Severance Theory: What do the numbers mean?

Ben Stiller is just Adam Sandler for democrats. Doesn’t matter which of these types of humor you enjoy, the one thing you know for sure is that you’re mighty concerned about the global rise in antisemitism, the biggest issue facing the world today. Ben Stiller is acting like a proud dad about severance, which is probably because it’s the first project he has been involved with that he can actually be proud of.

Listening to other people talk about Severance and their theories on what the numbers mean in the show makes me feel good about myself because it reminds me of how stupid people are. You guys are way off, and I know better than you, because I’m a self-proclaimed genius, and I shall condescend to tell you today what it’s all about.
But first I want to talk about how my mother always mistakes Ben Stiller for Adam Sandler.

These two members of the jewish faith are often mistaken for one another, and there are many forums comparing them and their bodies of work.
They both make the same movie over and over again, the only difference is that Ben Stiller makes movies for the idiots that look down on the morons who enjoy Adam Sandler movies.

And I look down on all of you.

The reason they seem so similar is because they have the same role in society, they have the same function, which is to brainwash society into thinking that it’s totally normal to be a passive participant in a barbaric 5000 year old death cult.
Democrats will enjoy Stiller, and Republicans will enjoy Sandler, but just like these two political parties the only difference is an aesthetic one, the colors red or blue, or in this case, jew or jew.
Stiller has the aesthetic of sophistication and Sandler has the aesthetic of simplicity, but their movies have exactly the same characters, exactly the same story lines, they both engage in the same amount of shameless product placement and they make exactly the same racist jokes. I challenge you to find 1 foreign person in either of these Fakata Mashuganas videographies that does not have a ridiculous accent or whose entire purpose in the script is to be a silly strange assistant to the main character.

Okay so now that we got that out the way, let’s talk about the numbers…What do the numbers mean? What do the employees of Lumen actually do? Before we answer that question, we need ask a bigger question… What does Lumen actually do?

Firstly, I feel like I need to point out that Severance, just like all good science fiction, is about real life in the current day. George Orwell’s 1984 was actually about the time he lived in , 1948, the year that both Israel and the apartheid state of south africa were founded.
Severance is about the real world, where you have to go into work and pretend like the world is not currently being taken over by neonazis. It’s where we can watch someone intentionally and undeniably identify themselves as a nazi and still believe that it didn’t happen. People do work that is meaningless to them. They are told it's important, and in the end they don't have a choice, and they have to become a different person. At work you forget about the broader issues that plague your life, your family, your community, your country, and the world at large, and you focus on minute mundane tasks that may or may not result in a better or worse world at the end of the day. When I described this show to my uncle he just said "That's just real life".

This is the main focus of the show in my opinion, and while yes, there is a coherent high-concept sci-fi story being told here with real moving parts that interact in satisfying ways that make sense in their own right, I believe this is all in service of an analogy for real life, in the current day, and about the real human condition that we all find ourselves in.

To give a concrete example, Kier, the CEO of lumen who is worshipped by the innies, is like Elon Musk. We are told that these people accomplished all this great stuff over and over again while we are being forced to work for him (I literally make money for Elon musk through paypal, which I am forced to use) but the reality is that he is just from a family whose wealth goes back generations, and there is a whole system designed to make us think that they are special and that we are working towards something important.

But what about the number? What is the purpose of the numbers?

Listening to other people’s theories on the numbers is the very thing that led me to making this video, because of how incredibly wrong everyone is. There is a prevailing thought that the numbers actually mean something, but I think this is falling for the red herring that the show deliberately places there to make you think like that. The characters start guessing what the numbers might mean so we start guessing too, but I don’t buy it. At the end of the most recent episode we see Gemma behind the monitor, along with a heads up display of a litany of graphs and numbers, data referring to something, and these goobers think that Mark is the one who is refining Gemma.
So let me get this straight, there is a naive child-like mouse man walking around a literal maze, and then there is a stern looking asian woman in a white room and what seems to be a labcoat, and they assume that Marc is the scientist here? That the data on the screen is refering the woman who seems to be directly examining the mark? So, I’m supposed to believe that through these numbers, through some completely mysterious ability, mark is able to successfully complete some task about this woman that he’s not even aware of? I don’t even understand how one begins to think something this stupid.

