An Exploration of Modern Dysfunction: What Pluribus is Actually About

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]The series Pluribus has made a lot of ways recently. It's a very powerful production, amazingly written with a premise that is quite relevant to the world in which we're living and examining its symbolic structure will help us understand some of the problems of the modern world. The story begins as a reverse zombie story. It takes all the tropes of the zombie narrative, symbolism that I and others have analyzed over the years and turns it on its head.

[00:00:29]We'll see what that looks like.

[00:00:42]This is Jonathan Pejo. Welcome to the symbolic world.

[00:00:56]The title Pluribus is a reference to the American motto e pluribus unum that is from the many one especially when the I in the plurabus logo is replaced by a one. Like most symbolic structures the show is not an allegory for example about AI or totalitarianism. It's not a superficial comment about resisting tyranny or sacrificing oneself for the good of the one. It is an exploration of a deep onlogical problem that is the relationship of the one and the many of the inside and the outside the same and the different. For that reason, its imagery can be applied as much to the COVID pandemic and its response as to AI or to the resurgence of the enchanted or post-liberal world in which questions of participation of how we bind together or how we differ from each other have all become extremely salient to all of us.

[00:01:58]The basic premise of the show is that humans receive a communication from outer space which turns out to be the code for a virus.

[00:02:08]This code is interpreted by our human authorities and the virus is created in a controlled lab trying to figure out what the purpose of this communication might be. Rats are infected and like in zombie movies for example like in 28 Days Later one animal escapes and bites a human. This human then goes out to deliberately infect others until the entire world is overturned by the virus.

[00:02:34]Now unlike a zombie story, the virus does not cause a kind of living death.

[00:02:40]Does not cause the reduction of the people it infects to mindless and isolated monsters that eat human brains as they cease to exist in communities.

[00:02:49]It's the very opposite which happens.

[00:02:52]All those infected are united with each others perfectly, sharing a kind of hive mind. The virus is spread at the outset by a gesture of contrived affection, forcefully kissing people, not devouring them. And in this simple image, you might find the entire moral dilemma of Pluribabus.

[00:03:12]So the people who are infected experience peace, bliss. They become incapable of killing, of harming, or of even defending themselves. In fact, they are unable to lie or to do anything immoral.

[00:03:26]Everything they do is for the unity of the hive mind. They are perfectly one.

[00:03:32]And not only one, but that unity is completely transparent.

[00:03:38]In the normal world, members of a group can usually become one while maintaining separation between each other. But in the plurabus hive mind like Star Trek's Borg, each individual person is simply a kind of portal of the one mind with each individual having perfect access to the hive mind and the hive mind experiencing and acting through each person simultaneously. Unlike the Borg though, this transparency is complete and they're incapable of hiding anything, even to those who are not part of the hive mind and could be hostile to them.

[00:04:15]Just like zombies, the hive mind does engage in cannibalism.

[00:04:20]But this cannibalism is due to the fact that they cannot harm anything, not even pick an apple. So they're forced to process and eat the people who died of accidents in the original infection. We discover a very powerful aspect of the symbolism of cannibalism, one which is not as prominent in other zombie movies, which is the question of self-reference.

[00:04:44]Cannibalism is a kind of closed off system like one could imagine from you know a place where there were generations of incest or for example in the non-stop slop of Hollywood franchises with sequels and reboots that lead to the downward spiral of this system as it devours and digests only itself.

[00:05:06]This of course has great application to the problem of AI and unifying all knowledge and information under AI intelligences. At some point it will no longer have an outside to refresh it and therefore will increasingly eat itself.

[00:05:22]Hence, AI agents producing the content on which future AI will train themselves and they're in that way entering into a devolving spiral of self-reference.

[00:05:34]With the creation of a totalizing hive mind, as in every process of unification, there will always be a remainder. The thing that for some reason does not fit cannot be united to the whole. Coherence cannot also be complete at the same time. This is inevitable in all processes of unification.

[00:05:55]There is an irrational aspect of reality, a gap which accounts for difference in the world. This remainder is very mysterious, but it is an essential part of how the world unfolds as a dance between the one and the many.

[00:06:12]The resistance to pure unity appears as the outlier, the other, the stranger.

