Spoiler alert for season 1 of Pluribus. Also, I just finished watching the show and haven’t looked into anyone else’s hot takes, so apologies of this one has already been said. But to me, whether intentionally or not, Pluribus is a striking metaphor for Trump and the MAGA movement in the United States.

The show Pluribus is about a virus, the recipe for which was transmitted to earth from an unknown alien civilization that is never met and remains mysterious. Unbeknownst to the scientists who receive this transmission, the virus joins all those infected into a single hive mind sharing all memories, thoughts, and senses. Ignorant of this intention, the scientists on earth use the recipe to engineer the virus in hopes of studying it, but in the process the virus ends up escaping the lab, resulting in most people on earth being ‘joined’ (their word) into this hive mind. Many people die during the joining process (some 800 million) while just thirteen people across the entire planet are naturally immune. The story follows one of the immune, Carol Sturka, whose wife was one of the people who died during the joining process. Carol finds the hive mind odd, disturbing, and dehumanizing. Yet the hive mind are not violent, and in fact are overly happy, conciliatory, and honest. They do not wish harm on Carol or the other survivors, wanting only to please them, indulging in their every desire. Indeed, they admit they would even deliver a nuclear weapon to Carol if she asked them to (and even make good on this in the very least scene of the season). The hive mind is averse to causing injury to any living thing, willing eventually to let the bodies joined to the hive mind die rather than harming a plant to harvest its fruit. They therefore eat only things leftover from before the joining or fruits that have fallen from trees on their own accord (among other things). But, the hive mind tells Carol up front that they are working around the clock to find a way of joining her and the others who have resistance to the virus into the hive mind. They speak of their desire to incorporate her as a biological imperative and that Carol will discover, once enjoined, that she is much better off. The other people who are resistant, with the exception of the reclusive Manousos Oviedo, have no objections to the new state of the world, seeing that the planet is now devoid of crime, bigotry, poverty, and other perennial issues that plagued human civilization. Carol hates what has happened and cannot contemplate why nobody else seems to share her outrage, but throughout the season begins accepting it until the end of the final episode where she joins with Manousos in their nascent attempt to try turning the world back into what it was before the hive mind.

There are other interpretations of Pluribus that are probably just as much in evidence as the one I’m laying out here. The COVID pandemic, with the possible lab-leak aspect to the virus, spreading and causing everyone to behave in different, and sometimes strange ways, is one possible interpretation. The rise of AI, people’s (begrudging or otherwise) acceptance of it, and its alien sort of intelligence, its homogenizing influence on culture, and the collective delusions it inflicts on society, is another perfectly valid interpretation. Another might be that, because the main character Carol is gay, the show could also be seen as a metaphor for the harms of conversion therapy, with the hive mind attempting to force (with a cultish smile) Carol to abandon her nature and join what is, in the point of view of the hive mind, a healthier and happier society. Yet another is that it is a metaphor for colonialism, with the hive mind arriving uninvited from the outside and involuntarily denuding people of their culture and any control they had over their own destiny. But, I think the hive mind being a metaphor for the MAGA movement (and, really, the broader Christian Nationalist movement) is among the best lenses through which to view the show (at least season 1).

The MAGA movement is, and always has been, all about making people feel good, so long as they buy into its collective delusion. It doesn’t matter that it has made the world objectively worse, because it has never been about objective measures of well being. People suffer while Trump goes on TV to assure his marks that this is what winning feels like, and they believe him because at this point, with so many costs sunk into the cult, they have to swallow an increasingly unhinged fiction in order to sustain its palliative illusion. This is why Trump’s regime is the meme and podcast presidency. Online, the members of this deranged cult share among themselves a deluge of images and clips and memes, homogenizing them into a brain-rotted hive mind that looks absolutely bizarre to those immune to the reality distortion field. It’s a sort of mind virus that, for those who buy into it, makes them feel good, even while they are starved of any real intellectual curiosity or true, measurable progress toward a more fulfilling life. An ideology devoid of content, the extent to which one buys into the MAGA project is the measure of its success. But, just like those resistant to the hive mind virus in Pluribus, it us who are told we are defective in some way for rejecting this barren ideology. We are, the accusation goes, suffering Trump Derangement Syndrome for calling out the grotesque nature and harmful consequences of the movement’s shared delusions. And if this calling-out reaches a level of emotional charge commensurate with the damage being caused by the movement, the entire hive mind gets triggered and sort of short-circuits, unable to handle the fact that what they’re doing is harming people, not helping them.

