The Defiant Individualism of The Last of Us

In the world of politics, few arguments are more consistent than the debate about what an individual owes to society: Their time? Their money? Their talents? Their entire lives? You can see this back and forth in debates about everything from tax policy to family formation to war and the draft; the individual versus the state or the collective is a—and perhaps the—defining conflict in democratic politics. 

When transmuted into narrative form, this argument is barely an argument. Instead, it almost always lands on the side of valorizing great sacrifice, in which an individual gives up everything in order to save the collective. Pop culture tends to deliver stories in which noble self-sacrifice is not only good, but the highest good and even, at times, the only good. The underlying assumption is when the individual and the collective are in conflict, the individual has an affirmative duty to sacrifice, no matter what it takes. 

This moral assumption can produce great pop culture. To take an obvious example, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is a better movie for the totalizing sacrifice Spock makes at the end, and even for his reasoning: “The needs of the many,” he and Kirk say as he dies to save his shipmates, “outweigh the needs of the few.” Spock’s commitment to his moral code, his sense of what is right and just in a world of difficult choices, is what allows the story’s heroes to survive. 

But this assumption is rarely interrogated at all, much less with any seriousness: In popular stories, those who oppose individual self-sacrifice are always portrayed as selfish or cowardly or just fundamentally villainous. They are, quite literally, enemies of society. 

What makes The Last of Us—a video game adaptation that recently finished its first season as an HBO series—so piercing is that it essentially reverses the moral assumption. Or, at the very least, it suggests that a reversal is not only possible but morally defensible. In The Last of Us, society is the enemy of the individual. 

That viewpoint is built into the particulars of its post-apocalyptic premise, in which small bands of human survivors inhabit a world overrun by a fungus that turns people into twitching, terrorizing, zombie-like mons