Remember That Time On LOST When: You Found Out Who Jeremy Bentham Was?

[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]

For awhile there was a mystery (go figure!) surrounding the funeral of one of the Oceanic 815 who managed to make it back to shore. For some reason, everyone referred to said corpse as “That guy” or “Him“, playing the pronoun game. Clever. And though the writers toyed around with the dead dude’s identity for awhile, when they dropped the name Jeremy Bentham, it became apparent to me who it was that was currently sucking non-wind. It was our pal, He Who Can Walk Again, the monster or the Island, tamer of Smokey The Monster Bandit, champion of faith, John Locke.

John Locke unto himself is a reference to the famous empiricist of the name name from way back in the day when dinosaurs roamed England and witches used magic to conjure rifles and other chicanery. That a man of faith was named after an omega lad of reason and empirical evidence is totally, like, ironic. But then they gave him the name of another real philosopher, that ofJeremy Bentham, and all of a sudden, dudebro had a named that fit him like a glove.

This is the real philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Dead and stuffed, and on display. I know I’m full of shit usually, but I’m not fucking with you:

Via Wikipedia:

As requested in his will, Bentham’s body was dissected as part of a public anatomy lecture. Afterward, the skeleton and head were preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet called the “Auto-icon”, with the skeleton stuffed out with hay and dressed in Bentham’s clothes. Originally kept by his disciple Thomas Southwood Smith,^[13] it was acquired by University College London in 1850. It is normally kept on public display at the end of the South Cloisters in the main building of the college, but for the 100th and 150th anniversaries of the college, it was brought to the meeting of the College Council, where it was listed as “present but not voting”.

The Auto-icon has a wax head, as Bentham’s head was badly damaged in the preservation process. The real head was displayed in the same case for many years, but became the target of repeated student pranks, including being stolen on more than one occasion. It is now locked away securely.

Can I get “Stranger Than Fiction” for $500, Alex?

I know of Jeremy Bentham because I’m a philosophy nerd who spent way too much time in college taking classes that had absolutely nothing to do with my degree. As I waltzed around campus for thirty-five years I ran across Bentham in Social Ethics, Modern Philosophy, and Medical Ethics.

Like I said, I’m a nerd.

Bentham was a utilitarian, a group of intellectual swaggernauts who operated under the belief that mortality was defined but whatever benefited the greater good the most. This is a super watered down, super base, utterly awful description of the philosophy. I promise. But it gets the point across. It’s the same idea that empowered Jack Bauer to shoot a dude in the face if it will stop a nuclear blast from wiping out the Eastern Seaboard. Again, super stripped down. Cut me some slack. I’m writing pop-culture slop, not teaching you philosophy. You unlearned fucks.

John Locke has always operated under some version of utilitarianism that places everything at the mercy of whether or not it benefits the Island. The Island is his equivalent of ‘the people’, and the dude will slice you, cut you, betray you, smash your shit, if he thinks it’ll help prevent the Island from being besieged by some sort of serious shit.

In a Season One episode called The Greater Good (GET IT?!), Locke thrashes the shit out of Sayid’s head in order to protect the group. Later on, the dude throws a knife through Naomi because he believed she and the rest of her posse from the freighter posed a threat to his little patch of paradise on the Island. And then? Then the dude, knowing he must die to save the Island, undertakes the quest of trying to bring Oceanic 815 back to the Island. The dude is totally in love with the Island. If the Island were a chick – and who knows, maybe it is – he would ask her to go steady.

The dude is straight up Jeremy Bentham rockin’ out on the Island stylee. He’ll do whatever it takes to save her, even if it means hanging his own ass. ‘Course, he never gets to pull off that wicked feat, because Ben chokes him out and all, but seriously, he would have.

Dude is ballin’.

Still though, the reveal was pretty awesome at the end of Season Four. I had the idea that it was going to be him, rocking the moniker Jeremy Bentham, but it didn’t do anything to reveal why he was dead, or if someone had killed him, or the what not. You have to appreciate someone as dedicated to preserving the greater good, even if it means sacrificing yourself. If Jack’s Dead Dad told me that I had to save the Island, I would have told him to kiss my ass, and that he could find me eating cheetos in the Hatch with Hurley.