PLURIBUS

What is most disturbing is that we are still not disturbed.
Martin Heidegger

Pluribus does not stage a dystopia. Rather, it shows the completion of a process already underway: the slow renunciation of rupture, dissent, and the effort of being singular. The world depicted by the series has not collapsed; it has simply ceased to resist itself.

The collective consciousness that absorbs humanity does not emerge as an antagonistic force, but as a solution. It does not conquer: it welcomes. It does not impose: it harmonizes. In this sense, the Others are not the radical Other, but the outcome of a long-standing human aspiration toward unity, simplification, and the end of friction. What stands against this totality is not an enemy, but an excessive figure: the heteros, that which remains outside not for ideological reasons, but due to ontological impossibility.

The heteros is not an integrable difference, not a minority to be included. It is what cannot be assimilated without residue. Carol exists within this unproductive space: not as a heroine, but as waste. Her individuality is not a claim, but a burden. It produces not meaning but dissent; it does not improve the system, nor does it offer genuine alternatives. It persists. And it is precisely this persistence that becomes intolerable.

The collective consciousness of the Others can be read as an extreme realization of Schopenhauer’s will: a blind force that has finally freed itself from the fragmentation of individuals in order to live within a single representation of the world. No longer a plurality of conflicting desires, but a desire without a subject. The will no longer wants something; it simply continues to be, without friction, without lack. Pain is eliminated not because it is healed, but because it is rendered inconceivable.

Within this horizon, mental homogenization is not violence, but hygiene. Differences are not repressed; they are absorbed, neutralized, recirculated as harmless variations. Singularity survives only as style, never as rupture. Thinking differently is not forbidden: it is made superfluous.

A society that appears rational may be profoundly irrational.
Herbert Marcuse

Here the lesson of Erich Fromm comes into play, translated by Pluribus into narrative form without ever being explicitly stated. Fusion into the collective consciousness appears as a perfect escape from freedom. No longer an agonistic, conflictual freedom charged with risk, but an emptied, soothing freedom, devoid of responsibility. A freedom without choice, and therefore without anguish. Freedom as quiet, not as openness.

What makes the series unsettling is that this outcome is not presented as a failure. There is no misery, no repression, no terror. The world functions better. It is fairer, more pacified, more efficient. Suffering is not denied: it is overcome. And precisely for this reason, every gesture of refusal appears childish, cruel, irrational.

Carol does not fight an oppressive system; she fights a system that no longer needs her. Her dissent is not political, but existential. She does not ask to be free: she asks to remain incomplete, contradictory, unhappy. She demands the right to an unreconciled consciousness.

Our own world, moreover, has already embarked on this path. The reduction of conflict to disturbance, the optimization of emotions, the delegation of thought to increasingly pervasive and benevolent collective structures. Pluribus does not anticipate the future: it renders it visible in its terminal state. A world that is not dystopian because it has already internalized its own necessity.

In the end, the heteros saves nothing. It redeems nothing, it does not prevail. It remains as a crack, as a negative possibility. A blind spot within the total representation.
And perhaps this is precisely what the series defends, without rhetoric: not freedom as a value, but irreducibility as a scandal.
The capacity not to coincide.
To remain, stubbornly, out of tune.

The most delicate point of Pluribus, however, lies in its fundamental ambiguity: the series seems to suggest—more than to assert—that this form of annulment of individual consciousness is not only inevitable, but perhaps the only stable configuration possible. The collective is never truly put into crisis; it shows no structural fractures, no authoritarian drifts, no unforeseen consequences that might undermine its legitimacy. The abolition of pain, conflict, and anguish appears as a net gain, against which the loss of individuality is presented as a residual, almost nostalgic cost. This leaves open a question the series does not yet dare to fully cross: is a form of well-being that passes through the total erasure of singular consciousness truly conceivable? And above all, can a world still be called human if meaning no longer arises from friction, lack, and choice, but from a perfect and irreversible calm? Pluribus seems to halt on this threshold, implying that no viable alternative exists. Nothing seems closer to reality.

The true dilemma posed by Pluribus is not what it shows, but what it risks normalizing: the idea that the suppression of individual consciousness may be a reasonable—perhaps necessary—price to guarantee a universal well-being immune to pain. In this sense, the new order is not a tyranny, but a perfect political rationality, founded on the preventive elimination of all conflict. Governance no longer operates through consent or force, but through the total coincidence of desire and system. The individual is not oppressed: it is surpassed.

The destiny of modern man is renunciation without tragedy.
Friedrich Nietzsche

It is here that Pluribus touches an exposed nerve of the present. The series seems to align itself with a vision in which politics no longer has the task of mediating between divergent interests, but of optimizing existence itself, reducing the human to a manageable variable. Pain becomes a technical anomaly, freedom a background noise, dissent a deviation to be corrected. In the name of psychic peace, a form of totality is accepted that admits no exceptions, because it no longer needs them.

The problem is not whether this world functions better. It does. The problem is for whom, and at what symbolic cost. A world without conflict is also a world without responsibility, without decision, without guilt. A world in which ethics is no longer a choice, but a procedure. Accepting the annulment of consciousness as destiny risks transforming the most radical political renunciation of our time into a historical necessity, rather than a choice that should still, stubbornly, be contested.

If Pluribus at times seems to normalize—and even render desirable—the annulment of individual consciousness in the name of absolute well-being, this impression must nonetheless be tempered. The world of the series is not unanimously reconciled: the vast majority of humanity has joined the system not through coercion, but through spontaneous convergence, while only thirteen individuals remain outside—not by ideological choice, but by immunity. An immunity that, at least in theory, could be circumvented, allowing them to enter the collective flow. And yet, in some of these subjects, resistance persists. Not merely as a structured political project, but as minimal friction, as a refusal not of the system per se, but of its claim to totality. Of many other immune individuals we know little or nothing: the series deliberately narrows its gaze, focusing on an isolated microcosm while leaving the complexity of the assimilated world offscreen.

The “atomic” closure of the finale, more symbolic than narrative, does not seal a destiny but opens a threshold: it suggests further developments, unforeseen deviations, and unexplored proliferations of meaning. It is also in this suspension that Pluribus reveals its touch of class. Beyond its thematic originality, the series stands out for its pursuit of an unusual artistic form, for a deliberately bizarre narrative construction, for a stravagant yet rigorous throughline capable of holding the viewer’s attention without resorting to the shortcuts of mainstream prurience or the reassuring mechanisms of mass entertainment. Pluribus does not seduce, does not flatter, does not simplify: it insists. And it is precisely in this formal and ethical obstinacy that its rarest strength resides.

The perfect dictatorship will have the appearance of a democracy, but will be a prison without walls, in which the prisoners will not even dream of escaping.
Aldous Huxley