Nine Perfect Strangers: The Philosophy Of Masha
Warning: Spoilers ahead for Liane Moriarty’s Nine Perfect Strangers
Liane Moriarty’s Nine Perfect Strangers follows nine people who seek to improve their life by attending a 10-day retreat at the Tranquillum House. This wellness resort is headed by Masha, a former corporate executive who reinvented herself after a near-death experience.
At first, Masha merely seems a bit eccentric, insisting that the guests not speak or make eye contact for the first five days and that they give up their phones and any unhealthy contraband they brought in. By the end of the book, Masha completely unravels and slips the guests LCD-laced smoothies without their consent, locks them in a basement and convinces them they are going to be burnt alive.
What makes Masha so interesting as a character is that she isn’t just insane or a narcissist (but she definitely is the latter). Lianne Moriarty crafts Nine Perfect Strangers’ villain so that she has intricately fleshed out philosophies and ideas.
Utilitarianism
At her core, Masha is utilitarian; anything that she believes will advance her clients towards their wellness goals is acceptable. Like Bentham or Mill, Masha believes that if her morally questionable behavior increases these nine strangers’ happiness, then it is worth it.
Her biggest display of this philosophy is through her use of drugs, unbeknownst to the guests, to create the “healing environment” she envisions. It turns out that the reason the Tranquillum house has had much success is that Masha places microdoses of psychedelic drugs within the smoothies.
The justification for this practice is to recreate the transcendental experience she had during her near-death experience. She believes that it was this brush with her demise that caused her enlightenment and subsequent change to her life.
Seeing her methods as not lasting after guests leave the house, she decides to up the ante with the book’s crop of main characters. On the fifth day, she gives them a larger dose of hallucinogens so that she may give them “psychedelic therapy”. When this doesn’t seem to stick, she locks them in the basement, forcing them to face death and reflect.
Masha is a utilitarian because she believes this practice will maximize her guest’s happiness and pleasure. She goes beyond a typical “the means justifies the ends” villain, and instead believes she is the harbinger of these damaged people’s recovery.
Buddhism
As stated earlier, Masha believes the path to the nine perfect strangers’ happiness is through enlightenment. She mimics many Buddhist practices within her retreat such as meditation and avoiding self-indulgence along with quoting the Buddha extensively. However, Masha also ignores certain aspects of Buddhist teachings.
While Buddhism encourages avoiding self-indulgence, it also preaches avoidance of self-denial. At Nine Perfect Strangers’ conclusion, it is revealed that the first domino to be knocked down in Masha’s life was the loss of her son.
Denial of her son’s accidental death causes her to claim that her second child is not her own and leave her husband. She thrusts herself into her work, getting very little sleep, leading to her collapse from cardiac arrest. Her life is truly the result of massive self-denial, which is against Buddhism.
Another way Masha misrepresents Buddhism is through her use of suffering. The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism focus on the acceptance of human suffering, its causes, and how to move forward from it. The way to reach the end of suffering is to pursue the Middle Path.
There are eight guides to achieve the Middle Path, most of which Masha did not follow. Things such as avoiding lying, harming living creatures, and selfishness seem to be missing from her practices at Tranquillum House.
She lied when she gave the guests drugs without their consent and harmed them by making them believe they would be burned alive. The further the reader gets into the story, the more apparent it becomes that the entire enterprise is constructed to stroke Masha’s ego.
Buddhism also comes into conflict with her utilitarian beliefs, for the former is about avoiding greed and materialist ideas, not simply pursuing what will generate the most happiness. While her methods do remove the guest’s phones, alcohol, and ability to eat unhealthily, they don’t adopt this as a lifestyle, but a temporary method to maximize their pleasure.
Nietzschean Tearing Down, Building Up
In Friedrich Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, the philosopher uses the metaphor of a hammer to explain how one deconstructs their views and rebuilds them. According to him, achieving greatness requires smashing the old ideas and then beginning the ascent to greater ones.
While Nietzsche meant the hammer to be a symbol of freeing one’s self from the constraints of religious and cultural morality and “false idols”, Masha moves these ideas from the metaphorical to the literal.
Nine Perfect Strangers’ antagonist believes breaking her tiresome guests will force them to achieve the same enlightenment she did. She first attempts through an exercise where each guest is given a “client” who they will defend their right to live. She is intentionally vague on the seriousness of her intent to kill the worst defended person.
Then, she escalates this further by convincing everyone that she is burning down the house with them still locked inside. Her justification is that the fear of death will give them the ultimate challenge and break them down so that she may build them up again.
The issue with this Nietzschean method is that the philosopher despised utilitarian and religious morality. He sought to free his readers from the shackles of systems that impose ideas against what is authentic to the individual.
Masha doesn’t want her guests to free their minds, but to make them dependent on her grand expertise. She alone is the agent of change these people need and her forceful tactics will bring them back to her grace.
Conclusion
What made studying the philosophy of Masha so fascinating was how relatable she was as a conceited thought leader. Though I wouldn’t call her cultish, though it was touching that point, she reminded me of the many famous people who believe they have discovered the secret to success or health, when in reality, it’s just a boost to their selves.
Masha holds so many contradicting philosophies because her endgame isn’t some sort of spiritual or moral uplift, but to make her feel important. Nine Perfect Strangers is incredible because Moriarty made Masha the hyperbolic pseudo-spiritualist typical of today.
