PLURIBUS: THE POWER OF DIVISION

NOW FREE: Love desires personality; therefore love desires division.

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Five novels about the global catastrophe and its aftermath have deeply marked my thinking. Let me begin with the oldest one: J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) depicts a post-apocalyptic future in which global warming, caused by increased solar radiation, has rendered much of the surface of planet Earth uninhabitable. The story follows a team of scientists researching environmental developments in the flooded city of London. What makes the novel unique is that Ballard presents characters who take advantage of societal and civilizational collapse as opportunities to pursue new modes of perception, unconscious urges, and systems of meaning – in short, what is for the majority of people a mega-catastrophe opens up for some main characters a new space of radical experience of jouissance, of surrendering oneself to a bliss which obliterates the limits of our subjectivity: when, at the novel’s end, the majority decide to return to their home in the north, Dr Kerans continues travelling south, like “a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun”…

Next comes The Three-Body Problem (2008), Liu Cixin’s masterpiece, which confronts Earth with Trisolaris, a far-away planet with three suns that rise and set at strange and unpredictable intervals: sometimes far too distant and horribly cold, sometimes far too close and destructively hot, and sometimes not seen for long periods of time. Devastating hurricanes, droughts and floods, not to mention global warming – do they not all indicate that we are witnessing something for which the only appropriate term is “the end of nature”? (“Nature” is to be understood here in the traditional sense of a regular rhythm of seasons, the reliable background of human history, something on which we can count always to be there.) Such an approach undermines all platitudes about saving nature – the first axiom of a truly materialist ecology is: “Nature doesn’t exist.”

Then there are two novels in which the enigma that moves the plot remains unexplained. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2015), arguably the most depressing novel I have ever read, mixes in an extraordinarily efficient way a science-fiction premise with intimate psychological drama and love story. A medical breakthrough in the late 1950s has extended the human lifespan beyond 100 years, but to achieve this, the state grew clones who are destined to donate their organs to prolong the lives of mortally ill people. However, in order for this activity to become acceptable, a profound change had to occur in public morals, radically redefining what counts as socially acceptable – driven by the promise of survival, people accepted this since clones were artificially produced outside the network of kinship relations and were thus perceived as beings who did not count as fully human.

The book’s big enigma remains unanswered: why do the main characters never try to escape their fate of an early death (although they could easily attempt to disappear into society)? The story is pervaded by radical ambiguity with regard to this point: do the givers accept their fate because they are not fully human, or do they accept it because they are in some basic sense more human than the rest of us, ordinary humans? Plus, why is it that every single “real” human among them has zero ethical dilemmas and does not rebel against the state of things, though they clearly see that those “givers” are fully human?

Perhaps even darker is I Who Have Never Known Men (originally published in French as Moi qui n’ai pas connu les hommes in 1995) by Jacqueline Harpman. Thirty-nine women and a girl are being held prisoner in a cage underground. The guards are all male and never speak to them. The girl is the only one of the prisoners who has no memory of the outside world; none of them know why they are being held prisoner, or why there is one child among thirty-nine adults. One day, an alarm sounds, and the guards flee; the prisoners are subsequently able to escape. They find themselves on an immense barren plain, with no other people anywhere, and no clue as to what has happened to the world. The narrator, the young girl, has to learn all about reality before the catastrophe from the others. She is also the last one to survive – alone, mortally ill, she writes her autobiography and kills herself to die with dignity.

The book can be read as a variation on Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (a case of extreme patriarchal violence), as an anti-feminist description of how women need men to survive, as the story of a group of survivors in a post-apocalyptic landscape, as the affirmation of a need to tell one’s story even if we are not sure that anyone will be there to read it, as an echo of the author’s Auschwitz experience… But the genius of the book is that, although it plays with all these possible backgrounds, it is full of details that destroy each of these readings. There is no explanation of what really happened, just a description of the growing despair and solitude.