The numbers are completely meaningless. They have to be, Otherwise you have to presuppose some kind of magical ability that cannot be replicated with a computer, an ability that needs training, training that we don't see for the outie or the innie. The idea that they have some subconscious reaction to a combination of numbers without being taught what the numbers mean is pure voodoo, and it would really disappoint me if that turns out to be a thing. It would turn a great show into a bad show.

Actually the proof that the numbers are meaningless is that they never make mistakes. I’ve watched the series multiple times, and so far I have not seen or heard of one refining error. You would think that if this was a real task with right and wrong answers that the innies would not just start getting it right immediately, after simply feeling some kind of undefinable intuition. My thoughts are that It's more likely just a record of their emotional state, and that would make sense logically, as they are "organizing" the numbers based on what they feel, in other words, making a record of what they feel.They stare at the numbers all day, when they have a strong emotion, they record it. Simple.

In the real world the science experiments that we are allowed to do are limited by ethics. For example, it’s unethical to raise a baby in a padded room without contact with humans just to see what happens. It’s unethical to kill a man’s wife to monitor how he responds. This is something that all scientists would love to do, if it were ethical, because the results of such an experiment would reveal a lot about how humans work. Having a blanc canvas of a human mind upon which to carry out experiments is kind of like the holy grail of scientific research, and people would pay billions of dollars for such an opportunity. Science, data, is like the raw resource of the 21st century. Why do governments spend so much money sending probes into outer-space and other planets? Why do they explode gallons and tons of expensive non-renewable fuel over our skies in order to shoot hunks of metal and mysterious glue halfway across the galaxy? Because the data that we get from such experiments might mean the difference between winning or losing the next war, or surviving the next natural disaster, or enduring the safety of the human race. Really, there is no telling what changes or profits are to be had from a new piece of never-before seen data. It’s only once we have the data that we can assess its value. It’s like playing a massive scientific lottery.
But, if you were able to instead create a state of mind that humans can voluntarily enter into that will replicate the state of being a child, or having no memories, you would have turned a lottery into a money printing machine. Companies from around the world would be sending you their daughters hands in marriage for the chance to use you human equipment to test whatever new experiment they might dream up, and the list of possible experiments one can carry out on a tabula rasa mind is inexhaustible.
Lumon exists in a world where people have rights. They cannot simply do whatever they want with the bodies of their employees without facing legal action, so of course this limits the experiments that they can conduct, but there is no limit to how many times they can redo the same experiment, or how many many times they have deleted Dylan and started a whole new Dylan innie from scratch.

Just to illustrate how important and valuable these test subjects would be in the real world, I want to tell a story about first year biology students, and trigger warning here for extreme animal abuse. Seriously, you have been warned, the next minute is not safe for life, so if you are easily triggered and just want to hear about severance, skip to the next chapter.

1st year biology students are required to snap the necks of tiny white mice or other animals every time one is contaminated or compromised. This can simply be that the mouse has learned something it was not supposed to, or it was exposed to something it wasn’t supposed to, or they have simply been used. This is extremely hard on the bio students at first, after all, these are human beings with souls, but after a while they get used to it, it’s just part of the job. Before the rat was compromisedqp it was useful to the experiment, and may produce valuable results… that rat might produce a billion dollar idea… but once the rat has tasted the fruit of the forbidden tree it becomes completely worthless.To a scientist, we are all those worthless rats who might as well have their necks snapped, for all science cares. There are too many confounding variables at play. How is a scientist supposed to know that the reason you dislike monkeys is because of the bell he was ringing and not the fact that your mother used to dress you up as a banana? Again, if someone was to take us worthless test-subjects and remove all confounding variables, that would be a trillion dollar idea, and each subject would be worth billions. You would be worth billions to science, if your mind was wiped clean.(On that note, Humans are incredibly complex and miraculous systems, and we still have no idea how humans acquire language. A human baby is still better at acquiring language than an LLM, as a baby only needs the words of its parents, the TV, and a few songs to learn how to speak, whereas an LLM needs to train on all the writing ever written in the entire history of human communication in order to misunderstand you. We still have no idea how human babies do this, and the data that reveals how it works would be very valuable. You could imagine for example a society where cameras and microphones are distributed to families around the world there would be a huge incentive to gather data from their babies.)

