“The White Lotus” – Clickbait in Luxury Wrapping

I gave “The White Lotus” another chance. Two more episodes. Once again I switched it off with the same feeling in my body: not uplifted, not enlightened – just dirty. As if I’d been rolling around in someone else’s anxiety, narcissism and cruelty.

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This isn’t “just TV”. It feels like taking a shower in cynicism and pretending it doesn’t stick.

For a humanist, that matters. Humanism starts from the idea that people can grow, reason and choose solidarity over selfishness. What we feed our minds with either strengthens that belief or erodes it. “The White Lotus” is sold as sharp social satire. To me, it’s something else: clickbait in luxury wrapping, served into our mental ecosystem at a moment when we can least afford it.

When entertainment becomes mental waste 

For me, “The White Lotus” is not brave satire about the rich. It is a study in toxicity. Unchecked craving, egoism, narcissism and entitlement drive almost every scene. People do foolish, selfish and downright cruel things to each other.

None of this is new. We already live with these pat-terns in politics, in business, in our feeds: people who put their own gain above everything else and often get away with it. The series doesn’t deepen our understanding of this reality. It adds no real insight. It simply prolongs our stay in the same filthy bath.

A few viewers will react with resistance and reflection. Many will stay on the sofa, let the episodes roll, and get used to it. Over time, that habit does its work. Being exposed to shit makes you smell.

Normalization and shifting boundaries

At the core, this is about boundaries. Scene after scene trains us to tolerate behavior we know, deep down, is unacceptable. Narcissism, cold exploitation, small sadistic power games – all presented as “sharp character studies.”

In real life, these patterns would be warning signs. Here they become style. At first they feel extreme, then typical, finally almost everyday. That process shifts what we regard as normal.

“The White Lotus” functions as a concentrate. When it becomes evening habit, our own tolerance moves step by step. You don’t need to analyze it; repeated exposure is enough to sand down resistance.

From a humanist perspective, that matters. If our stories keep teaching us that cruelty is ordinary and integrity is naive, we should not be surprised when cynicism spreads.

Everyone is corrupted – but you don’t have to be

What disturbs me most is that everyone is dragged down. There is no firm point, nobody who actually holds the line. Staff, guests, couples, friends – almost every character moves in the same direction: more egoism, more cynicism, greater readiness to betray.

Attempts at decency crumble. Honesty becomes ammunition. Guilt is cashed in. Trust is used as an opening for the next violation. Anyone who tries to stand upright is either exploited or reshaped.

In many dark stories, there is at least one crack in the wall. In “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” the main character is effectively destroyed, but the fellow patient who shares his captivity uses the moment to escape. Someone gets out of hell. Someone refuses to keep playing by the institution’s rules.

In “The White Lotus,” that never happens. Everyone stays, adapts to the logic and lets themselves be corrupted.

But you don’t have to.

You can step away from the table, change the channel, refuse to let this particular vision of human beings take up more space in your head. Ironically, that may be the most generous way to read Mike White’s work: that his deepest, unspoken wish is that you recognize how awful this world really is – and that you finally walk away from his series, and from the real-world scripts that look a little too much like it.

A direct mirror – without hope

The uncomfortable truth is that “The White Lotus” is, in many ways, a direct mirror of the world we live in. Growing inequality, everyday cynicism, the sense that some lives are simply cheaper than others – all of that is already out there. The series invents very little; it concentrates what we already suspect.

The problem is that the mirror is almost entirely without hope. No cracks, no exit, nobody who genuinely refuses to play along. We get a careful depiction of a corrupt system, without a single line pointing toward change. We already know how dark things can get. What we lack is not more illustrations of decay, but stories that show it is still possible to do something other than give up.

From a humanist perspective, that is the real wound. Humanism is not blind optimism. It recognizes cruelty, domination and structural injustice. But it insists that people are not only products of these forces – that we can resist them, sometimes at great cost. A cultural diet that constantly tells us the opposite quietly undermines that conviction.

In a time when inequality is deepening and many already feel powerless, this type of storytelling is a loss. It pulls us one step further away from the will to act.

When the creator joins the class he depicts 

Mike White has described his ambition as showing how money and privilege distort relationships, how the ruling class thinks and feels. On paper, that sounds like a social project.

In practice, he has become part of the very circle he portrays. The success of “The White Lotus” has made him wealthy and celebrated in the same elite he follows with his camera. He is no longer outside, examining; he produces content for the system that rewards this sort of cynical prestige television.

This is how corruption often looks in real life. Not a sudden betrayal, but a series of small, reasonable steps. Cynicism gets praised. Each new layer of depravity brings more awards and extended contracts. Continuing becomes rational. Eventually you are not only exposing the elite – you are one of the people keeping the machine running.

A story that repeats itself.

Clickbait in prestige format

“The White Lotus” is also driven by the same logic as clickbait in social media. Hatred, scandal, sex and violence keep us watching, not depth or insight.

Algorithms on X, Instagram and TikTok reward content that provokes strong emotions – anger, schadenfreude, shock – because it keeps the gaze locked. The series works the same way, just in a more expensive wrapper.

Copy–paste seems to be the method: take the emotional economy we already know is destructive on social platforms, dress it up in the language of prestige TV, and sell it as “social commentary”. Psychologically, it resembles doomscrolling in long format.

“The White Lotus” is tempting in the same way infidelity is tempting. We know what it does to us and to the people we live with, but some still give in. A brief thrill, followed by a long aftertaste of guilt, mistrust and emptiness. That is how this kind of prestige filth works. We tell ourselves it is “just entertainment”, even as we notice what it does to our inner climate.

At the same time, “The White Lotus” is part of the HBO/Warner universe, tied into ever larger media conglomerates and streaming deals. Step by step, a handful of global actors are becoming gatekeepers for most of what we see. They can do this because we have fed them with our attention and subscriptions. Every time we accept one more season of well-produced cynicism, we are effectively voting for more of the same. These platforms do not measure whether we become wiser or more humane.

They measure whether we stay.

In that logic, “The White Lotus” is ideal. It generates conversation, feels “important”, but leaves us tilted toward cynicism. It does not challenge the structures that give it life. It stabilizes them.

Mental hygiene as a humanist duty

We have language for physical lifestyle – sugar, alcohol, exercise – but almost none for our mental diet. Yet it shapes how we see ourselves and others at least as much.

If I repeatedly rise from the sofa feeling low or dirty, without any new understanding or renewed energy to do anything, that is a signal. Not that I am too sensitive, but that the content functions as mental waste. Glittering packaging, but still waste.

Humanism has always cared about what we put into our minds: superstition, propaganda, dehumanizing ideology. Today, the threat is less about a single dogma and more about a constant stream of content that numbs empathy and normalizes mistrust. That, too, is an ethical and political problem.

“The White Lotus” ultimately appears as one more chapter in a story that keeps repeating itself. The names change – Tarantino, “Succession,” “Breaking Bad” – but the pattern holds: prestige packaging for human degradation, cynicism praised as realism, and viewers trained to mistake exhaustion for insight. Power and money corrupt the people on screen, but also the industry around the work and its creator. The elite is portrayed, the elite recognizes itself, the elite rewards the result. The circle closes. The rest of us sit in front of the screen, a little more dulled, a little more stained, while the next season is planned.

Here is where I draw the line.

I refuse to let my mental environment be treated as a dumping ground.