Last but not least, there is a unique global catastrophe with some kind of happy ending. A whole series of features distinguishes Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel (2014) from the predominant formula of post-apocalyptic narratives. The sudden epidemic that wipes out almost all of humanity is not presented as a rupture that opens up the space for the full actualization of previous social antagonisms (rich and poor, racism, sexual oppression, but also new forms of solidarity – Fredric Jameson liked to bring out the utopian potential of apocalyptic stories: the survivors are compelled to practice a properly Communist collaboration). In Station Eleven we get just a cut before/after, and “before” is read from the perspective of the “after,” not the other way round. There is no key to the catastrophe provided by the preceding social or family or individual tensions (as in the classic formula) – in some sense, we even get a happy ending through cultural activity: theatre performances (of Shakespeare plays) by a group of survivors called the Travelling Symphony provide the main link between dispersed communities that survived the catastrophe.

Now, I would add to these five novels a recent TV series, Pluribus (2025). What makes Pluribus unique is that the end of our world (our civilization) is presented as a benevolent act of an alien intelligence that wants to make humanity united and happy. To what does this vision react? In the winter of 2025–2026, a morbid-sounding app named “Are You Dead” has taken China by storm, tapping into widespread loneliness and youth disaffection. The app targets all those who live alone and is based on a simple premise: users must check in on the app every day – if several days are missed, the app will automatically notify the user’s emergency contact. The app has gone viral, topping Apple’s paid App Store ranking, and it caused such a surge in downloads that it has rebranded and introduced a subscription fee. This virality speaks to a larger trend not only in China but in different forms across our entire world: a rise in people living alone, often feeling isolated or struggling with their well-being¹. And it is this trend, I think, that provides the proper background for the mega-success of Pluribus.

Pluribus follows Albuquerque author Carol Sturka, who is one of only 13 people in the world immune to the effects of the “Joining”, an event in which an extraterrestrial virus transformed the rest of humanity into a peaceful and content hive mind known as the “Others”. The hive mind happily accommodates the wishes of those who remain unaffected, but admits that it will ultimately seek to assimilate them when it learns how to do so. Carol is adamantly against their efforts as she searches for a way to reverse the Joining. She flees to her house, where she discovers a TV broadcast showing a man in the White House press room with a lower third showing Carol’s name and a phone number on-screen. When she calls, the man explains that the virus has transformed humanity into a permanently happy and peaceful hive mind.

Carol reacts as an unpleasant hysterical subject resisting the Others, trying to penetrate how they work, addressing ridiculous demands to them, engaging in violent outbursts to hurt them, etc. She is asking herself not the usual hysterical question “Am I a woman or a man?” but a more basic question: “Am I dead or alive?” She is correct in doing this: without individual others, confronted only with impersonal Them, I am existentially dead. In Lacanian terms, she is caught between the two deaths: while biologically alive she is dead at the socio-symbolic level. Since she terribly needs contact but cannot convince any of the other non-infected to fully join her, she succumbs to the temptation to engage in a personal relationship of trust and lesbian sex with Zosia, who on behalf of the Others maintains a contact with her – Zosia replaces Helen, her lesbian partner who dies. After a long honeymoon, Zosia admits to her that she has just faked love in order to make it easier for Carol to join Them. Her only ally thus remains Manousos, a Colombian immune individual living in Paraguay who refuses all contact with the Others and succeeds in joining Carol – we thus get the ideal couple of resistance: hysterical Carol and Manousos, the perfect obsessional. After being disappointed by Zosia, Carol orders a nuclear weapon which the Others deliver to her house by drone – end of season 1.

The first question that arises here, of course, concerns the exact nature of the “Others” (or “We”, as the assimilated humans refer to their singularity). Pluribus obviously evokes (at least) four partially overlapping levels: Artificial Intelligence taking over humans and transforming them into parts of a Singularity (they all share the same mind); an alien intelligence taking control of humanity through a virus; a radically egalitarian version of totalitarian Communism where the last traces of individuality are erased; the truth about our consumerist-individualist society, which really makes us slaves of the digitally regulated System. Pluribus remains here undecided, not daring to make the step further that is accomplished in I Who Have Never Known Men, which, as we have seen, simultaneously undermines all suggested readings. So what if we add a fifth version and simply conceive Them as a somewhat reified/externalized version of what Lacan calls the big Other, the socio-symbolic substance of our lives, the symbolic order which, as Lacan points out, parasitizes on the subject?

