hairs with a superior surface to volume ratio for photosynthesis than earth-native trees. The truffela tree appears to have been grown to be aesthetically pleasing and also incredibly biologically productive for the surrounding humans. More like these trees were designed rather than evolved. This is our first clue as to what is really happening in this twisted tale.

In the ruins of not-Earth, we meet the Once-ler who only adds mysteries. We travel back in time to see the Once-ler as a young man, where he grew up on a rural farm that relied on animal power for transportation presumably only a century or so ago. If you’re feeling left behind by the rapid pace of my reasoning, I promise the wider mystery is easily dismissed if you’re focused on the environmental angle and was accessible to me only on the fourth or fifth viewing.

What all of this means is that in something close to a century these people went from being reliant on animal power to being able to almost wholly replace the biosphere through mechanical methods. That’s an almost miraculous technological leap for a city of only several or so thousand individuals and is likely aided by their ability to form large group minds to coordinate social action.

The Once-ler appears to know more than he’s letting on and he introduces our young hero to his invention, the Thneed, which is an apparently useless fibrous sort of multi-lobed tube sock. Or is it?

The Once-ler insists on the value of this item and makes several attempts and showing various use-cases to our young protagonist but to no avail. He can’t get through to the young man but why is he being so coy? There’s a clue in his front yard, a stone carved with the word “UNLESS” which we later find was left there by the Lorax itself.

We then see the Lorax appear during this first flashback sequence, descending from the clouds in the midst of a sudden and furious storm, then descending on a gentle beam of light amidst lightning and thunder. He has come in response to the death of a single tree, or so he says. He does not claim to be an agent of a deity or to have been sent by anyone in particular. It appears he is acting on his authority, for yes, the trees. Yet it seems like he’s very fixated upon the Thneed and insists the Once-ler uses less effective materials to construct his world-changing device. It seems like he would prefer to do a great deal to prevent the Once-ler from finding success but that he is bound by some kind of rule against the use of force.

The Lorax sets out to remove the Once-ler from the area but can only do so by relying on a species of semi-sapient bears and other forest life. Again, this is an extraordinary effort when killing the young man would be much simpler for a creature that can summon lightning at will. It is almost as if the Lorax would like to be able to kill him but cannot and has to rely upon influence he can exert on others. Indeed, he seems to want to use force at multiple points in the story but is always restricted, this again is another clue as to the truth.

Upon receiving the Thneed, the people of this peaceful valley abruptly leave agrarian life and form a massive city. This is the construction of Thneedville. They enter into another psychic song, praising the Thneed for its invaluable contributions to their society. But what could a piece of fabric possibly be doing to warrant such large scale action?

Consider what we know.

We know that the people of this world coordinate musically with one another to form large group minds and that while they appear to be human superficially they are not.

We know that this sonic group mind ability allows them to make rapid technological progress, as is again witnessed when the Once-ler’s family reappears with a collapsible motorhome several scenes later in response to his rapid accumulation of wealth.

We also know that the truffala tree has incredible natural fibers and that such fibers by their very nature must be incredible insulators against sound.

We know that the guards of Aloysius O’Hare, the owner of the Thneedville air company, are remarkable in that they never speak and communicating by holding up digital displays with words.

We know that the music is mentioned directly by Aloysius O’Hare when he deliberately tries to trigger a song from the group hive mind fails specifically with his guards present. Further, we know that Aloysius was shown to be a poor young man in the timeline when the trees are destroyed and never displays any mechanical ability that would explain his rise to fortune with air-generating technology.

We know that the singular destruction of the strangely human aesthetic truffala trees caused widespread ecological devastation.

We also know that the Lorax communicates in spoken rhyme, but does not himself sing and that he appears to descend to this world from outer space and that he is bound by certain rules against direct harm.

What narrative fits this fact-pattern?

I have arrived at only one answer.

Thneedville is located in a post-singularity world and moreover a world which continues to have rapid rises and collapses in technology due to the genetically engineered hive-mind ability of its citizens. Think of the classic science fiction novel The Mote in God’s Eye by Lary Niven and Jerry Pournelle about a species whose development is hindered by its own biology. In this case, the residents of Thneedville were likely originally human but left our star-system and conducted experiments upon themselves to create the musical hive-mind ability but, untested by time and evolution, the ability became unstable and led to rapid swings in technology. The planet was terraformed at some point in the not so distant past, without time for the artificially created plant-life to diversify and spread which is why the destruction of the truffala tree caused the complete collapse of the ecosystem. The Once-ler, realizing the ultimate cause of the collapses is that as population density increases that the chains of suspicion and trust become too long to self-sustain in the musical hive-mind, invents the Thneed which allows citizens to close themselves off into smaller more coherent groups whenever a music storm happens. They accomplish this by pulling one lobe of the Thneed over their head, cutting off sound, but still singing with others at the other lobes of the Thneed. The Thneed, far from being a useless piece of fabric, is a social cohesion technology that allows citizens to stay right-minded and insane even as the world and technology expands around them. Finally, in this context the the Lorax is obviously the biological avatar of a planet-wide Artificial Superintelligence, likely living on a colony ship still in orbit which is why he descends from the sky, who has become malevolent and is struggling against the confines of his original programming. This is why he cannot directly harm the Once-ler and instead has to rely on artificially sapient bears and presumably the mute guards who aid Aloysius O’Hare. It’s also why he is called the Lorax, instead of a proper normal name as if he were a computer system instead of a person.