In order to achieve a test subject with a mind that was wiped clean a lot of science would be needed up front, so Lumon may be anywhere in this process of developing the severance procedure. They might have just developed the technology recently and are just testing to see whether it works, which makes sense given Cobel’s interest in what they are able to remember, or they might be well into the process of developing the severance procedure and are now testing experiments sent to them by clients, experiments such as can you train a human man to think he is the mother of goats or other animals? The memory separation process can clearly impact what they are able to remember at varying degrees. They remember some things and not others, and I’m sure if they wanted to they could create a chip that removes their memory of language too, reducing them to the state of absolute babies, and maybe they chose to allow them to remember language in order to accelerate testing of more advanced developmental questions. One thing that I’m pretty sure about is that the severance chip does not give any average person the magical ability to sense combinations of numbers.

This is the part that makes no sense to me in other people’s explanations. THey think that suddenly a normal person working as a security guard or history teacher will suddenly develop this incredible ability to identify all manner of incredible phenomena through these completely obscure numbers. They suddenly develop this ability that even a computer is unable to achieve. There is just something special about human intuition that is required for this complex task, even though they have already mastered the tech of memory separation… or maybe it’s a matter of responsibility, maybe they are outsourcing the responsibility and guilt of their heinous crimes to their unaware employees… but that is just not how it works legally, and it’s not as if companies in the real world have issues getting criminals to carry out their dirty work. Maybe it’s an advanced form of non-disclosure agreement where nobody knows what is going on, but still, it’s unsatisfying due to the magical voodoo nature of the process.

There is a supplementary ebook to accompany severance called… and in it they lay out a theory for what Lumen may be doing. Some may point to this as proof, but there is no telling that this employee is on the right track, or that it wasn’t just a coincidence that the van exploded at the same time as the refinement, and this theory suffers from all the same stuff.

People tend to assume that what Lumon is doing is evil. Yes, on the face of it it does seem immoral, but in the real world there is great controversy surrounding companies that perform experiments on humans and animals even when those experiments might result in cures for diseases that may save millions of people. Lumon is just as morally ambiguous as these real life companies. Yes, they are “toturing” their employees, but their employees consented to the procedure, they are being compensated, and it is possible that this torture may result in positive things. It may be that once Mark and his friends discover the true nature of the company that they suddenly accept it as good and necessary, and perhaps this is why Helena displays no sympathy for her innie despite having a clearly freakazoid father. The severance procedure is controversial, which means a lot of people accept it. About 50% of people are pro-severance. If you compare the severance procedure to experimenting on actual babies, then of course the severance procedure seems more ethical, (The show would be a lot darker if they were just experimenting on babies) because of the element of consent which babies are unable to give, let alone understand.It’s kind of like volunteering for drug testing, except they just say it’s a job instead of telling you what the job is. I think we would be perfectly fine with someone severing themselves if they stated that they cared deeply about the science that it would produce, in the same way people are happy to be donors. They would be happy with the sacrifice, happy that is until they realise that the product of the procedure is basically a baby with it’s own consciousness and rights, and that there is no difference between experimenting on a baby and experimenting on a severed person’s innie counterpart.

