If you’ve watched the first two episodes of Pluribus, it’s hard not to ask: what if our world really became a shared mind? No more wars and hate; a planet synchronized by euphoria and “humanity.” Given how things are going, that doesn’t sound so terrible.
My husband disagrees. He thinks humans weren’t made to live that way. But hear me out: what if science could script a kind of “peace” without erasing autonomy. RNA tuned for transcendence without losing the self? Wouldn’t that be… tempting?
Our world now needs a hard reset. Think of Sudan. Syria. The relentless news of cruelty. Envy and malice. Racism, greed, the compulsion to dominate. Imagine a universe where none of that exists. A world where people actually honour one another’s dignity. Isn’t that the dream presidents summon in their State of the Nation speeches and pastors pray over every week?
What Pluribus is actually doing
Vince Gilligan’s new Apple TV+ series frames that dream as a nightmare-adjacent thought experiment: a signal from space catalyses a biological cascade, and most of humanity merges into a blissful hive mind. They’re not zombies. They’re very lucid, “really, really happy people who still have all their faculties.”
Critics have been impressed so far. The show opened to a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score and has earned praise for its audacious pilot and Rhea Seehorn’s performance.
The ethical hinge: Peace without personhood?
Here’s where the show needles: if we could abolish war and hatred by fusing minds, would the cure be worse than the disease? Pluribus keeps reminding us that this “happiness” arrived with catastrophic cost and coerced consent. These are facts that complicate any utopian reading. Something my husband reminded me of: though peace and happiness matter, our independence and personhood matter too.
A note from Gettysburg
During our discussion (or better yet, disagreements) about the show, for some reason I began thinking of Abraham Lincoln’s two-minute address at Gettysburg. In 1863, after a battlefield soaked in civil war, Lincoln spoke just 271 words and reframed the meaning of sacrifice and national purpose. He urged a “new birth of freedom,” so that government “of the people, by the people, for the people” would endure.
Why invoke Lincoln here? Because Pluribus offers a seductive peace that bypasses the messy work of self-governance. Lincoln’s answer to war wasn’t uniformity of mind; it was recommitment to liberty and equality.
Where I’ve landed (for now)
Pluribus leaves me torn. A world without hate sounds holy, until I remember that love without freedom isn’t love at all (I’ve had to agree with my husband). The happiness being sold to us on the show is not true happiness. I want the reset, yes, but not at the expense of the stubborn, sacred friction of being human: dissent, conscience, the right to be wrong, and the chance to become better. If there’s a path to peace worth having, it looks less like merging minds and more like Lincoln’s charge of imperfect people recommitting to hard ideals, together.
So for now, I’ll simply wait to see how the next episodes unfold, enjoying the story, the science fiction, and the unsettling beauty of its ideas. And as I watch, I’ll keep hoping that the “reset” our world so desperately needs never arrives in the form of a collective hive mind, but through the quiet, human work of choosing peace, dignity, and compassion on our own.
Will you choose individuality or hive mind?