Somerset Maugham’s Razor’s Edge (2025): Larry Darrell vs. Hyperreality
The Original Journey
W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge (1944) tells the story of Larry Darrell, a man who rejects conventional success in pursuit of deeper meaning. Unlike his peers—who chase wealth, status, and security—Larry embarks on a philosophical and spiritual quest that takes him from Paris to India, where he encounters Eastern wisdom and reshapes his understanding of life.
Maugham, both narrator and observer, contrasts Larry’s journey with the lives of those who stay within the confines of Western materialism. The novel explores existential restlessness, the limits of reason, and the tension between individual enlightenment and societal expectation.
But what if Larry’s story happened today?
What if instead of post-WWI disillusionment, he awakened during the COVID era?
Larry Darrell, the Social Worker
Larry wasn’t some lost soul drifting through life. He was a dedicated, competent professional, working within the social system. He saw himself as pragmatic, helping those in need without falling into ideological traps.
But then came COVID.
At first, he followed the rules, believed the narratives, trusted the institutions. But slowly, the inconsistencies piled up.
The fearmongering, the censorship, the shifting goalposts. People who had once been rational parroted absurdities with unwavering conviction. "Two weeks to flatten the curve" became an indefinite state of emergency. Science wasn’t debated—it was decreed.
Larry started reading—not just studies, but philosophy. And that’s when Baudrillard hit him like a lightning bolt.
Baudrillard: The COVID Simulation
Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality—where the line between reality and simulation collapses—explained everything Larry was seeing.
COVID wasn’t just a crisis. It was a narrative event, a media-constructed reality that fed on itself.
The world wasn’t reacting to the virus—it was reacting to the image of the virus.
People weren’t debating facts—they were performing belief.
Every restriction, every policy, every shift in messaging wasn’t about reality—it was about maintaining the illusion of control.
Baudrillard had predicted this decades ago: a world so saturated with media that people could no longer distinguish truth from spectacle.
Larry’s colleagues at the social office didn’t see it. They followed the approved Haltung—the "correct moral stance"—on every issue, whether it was COVID, climate change, or the war in Ukraine.
It wasn’t about truth. It was about belonging.
Lyotard: The End of Grand Narratives
Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition took Larry even deeper.
Lyotard argued that modern societies once relied on Grand Narratives—big, overarching stories that made sense of the world, like religion, progress, or democracy.
But in the postmodern age, those narratives had collapsed.
In their place? Micro-narratives. Fragments of belief. Shifting ideologies. People didn’t follow one big truth anymore—they latched onto whatever story felt most comforting at the moment.
COVID wasn’t just a pandemic. It was a fragmented, self-contradictory myth that changed daily, depending on what people needed to believe to maintain their faith in the system.
Larry watched as his intelligent, well-educated colleagues abandoned logic and clung to ideological scripts.
It wasn’t stupidity. It was a survival mechanism.
The Choice: Sell Out or Walk Away?
He could have written a book. He could have gone on podcasts, monetized his insights, become the next great intellectual dissident.
But he saw the trap: commodified rebellion.
The system had an escape valve for thinkers like him. They were allowed to dissent—so long as they played by the rules of the attention economy. As long as their rebellion could be packaged, marketed, and consumed, it was no threat.
So Larry did the one thing that truly scared them:
He disappeared.
Not into obscurity—but into silence.
He kept his job as a social worker but stopped arguing. He stopped trying to wake people up. He simply did what was real.
Helping people, not debating abstractions.
Larry had found the razor’s edge—the thin line between knowing the truth and letting it consume you.
His friends thought he had given up. But he hadn’t. He had simply understood the final lesson:
You don’t win by fighting the hyperreal. You win by walking away from it.