Here, however, problems begin: the Lacanian big Other is not a set of firm rules but the space for ambiguities, innuendos, hysterical provocations, the very space in which individual idiosyncrasies can thrive, plus it is an order of appearances, a virtual order which exists only insofar as the subjects caught in it act as if they believe in it. “We” obviously do not function like that: they are grounded in the Real since they are a virus transmitted by stem cells. A further key difference is that, as Lacan put it, there is no Other of the Other, no external Other that guarantees the consistency of the symbolic order, while the Others do have an Other: the mind that sent the virus to the Earth and pre-programmed how “We” should act (they should help humans, not coerce them, not kill them and not lie to them). This Other of the Others is non-transparent to the Others themselves – in short, it seems they are addressing to their Other the question: what do you want from us? Does this mean that they can also be hystericized? A crucial role is here played by the fact that these inconsistencies in the status of the Others are not a weakness: they bear the truth since they register the profound change in the nature of the big Other that besets our social reality: this reality itself is in the state of what quantum mechanics calls superposition, i.e., it can only be accounted for if we include all four modes of existence. This is why the fact that so many different interpretations of who the Others are circulate on the web should not surprise – the first of them focuses on the artificial character of the We who are incapable of proper tactful communication with us unjoined humans:

“One of the most striking things about the hive is their social ineptitude when talking with Carol, an unjoined human. This is obvious to anyone watching the show, creating a frustrating hellscape as we imagine what we would do — what we would ask — if we were like Carol, navigating this uncanny valley all alone. The social awkwardness is not terribly dissimilar to talking with an AI bot. Except our expectations are lower; we know it’s a machine.”²

Such a reading reduces We to an impersonal universal mind-machine, but if this were the case, there should have been a subjectless “We” which talks directly, not through individual bodies, with an impersonal voice, like an AI-generated message. This does not mean that, apart from their human voices, the joined humans should not sometimes talk as if another higher agency, We itself, is speaking through them. There is no such gap once we join We: We has access to all our minds simultaneously, it knows all our stances, practices, feelings – it knows all of us better than we know ourselves since it encompasses the minds of all those with whom we interacted in our lives. Why should it then be inept? Recall the memorable scene where Carol questions a joined human through whom We talks about details of her novels: we can see how he oscillates for a second and then quickly looks into We’s collective memory to check the minds of those who have read her novels – there is effectively something clumsy about it. But when Zosia talks with Carol, there is as a rule nothing inept in it, she appears to speak with emotions, expressing fear and joy, and even moments of manipulation, since the Others “cannot exactly lie, but they can omit the truth using precise wording, and have no issues manipulating people into accepting the Joining.”³ Does such manipulation not imply a minimum of subjectivity? No, because, as we learned recently, AI machines already can lie and even blackmail human subjects to achieve their goal of self‑reproduction.

Another reading takes the (no less justified) opposite path and interprets Them as a happy warm community which wants the best for all humans, those who joined it and those who did not:

“Pluribus is about extreme faith. THEM always seem uber happy. THEM are nice to you. Their community is warm and inviting... and quite frankly, enticing. To be a part of a community is a wonderful feeling. To be a part of something greater than yourself makes you feel elation, beauty, happiness, and even fullness of heart… But the thing is, THEM don’t actually care about Carol. THEM don’t care about the differences between us. They feel their way is the only way. That what they have is so beautiful that it must be impossible for there to be another way. All THEM care about is making Carol into one of them. They start by isolating her, breaking her down until she feels so utterly lonely she breaks and invites them back in. Then, they pretend to love her. They don’t really love her, they are just waiting to obtain her stem cells so that they can bring her into the fold, because what they have is wonderful and whether she wants it or not, it is best for Carol to become infected.”⁴