A popular argument among Christian Nationalists is that many of the world’s current miseries came about because people abandoned Christianity. Western civilization jettisoned “Judeo-Christian values” in the name of diversity and pluralism and this brought us, the argument goes, the horrors of Woke-ism and the male loneliness epidemic. But, we can Make America Great Again if we just convert to an American/Trumpian version of Christianity and remove all the people who are deemed too different to join. In other words, if we hook ourselves up to the Christianity hive mind, we’ll all be better off, able to rally around an Americanized and jingoistic Christian monoculture. It doesn’t matter if God doesn’t exist and the happiness people may or may not feel after joining is based on lies, what matters is that people conform for the sake of social cohesion. If a lot of people must suffer and die to bring about this homogenizing project, that is a price the Christian hive mind is willing to pay, just like the hive mind in Pluribus was willing to kill off some 800 million people to conquer the world and join them to their Nozickian experience machine. But, just like how any good Fascist regime requires Enemies of the People to cultivate a veneer of legitimacy, the dead in Pluribus do not go to waste, able to be used to nourish the hive mind. Mass delusions must grow in the soil of the vanquished. 

In Pluribus, those who are not only resistant to the mind virus, but also actively resist the hive mind, are those who are too different. There is Carol, who is a gay woman whose wife died during the joining process, and Manousos, a man who migrated up into the U.S. from Latin America to seek out a way to bring down the hive mind. Ten of the other eleven people who are resistant to the mind virus did not experience the tragedy of losing loved ones and so are able to maintain the illusion that their lives are still comfortable and not that much different than before. Similarly, many people in the U.S. have not yet felt enough of the pain of the damage being done to our society and so can continue on as if everything is normal.

The exception among the eleven accepting the fate of the world is Koumba Diabaté, who takes on the persona of a very Trumpian style rich man, i.e., what poor people think rich people are like, complete with gaudy displays of opulence and wealth. He even demands to be flown around on Air Force One, on which he is taken to Las Vegas, where his hive mind “chaperones” are commanded to behave as sycophants who act out rolls in his hedonistic fantasies, like so many cabinet members sitting around a conference table to all but fellate the president. While Diabaté agrees with Carol that it’s a little off-putting that the hive mind consumes HDP (human derived protein) from all the people who died during the joining (or who have died since then), he’s able to look past it because this new world lets him feel good and gives him everything he wants, much like the previously Woke-capitalist tech billionaires who executed a heel-turn to become Trump bootlickers in his second term. The hive mind, in reality, took everything from Diabaté, but supplies all the trappings of winning at life, and so he is content to feel good while having nothing that truly matters.

Mid-season, while in the throes of despair at being abandoned by the hive mind after she displayed Hive Mind Derangement Syndrome, Carol spends her time lighting off fireworks as if to remind herself of the America she lost to the mind virus. With the hive mind like an enshittified tech company, incapable of creating anything novel, only able to extract value from what humans had built up to that point, Carol attempts to recapture memories from a life she will never get back. She visits the now vacant restaurants she and her deceased wife used to visit and goes to the deserted museum to see the works of her favorite artist, a painting of which she then loots as if attempting to recapture that past more concretely. Yet living in nostalgia does nothing to remedy her depression. Feeling out of options, she begs the hive mind to return and tries forcing herself to love it. She gains some semblance of happiness, but is reminded that behind the scenes, the hive mind, like an alien Heritage Foundation, works tirelessly to find a way to overcome her natural resistance and force her to join. Because that’s what matters to the hive mind, that people are joined to it. Things like agency and bodily autonomy do not matter, because the hive mind is convinced that Carol will be so much happier once she joins. Similarly, for Christian Nationalism it does not matter whether or not God exists, or that LGBT people definitely do exist, or that Christianity doesn’t end suffering but merely covers it up, what matters is that everyone joins them in their homogenized hive mind. Just like no person (with the exception of Kusimayu) was given the choice in whether or not they join, by taking over the government through lies and fraud, the MAGA movement (and Christian Nationalism in general) has foisted themselves upon the rest of the U.S. and told us it’s for our own good. It’s revealed that the hive mind even plans to beam the recipe for joining it at other planets as well, in an attempt to get all life forms in the galaxy to join, just like how MAGA is making itself not just America’s problem, but the whole world’s problem. 

Concluding Remarks

As with any interpretation of a text, this one almost certainly does not account for everything present in the text, i.e., it is underdetermined by the evidence. Multiple interpretations are possible, and this is just one of them. I’m sure those in the MAGA movement could come up with their own self-serving interpretations that casts the hive mind as their enemies. But the above is the interpretation I couldn’t help but view the first season through as I watched the show.

It will be interesting to see where Pluribus goes in future seasons. Much like the MAGA movement, one wonders if, should society successfully shake off the mass delusion, whether the former members will thank the rest of us for it. One criticism that the left has for capitalism is that it fools people into thinking they’re happy. But what is the major difference between one actually being happy and being fooled that one is happy? If the MAGA movement succeeds in plunging the U.S. into third world country status and allows China to ascend into unipolar superpower status, but they’re happy doing it, one wonders if it would do any good to shatter their illusion. Similarly, if Carol and Manousos “save the world” and remove everyone from the hive mind, those people will be met with a world where almost a billion people were killed and society as they knew it has collapsed, and they won’t even have the intoxicating contentment of their mind virus to numb the pain. They may yearn for the mind-numbing comfort of their enslavement.