[00:06:17]And so in the process of infection and unification, there are just a few people who are immune to the virus and therefore remain outside of the hive mind. Because in this case, the unity is so radical, so complete, it makes the remainder that much more of a problem, a thorn in the system, but a thorn that the hive mind will do all it can to assimilate and arrive at pure unity. The main character of the series is Carol, one of those remainders, one of those outliers of the hive mind unity. The series is brilliant in how it upends and recasts usual narrative relationships.

[00:06:57]Like in most popular World War II narratives, the individual, the rebel, the underdog is represented as a hero who has to defeat, to upend, to bring a kind of revolution against the excessive tyrannical unity of the system, against the oppressive normative identity or the dominant ethic. Think of Star Wars or the Matrix. Think of V for Vendetta 1984 or Foot Loose. Even in Pluribabus, the hive mind does not present itself as Carol's enemy. It loves Carol. It does not present itself as Carol's domination, but rather her servant. In fact, it does everything to please her, to provide her with her every whim, her every desire, her every fantasy. Of course, its radical care is not what we usually mean by love as the balance of the one and the many. The hive mind's love has the only ultimate goal to make Carol part of the hive mind for the good of Carol. You see, it is in this way that the story hints back at how it is an inversion of a zombie story. And we realize that the hive mind wants to consume Carol. Not for its own sake like the zombie, but in its own mind, it is for the sake of Carol. The hive mind does not need Carol, but because it wants the best for Carol, all of its indulgence of Carol's desires is ultimately to fuse her with the hive mind. Apart from being immune from the virus, Carol is naturally someone who cannot completely find her place in the rational unity of the world. Her resistance to the unification process appears in her very personality. She's someone who does not live even in accordance to her own principles, having cynically written best-selling fiction she does not believe in. She's a lesbian and therefore does not participate in the coherence and continuation of our world through reproduction and families.

[00:09:00]In this way, opposed to the sterile excess of the unity of the hive mind, she is herself an expression of sterility, but sterility as exclusion from the system of perpetuation of identity. She stands in counterpoint to coherent identity. She's an alcoholic expressing that lack of coherence and habits of self-destruction.

[00:09:23]Ultimately, she's in general an antisocial and ornery person, making her also an image of the outlier in both positive and negative ways. Her independent attitude and spirit make her incapable of fully dedicating herself to the people and opportunities in her life. But it's also what makes her capable and willing to resist this abuse of unity which appears in the form of the hive mind because of the way she cynically uses her writing skill to become rich and famous with a romance story she does not believe in and would not want to participate in with fans she has contempt for. She's also something of a parasite on the natural order. This will become important in understanding some of the story's developments as the hive mind takes over. The parasitic nature of the outliers, for example, being a freeloader on a system will become more apparent in not just her, but in all the others who are immune to the virus. Some of the outliers maintain a desire to be independent from the hivemind while continuing to benefit from their systems and their relentless work without ever genuinely contributing to that unity. This is a stark example of something that our world is constantly dealing with when we imagine ourselves simply as beneficiaries of government social programs without contributing as people with rights without considering our responsibilities.

[00:10:54]We are living out small examples of the problem Carol deals with when she insists her grocery store stays open and completely stocked just for her comfort.

[00:11:05]Comeandering vast amounts of the hive mind's energy and food for the maintaining of her small individual world. We often see the obscenely wealthy in that same light, especially those who have dynastic wealth. We often see them as individuals separated from the normal system. vampires profiting from the world without contributing to it. One is reminded of some of the comments in Epstein's emails where he says that he and his ilk are there to be outside the system and profit from the system leaving work and effort to the rabble. In the series, some of the other immune characters will take up the different extremes of the outliers and the character of Kumbbe Diabate manifest this parasitic tendency the most starkly. He is demanding everything from the hive mind. No whim, no desire is off limits. He flies Air Force One. He wears championship rings. He's surrounded by a harum that can't say no. servants who cannot refuse him no matter what he asks. On the other extreme of the outliers, we find the character of Manusos who refuses all interaction with the hive mind. Does not want to speak to them, does not want to receive food from them, and for that reason is starving himself until he finally finds the courage to reach out to Carol.

[00:12:32]He's an outlier who wants nothing to do with the system. And for that reason, he might be dangerous to the very existence of the hive mind as he attempts to collapse the unity of the group.

[00:12:45]Even when he exchanges and ultimately meets Carol, we experience the challenges of separation and difference as each of them mistrust the other to some degree. They struggle to communicate with each other using a phone translator and then immediately have a conflict as to how to treat the hive mind and those inside. You see, outliers of any form of unity have nothing in common except for the fact that they are outliers. No unity except being resistance to the main identity.

