Pluribus: when harmony frightens us and happiness feels unsettling

What Is Really Behind Plur1bus?

Since the series began, something about it caught my attention in a different way. It doesn’t feel like just another production designed to distract or hook us through adrenaline. At least so far, Pluribus presents itself more as a mirror than as entertainment, a silent invitation to reflect on the moment we are living through as humanity.

Created by Vince Gilligan, the series builds a world transformed by something that closely resembles the idea of a unified collective consciousness. Suddenly, a large part of humanity undergoes a kind of “activation,” described in the narrative as an epidemic or neurological transformation, and the world changes radically. People appear calmer, more cooperative, more connected, as if the filter of the egoic mind had fallen away and everyone began accessing the same field of information, the same source.

A few humans, however, do not go through this transformation. Among them is Carol, the protagonist. She remains isolated, attached to the old world that no longer exists and to her own individuality. Carol ultimately becomes a symbol of this resistance, the resistance to the dissolution of the “self” into something greater.

It’s natural that many viewers identify with her struggle. Still, a question begins to emerge: why resist so strongly a state that seems to bring peace, harmony, and unity? Why long for the return of a world marked by competition, violence, fear, conflict, and psychological suffering?

Even without presenting itself as a spiritual work, Pluribus touches on deep and delicate themes. It questions our visceral attachment to the past, to old ways of living and feeling, to the pain we know, and also to the fragmented ego that fears the unknown.

On the spiritual path, the ego often appears as a defensive structure. It tries to protect us, yet at the same time imprisons us in repetitive patterns. Carol carries this primitive fear: the fear of losing identity when conflict ceases to exist, when there is no longer anything to fight against. The fear of dissolving boundaries. The fear of change. The series seems to place us before an essential question: is individuality truly our most precious asset, or merely a temporary stage of consciousness?

In Pluribus, the transformed humanity resembles a vast unified mental field, silent, peaceful, and connected.

Something many spiritual traditions describe as Samadhi, Christ Consciousness, Buddha Consciousness, or simply the return to the One. For a consciousness still attached to the ego, this may sound like a prison. For others, it may awaken a deep, almost ancestral memory of healing, belonging, and transcendence.

Perhaps what is most unsettling in the series is not the collective itself, but our difficulty in imagining a world where peace, love, and harmony are not imposed, but arise naturally as a consequence of a new level of consciousness, a world where conflict is no longer the axis of existence.

Pluribus gently exposes something we rarely question: our attachment to suffering, chaos, and the romanticization of struggle. It shows how accustomed we have become to pain, to the point of finding the possibility of living without it unsettling. And perhaps, without saying it directly, it asks whether the real fear is losing individuality, or letting go of the old world we learned to mistake for freedom.

The series is still unfolding, and we don’t yet know where it will lead. But the conversation it opens is already precious. Perhaps Pluribus is not about an external threat, but about humanity’s resistance to its own awakening, the fear of losing boundaries, the fear of silence, the fear of entering a space of greater presence, collaboration, and peace.

Curiously, this makes me think of a society of ants, not the hierarchical version we tend to project onto them, but a living organization where no one stands above another. A collective without kings or queens, sustained by a subtle network of connection that organizes the whole not through fear or control, but through natural harmony. Each being like a small node in a vast web, caring for the whole because it feels the whole.

In the series, what truly frightens Carol does not seem to be a concrete danger, but the silence of this shared field. It is not the collective that threatens her, but the dissolution of a separate, rigid “self,” shaped by a world built on competition, surveillance, and paranoia.

Pluribus reflects something profound about the modern psyche: we have been trained to distrust love, to suspect kindness, to interpret connection as a threat. That is why a society vibrating in harmony — as many Indigenous cultures and spiritual traditions recognize themselves to be part of a living organism — can feel frightening to a mind accustomed to egoic individualism.

Carol flees from love in the same way many of us flee from inner silence.

Not because it is dangerous, but because this silence dissolves the walls of the ego, and with them, everything we learned to believe was necessary in order to exist. The series shows this gently, using Carol as a mirror: when we resist connection, we suffer; when we relax into the flow, something greater within us begins to awaken.

Perhaps the new world of Pluribus is not a warning about yet another extraterrestrial domination or a conspiracy against humanity, narratives we are already saturated with. Perhaps it is not even about the loss of individuality, but an invitation to reflect on what kind of individuality we choose to keep sustaining. After all, the “self” was never an isolated territory; it was always just a room within a much larger house.

The ego tends to insist on the need for control, separation, conflict, and constant defense in order to survive. But there is another possibility: a conscious individuality that knows who it is without needing to oppose the whole. In this sense, Pluribus seems to offer us — gently — a silent choice: to continue defending a world built on fear, war, and surveillance, or to allow the “self” to relax, expand, and participate in a living, connected, cooperative network where harmony is not imposed, but arises naturally.

Perhaps the true dilemma is not between freedom and unity, but between remaining identified with an ego that believes it is in control or trusting a greater intelligence, where the “self” does not disappear, but finally finds its place within the whole.