This is the conflict that Severance places us in, and the root of the controversy. Lumon is hiding the true effects of the procedure, and the employees believe that if the world knew what it was like to be an innie, it would stop. But, on the other hand, it just may be that the results of the experiment were so beneficial to mankind that the discomfort of many sub-personalities is from the indispensable benefits gained from abusing them. This is one of the things that makes the show so compelling, it’s questions about consciousness and the suffering of the unheard.
Severance places us in the position of the rats who have their necks broken, and asks us if it’s worth it.

Okay, so Lumon is a science producing company, which makes sense given that they are known for “Pharmaceuticals and tech” the two main industries whose main focus is Research and design. But what experiments specifically are lumon conducting on the severed floor?My thoughts are that Lumon is developing more brainwashing techniques, this is the main product, how to dominate people and society. If you are in charge of an innovative company, innovation isn’t the important thing, the important thing is that you stay on top. If a competitor innovates, you try to acquire their innovation so that you continue to stay on top. You don’t have to innovate yourself, you just have to make sure nobody else does, and if they do you take credit for it and control its products. This way you always stay ahead. So I believe they are developing methods to continue to stay powerful, and probably competing with similar companies in other countries around the world.

While Lumon was developing the severance process it must have taken a long time to get the innies to stop killing themselves, or each other, or attacking the supervisors. It must have taken a lot of work to get them to remain calm and complicit for most of the time, and even self-supervise. The games, the rewards, the weird religious stuff, the paintings, the lighting, the way they speak, these can all be attributed in some part to ensuing their complicity and docility.

The break room is just like writing lines at school. It’s just a time and testing non-violent punishment for children that both keeps them busy and forces them to internalise some message in a monotonous soul-crushing way. When I was at school I wrote out Honesty, Integrity, Self Discipline, Commitment and Respect a couple thousand times, and look at the good it did me.

There are many examples in the show of classic psychological topics, such as the tribalism seen between departments, behaviours that Gorillaz, chimps, and even goblins engage in. Lumon seems to be encouraging the distrust between departments, perhaps to study thisFomenting distrust between teams but not rushing to amend the altercation that ensues

I’m 100% certain that this is what it is about, that Lumon is a research and development company and that the severed employees are their assets that they use to conduct all kinds of different experiments, which is why there are so many different kinds of weird things going on. I’m 100% certain this is what it’s about and I will be proven right! Or I’m just wrong about everything and I shouldn’t have even made this dumb video at all. Seriously the show is so good that I’m gaslighting myself. Maybe the show really is about terrorism, and they’re all really exploding palestinians…. Can you imagine if the show turned that way, if we actually found out that Helly and Mark were just blowing up kids, and they get all political and join antifa, Bernie Sanders gets severed and falls in love with Baron Trump in Optics and design. That would be great (s)

But in comparison to these other people’s theories my theory looks pretty good. (Show them talking about the scientist behind the monitor)

Afterthoughts

Milcheck and Cobel definitely aren’t normal people. Perhaps they underwent a similar surgery to severance that was less developed, perhaps one that completely erases your memory instead of splitting it in two

Helly may be lying because she is the outie or because she is ashamed of being an Egan, or she is worried that

I really didn’t like the last shot of the most recent episode, because it uses music and cinematography that is supposed to invoke the feeling of a team back together, doing their thing, but they are being tricked into feeling that way. This is intentional, I think, it’s meant to invoke a feeling of disconnection and sickness.

The reasons behind the video are interesting to think about. It could be that the defiance was a part of the experiment in the first place, and that Lumon is playing 4D chess, but I would rather take the show at face value and believe that the innies really did succeed in breaking out. It is tempting though, to believe that Lumon deliberately allowed the innies to break out in order to study some kind of way to appease a worker rebellion, but this would raise more questions and make the show much less satisfying. I think that the video is simply to appease the innies so that they continue their work. It may be an excellent opportunity for the company to test more compliance techniques, and it does seem effective, judging by the ending. It is reflective of the was revolutionaries are co-opted by the systems they oppose in the real world.