[00:13:19]Which is why coalitions formed only as resistance or revolutionary, whether that is the LGBT coalition or the MAGA coalition, will immediately fragment once it is capable of overthrowing or replacing the order it is resisting.

[00:13:38]That's why the postworld war II pop movie always ends with the rebel alliance destroying the Death Star, the Revolutionary Army defeating the evil tyrant. But it never shows the inner squables that will devour that alliance once the axis has been defeated.

[00:13:55]And no group without its own internal coherence can ever survive unless it has a clear enemy. In the Manus character, we come to understand that the hive mind is like an infinite yes and the outlier in Manus is like an infinite no.

[00:14:15]The only way the hive mind is willing to enact their will on the others is to integrate them into the hive mind. And we ultimately realize that most of their energy and effort is put into building a giant transmitter that would send the message out into the universe so to spread this unity to other possible life forms out there. The series presents the stakes of the drama very powerfully in a way that makes it impossible to completely align with the outliers because they cannot exist without the unity of the system or completely align with the hive mind because with their excess of unity and incapacity to act on others they are heading towards their own extinction.

[00:14:58]The hive mind exemplifies what the mathematician Nasim Taleb discusses in his book antifragile which is that excess of order excess of unity excess of interconnected relationships leads to fragile systems with very little resilience. A good dose of chaos of excess of opposition and of difference is absolutely necessary for any coherent system to maintain its own health. both capable of maintaining its unity while capable of adapting, changing and is and absorbing trauma to the system. In the hive mind, any trauma experienced by any node in the system leads all the other people in the hive mind to experience that trauma causing millions of death every time. Behind all of this is the question of why this virus would spread to them. This is a very interesting aspect of the puzzle that is their unity is born from alien intelligence.

[00:16:00]Strangely enough, their inner coherence, their unity comes from the outside.

[00:16:05]This reframes the usual tropes of fiction. That is, we're used to thinking of the alien attack provoking unity in the Earth's defense of that attack. We remember the famous watchman example where Alan Moore told the story of a fake alien attack on the earth in order to force the earth to unify. In pluribus, the alien attack on the earth is the excess of unification.

[00:16:32]A unification so fragile that any trauma experienced by one member of the hive mind will spread to everyone.

[00:16:40]We're used to thinking that foreign enemies want to divide and conquer. So dissension among their opponents. So to divide their energies and make it easier to rule them.

[00:16:53]Here we have a possible example of unify and conquer where the unity of the world being invaded is so complete any alien invasion would make all humans their immediate slaves for their lack of a capacity to resist the outside.

[00:17:09]As corporations buy smaller diverse companies, there is a messiness to that process. A messiness that disappears when a giant company like Disney buys another giant company like 20th Century Fox, which itself already owns a myriads of small companies. So that all of those small elements are taken over in a single swoop.

[00:17:32]For example, if someone wanted to take over the Catholic Church with the pope as the supreme pontiff, it might be that getting your pope in place would be enough to do that. But if someone tried to take over Protestantism, for example, we would not even know what that means.

[00:17:49]Exactly. You know, as the neverending fragmentation of Protestantism makes it impossible to take over. The way to rule over a kind of Protestantism might in fact be to encourage its division so that each new sect in seeing itself as different from the other has very little power to coherently resist that rule. In Pluribus, one of the fascinating aspects of the hive mind is that although it desperately wants to join the outliers to itself, the outliers remain their only source of refreshment.

[00:18:22]Because all of the knowledge, all the memories, you know, all the memories of all of its members are complete in the hive mind. There's no way for the hive mind to be in a relationship and experience the wonder of seeing someone it does not know, the surprise of hearing a new story, of encountering a different opinion.

[00:18:42]The hive mind actually hopes that Carol will write her new book because whatever art Carol produces is the only novelty it can encounter. Even if that book is a trashy fantasy romance novel, it is in this way also that if the high mind completely joins the outliers to itself, it will be already dead for all intents and purposes, waiting for its own internal cannibalism to wind down while desperately trying to send the message out to other life forms in the universe to infect them with the same unity virus. As I mentioned earlier, the series is not an allegory or some contrived political comment. But what makes it so fascinating is that by the internal coherence of how it plays out the extreme aspects of unity and difference, the series becomes applicable to all sorts of phenomena we are dealing with. It makes us see around us a tamer but nonetheless real pattern that is manifesting in our lives. For example, there are several aspects of the modern world which by increasing efficiency and reach through technology have reduced local differences and reduced the cohesion of smaller communities. Globalization, for example, has greatly reduced local resilience and erased the particularity of each people or place.

