So to me there were sort of two layers to the story, but they interrelate.

The first, and more surface-level one, was the question of whether the parts that we hate about ourselves are really something we could do without. At least without changing us. Morty's confidence also made him a sociopathic asshole. He became "successful" by our society's definition, which says quite a bit about where we are as a culture right now.

One of the things I've thought about a lot lately with regards to mental illness is that it's all about arbitrary divisions. Everything's about where you fall on some spectrum or another. Confidence is good, to a point, and so is self-doubt. Success in life is, to me, all about finding balance. Every negative thought, feeling, and emotion has its roots in something good and necessary. We're only here to talk about this episode, to create art, to do whatever because we had ancestors somewhere along the line who were willing to kill to survive, rape to continue their bloodline, you name it. Rick could only get them to the detox place because of the same skills and knowledge that made him into kind of a dick. But remember that their adventure leading up to it was implied to be a heroic one?

I also thought there was an interesting underlying current about moral relativism. Towards the end, Rick says that "our toxins have as much a right to their world view as..." He's cut off by Morty slapping him, then saying that "obviously [his] version of health is a hell of a lot different from [Rick's]." Rick then wonders how the machine would know what "healthy" means?

Free speech has been on our minds a lot lately, and one of the things with censorship is that it inherently involves making a moral judgment. If we want to censor something, we're saying that whatever the information content of that speech is morally unacceptable, and that it's morally unacceptable even to express it. Part of making a society work, of course, is figuring out a decision-making process for just this kind of question, i.e. what are the moral truths upon which we agree. The genius of liberalism (as that word was originally used) is a recognition that we're not all going to 100% agree on everything, and that this is okay; we'll only enforce what we can all agree on. But that same societal backlash against neo-Nazis is the same underlying impulse that was used against civil rights protests in the 1960s, against anti-government protests everyone on Earth, etc. A hammer doesn't suddenly work differently on one nail versus another.

What was so cool about Rick's line was that I, and I expect most people, had automatically inserted my own idea of what was "toxic" into what I imagined was removed from both Rick and Morty at the beginning of the episode. Toxic Rick became a cipher for our own views about what is toxic in a person (an especially apt choice of words, giving all the talk of "toxicity" online). But notice how one of the things that was actually removed was Rick's attachment to Morty? How after he was a "better" person he suddenly gave 0 fucks about his grandson's suffering? Few of us would've pictured that; if anything, we'd expect Rick to care more after being de-toxified. But Rick only respects rational things, and love is by its nature irrational. What Rick threw out is something most of us would choose not to, and when Toxic Rick converted the whole world there for a minute, it was based on his view (and so of course Rick's) idea of what was toxic.

So one of the big takeaways for me was to be careful about being so quick to decide what is healthy and what isn't.