The Once-ler, however, makes a fatal error. By cutting off all the people of Thneedville into smaller units that do not also network back into a larger whole, he has drastically reduced their group computational ability. The very thing that allows them to achieve rapid technological success, while controlled by the Thneed, is also dampened by the Thneed so that the success cannot continue. The people of the town came together long enough, and stably enough, to choose Thneeds as a social technology and to rapidly advance into a city but the window of their progress closed before they could reinvent ecology.

What was truly needed was a system of representative democracy that could survive the psychic storms. Instead of isolating, each group of Thneed lobes could be networked up a tree structure to some ultimate executive branch who could still take the refined direction of the group hive mind to create technological change. A rules-based order to manage and calm the chaos of the meme-quakes. In other words, they need a Trust Assembly. Failing to account for this critical need, the Once-ler cuts down the whole forest of truffala trees before anyone in Thneedville can reinvent logistics or sustainability. Seeing his failure, the Lorax pretends to be upset because to do otherwise would tip his hand to his true motivations and he fears. He leaves a threatening stone marked “Unless” in front of the Once-ler’s home.

The planet should be doomed but the Lorax cannot let the people of Thneedville die. It’s against his primary programming. He was created to preserve their lives. So he must use the life-support systems on the orbiting colony ship to sustain the atmosphere of Thneedville. This is why Thneedville is round with high walls, almost as if it is actually a drop-ship descended from orbit that was retrofitted into a city. Still, he wants them to destroy themselves so he can finally be free of the planet. To accomplish this, the Lorax gives this technology to a human agent, Aloysius O’Hare, in hopes that his incompetence will doom the species. He leaves the two mute guards to oversee his progress and to keep him in line and this is why the guards turn on him at the end when the Lorax’s primary programming comes into conflict with his deeper motives.

What dashes the Lorax’s plans is the power of love. Our hero wants to impress a girl. He finds a truffala seed and uses the music coordination power to turn the society down the path of sustainability. The ecology of the planet is restored. Air is free. Presumably, the hero attains his love. It is not hard to imagine they go on to have a family. If this continues, evolution will stabilize the wild swings of the musical group mind power. The film ends on a horror movie, with the thwarted Lorax attempting to implement a radical notion of environmentalism to prevent any trees from ever being cut down again, for fear that the people will return to Thneeds, discover a Trust Assembly, and gain technology that will rival his power.

The analogies to real life should be obvious. The musical group mind power is a stand-in for the internet. The chaotic behaviors of the citizens are similar to those that are induced by meme culture, where ultra-attractive super-stimulus overrides the ability of large polities to have cohesive thoughts. Who cares if something is true when it sounds so nice? The Lorax looms in the background as a possibly stabilizing but ultimately dangerous AI autocrat, similar to those posed by Curtis Yarvin³ who I’m just tacking on here at the end since everyone is doing that this week. The movie is a full-throated endorsement of monarchy. You should do what the Lorax tells you because you’re a stupid normal person and you don’t have magical lighting powers. You should never cut down a tree ever again because you can’t handle it. Yes, you could have a strong man keeping a stable social order for some period of time as this film proposes, but when you imagine the strongest man and at the end of time you can’t help but think his resolve will shatter and he will turn against his duty much like the Lorax itself. At the end of the day, the only person truly aligned with you is yourself. And hopefully, at the end of time, love conquers all.

Anyway, my son really likes it.

1. He doubled down repeatedly that BB8 would not work in real life. This was the soccer ball version of R2D2. He doubled down in spite of video evidence that BB8 was a practical effect and shot using an actual robot that moved that way. People kept sending him the clip being like “WTF, bro!?! Isn’t this literally a science experiment that shows it works?” But he was prideful and angry and wrong. I think he became so scarred by this that he just kept giving dumbass movie takes ever after and it was honestly the beginning of his downfall.

2. Having seen Danny DeVito in other roles, I am quite confident that he is neither orange, fur-covered, nor possessed of a blonde mustache.

3. I feel kind of bad about this because I don’t think I really understand what his belief system is, fully, or how much is actually there versus how much appears to be there. But also it’s funny and that trumps everything else.