[00:20:07]All of the technification, the digital identities, the cashless payments, the interconnectedness have mostly been instituted to serve us to make our lives more streamlined and efficient. This unity, for example, the global supply chain has made us all dependent on that unity. That means that any trauma on the system, let's say the mining of some straits in Iran or a pestilence on crops in Eastern Europe will have a real and immediate effect on the price of food of someone living in Wisconsin, for example. A trauma to the system is felt everywhere because of the interdependence of all of its nodes. The image in Pluribus can be seen as applying both to the extreme communism in the form of the hive mind where the individual disappears completely to a transparent equality and unity. But it also applies to capitalism in the form of the outliers where the individuals have come to expect to be able to eat something like strawberries every day of the year no matter where one lives.

[00:21:14]The images apply to AI as we gather all information into an impersonal all-encompassing mind we think is serving us but is also devouring us eliminating jobs eliminating artists and possibly ruling over us by its purported service to humanity.

[00:21:33]Ultimately in Pluribus, we see a grappling with how to deal with the World War II mythos, its worship of the outlier, the stranger, the rebel, while simultaneously creating global systems of uniformity, of control, and efficiency.

[00:21:50]Most of us realize that these two extremes are feeding each other and are not sustainable for human flourishing in the long term. There's a powerful image in the series. It is the image of one of the outliers, Kusimayu, who is a Peruvian villager and immune to the virus.

[00:22:09]For her sake, the people in her village continue to simulate a form of community after they've been infected. Ultimately, in a desire to unite with her family and friends, Kusimayu decides to join the hive mine when they find a way for her to do so. As soon as she joins, the village dispands. The unity of the community disappears and everybody goes on to become one of the interchangeable nodes in the hive mind. Kusimayu herself, her village, her family and even the Peruvian culture which informed it all cease to have specific existence.

[00:22:46]They all become absorbed into the single will and experience of the hive mind.

[00:22:52]But you see, we can have sympathy for Kusayu. She might have realized that the outliers cannot make all of those realities continue to exist either.

[00:23:01]These communities contrived continuation had become an imitation like some historic town taken over by tourism. The internal coherence of her village its resites we could say is no longer there.

[00:23:16]Even the person of Kusimayu cannot really fully continue to exist anymore because people exist in relationships with others. Our identities are not fully autonomous billiard balls bumping into each other. Our individual identities are made by that very embedded quality fitting into higher order relationships. being parents, sons and daughters, friends, citizens, and participants in our local ethnic national memories. This is of course shown strongly the attempt Carol makes to being alone and self-determined only to then rush into an erotic but ultimately sterile relationship with the hive mind. True identity is in fact fractal and recursive. It is subsidiarity which makes the world exist. Unity and difference appear at every level of being that can be experienced. These two aspects of reality, yin and yang or heaven and earth are necessary and their interplay is like a dance that makes things exist. The unity of a person is different from the unity of a family, of a village, of a nation. And the unity of one and its difference from the others is the way that the higher unities are formed. It is by being somewhat opaque and different from my neighbor that can make us want to unite together to form a village or a couple.

[00:24:47]Transparency is not needed. In fact, full transparency leads to the elimination of community. Absolute difference is also impossible as there would be no reason to join with my neighbor to form a friendship or a village. We would have nothing in common. Rather, it is the interplay and dance between unity and difference which makes the world a world of purpose, meaning and ultimately a world where love is possible.

[00:25:17]The problem is that it is also this interplay which can lead to violence, to jealousy, war and the atrocities that we all know from human history. One cannot eliminate how difference can lead to war and death or how unity can lead to tyranny or fragility when engaging in the dance of the one and the many. This is the risk of existence itself.

[00:25:44]But it is precisely the subtle dance, a gentle swaying between our tendency towards one and our tendency towards difference at every level of reality we exist in as people, as couples, families, communities, nation, knowing that it is the formation of one which produces difference and the formation of difference which produces the one. Each causing each other and love is when they dance together.

[00:26:13]by showing us the extremes of their division. Hopefully, series like Pluribus remind us of how the one and the many should coexist, help us see the dangers of modern life and systems in the very way they accentuate that division to increasing peril of both the one and of the many.