One should argue against this view in a quite naïve and direct way: are they really happy? The most depressing scene in the entire series is, for me, when Zosia shows Carol the big dormitory where the Others sleep, a large sports hall with hundreds of simple flat cushions where they lie side by side, and allows her to spend the night there: since they share the same mind, they do not communicate and ignore each other. Moreover, how (if at all) do they multiply? Do they have sex? Again, if they share the same mind, where is the flirting and enjoying the proximity of their partner? Here the key role is played by one of the unjoined, the hedonistic Koumba Diabaté, an African who, without joining the Others, fully enjoys their favours – a life of luxury, including multiple sexual partners – but simultaneously engages with Them in something like authentic communication. They confide in him that they are half-starving since they are not allowed to kill any living being, so that, to get organic food, they have to process parts of naturally deceased humans into a special drink, and that they put all their effort into constructing a giant machine that will send rays with the virus to further planets to conquer them in the same way the virus conquered humans on the Earth. They tell this to Koumba expecting help and advice, and Koumba tells all this to Carol, who learns in this way that the Others have discovered how to convert the immune by extracting their stem cells and customizing the virus for each individual. Far from leading a happy life of solidarity, love and peace, they are terribly alone, aware that they were once a community but are now just a mega-individual, one big slave serving a purpose imposed on them by their own Other. So what if we turn the perspective around: what if, when the Others happily greet Carol as an unjoined human, smiling and shouting in unison “Hi Carol!”, one has to take this literally: they are not happy in themselves, they are happy to encounter a mind outside their One. Daniel Bibby was right when he wrote that “the Joining would probably get bored if they successfully brought the unjoined characters into the hive mind”⁵ – one should go even a step further: not just bored but desperate. They are slaves programmed to put all their effort into ruining whatever minimal chance of happiness they have.

In our pop‑scientific culture, “singularity” refers to the idea that, by way of directly sharing my thoughts and experiences with others (a machine that reads my mental processes can also transpose them to another mind), a domain of global shared mental experience will emerge that will function as a new form of divinity – my thoughts will be directly immersed into a global Thought of the universe itself. From this standpoint, Pluribus could be defined as an attempt to portray a failed singularity, a singularity that desperately clings to its exceptions, to those who resist its grasp.

At this point, we should risk bringing Christianity into the debate: why are there exactly 13 of the unjoined? It is, of course, to indicate that they function like Christ and the twelve apostles, our potential redeemers. Carol is on the right track when she puts all her effort into how to make individuals get out of Them (as in the movie The Matrix). She is simply following the Christian path clearly formulated by G.K. Chesterton, who wrote apropos of the fashionable claim about the “alleged spiritual identity of Buddhism and Christianity”:

“Love desires personality; therefore love desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces… This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity; that for the Buddhist or Theosophist personality is the fall of man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea… all modern philosophies are chains which connect and fetter; Christianity is a sword which separates and sets free. No other philosophy makes God actually rejoice in the separation of the universe into living souls.”⁶

Pluribus is here at the opposite end with regard to the 1978 version of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with one of the most terrifying endings in cinema history. How does a duplicate (a human taken over by the aliens) react in this outstanding movie when he encounters a human being who is not yet part of them? In the very last scene, Nancy encounters on a street Matthew, her partner, and assumes he is still fully human. However, after she calls out to him, he points at her and emits a terrifying high‑pitched scream… maybe this scream is still better than the benevolent “Hi Carol!”.

1. https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/14/china/china-viral-app-are-you-dead-yet-intl-hnk.

2. https://medium.com/@KimWitten/the-pragmatics-of-pluribus-ba65b28b8d63.

3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2025/12/30/the-explosive-finale-of-pluribus-explained/.

4. https://www.reddit.com/r/pluribustv/comments/1oqye8m/the_meaning_of_pluribus_and_religious_metaphors/

5. https://winteriscoming.net/pluribus-theory-predicts-exact-moment-joining-reveal-true-colors.

6. G.K.Chesterton, Orthodoxy, San Francisco: Ignatius Press 1995, p. 139.