What Will Happen If Our World Flips Like Apple TV's Pluribus?

Quick Note: Reviews of new movies, TV series, music are everywhere. When I started watching Pluribus, I didn’t want to write another review but thought of experimenting with it in a different style: a mix of personal essay + some of my reading brain experience peeled out + merge it with history/science/ideas. Wired Magazine often does such ‘what-if-in-real-life’ kind of pieces, and I thought, why shouldn’t I? So here goes:

When I started watching Pluribus, I loved that the series had zero visual effects. It is from the creator of Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan, and I was expecting it to be exceptionally great. It is. Rhea Seehorn, the actress who plays the protagonist Carol, is fabulous—good, rude, very short-tempered, and she just aces it .

The premise is simple: What happens when just one short-tempered novelist is the only person (along with another dozen) who can make ‘sense’ after an alien virus infects the rest of the world? ‘Turned’ humans become part of a singular hive mind and can only speak the truth and cannot harm each other — a self-imposed law that means they do not even chop trees or pluck vegetables. The world comes to a standstill. The ‘humans’ then try to convince Carol how best they can help her.

While watching, I wondered: What will happen if there is literally no evil, no need for struggle? It made me think about the science behind it, the philosophy, the logic. So I did what any writer would do: I researched both sides. What if eliminating violence and struggles created paradise? And what if it destroyed everything that makes us human?

We have been told that when we struggle is when we become the best version of ourselves. While devouring essays, I noticed a pattern: philosophers from Nietzsche to Hannah Arendt argue adversity is constitutive of human greatness. Evolutionary biologists like Richard Wrangham show that intergroup conflict drove human cooperation itself. 

Psychologists document that post-traumatic growth requires challenge. Political theorists warn that eliminating opposition leads to institutional weakness. The research suggests a violence-free world might produce existential emptiness, institutional decay, and evolutionary stagnation.

Reading all this research made me think of my days back in college: I flunked engineering math in my first semester. Scoring an arrear on your transcript was considered a taboo, a black mark—people assumed you can't graduate, won't get a job, that you're fundamentally broken. I remember how nobody at college really offered how to see my failure in math as an opportunity to learn but just an extra burden to carry for the next semester. But that failure changed everything: I distracted myself by writing obsessively to vent my frustration. Eventually, I realized: maybe I actually enjoyed this. Maybe writing is what I need to do. Perhaps the struggle was necessary for me to pivot to writing?

The supporting character in Pluribus, Zosia (played by Karolina Wydra), who acts as Carol’s chaperone, tells her the perspective of the hive mind. She reasons with Carol that the world is a better place now with no struggles. Flashbacks sparked off my college days yet again–I've told the story of failing math to myself for years as proof that struggle builds character. My failure created my writing ability. But what would have happened if I hadn’t failed math? Would I have been an engineer today? Perhaps a science writer?

I've always been drawn to fictional world-building. I admired Pluribus' minimal effort in showing more by crafting less—spoiler ahead!—it doesn't reveal the virus' cause, nor does it show the aliens. The infected merely refer to themselves as "we."

This drives them to work as packs. Wars stop. Everyone has the IQ of the smartest person on the planet because they can "access memories" through a "single mind." Every child can answer complicated scientific questions.

So in my quest to dig through the history of "have we been close to developing a utopian society," here's what I found: Eliminating violence wouldn't create emptiness. It would unlock the largest economic boom in human history.

Violence costs humanity $14.4 trillion annually—10.5% of global GDP. The ten countries most affected lose up to 59% of their GDP to conflict. The most peaceful? Only 3.9%.

We've seen this pattern before. Pre-Islamic Arabia was defined by jahiliyyah—an era of injustice, incivility, inhumanness. When Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) established the Constitution of Medina in 622 CE, replacing blood feuds with individual accountability, the transformation was dramatic: This period is considered the Golden Age of Islam because he was one of the first to establish rules of law, ethics, and conduct—guiding what makes us human. What happened? Within a century, the Arabian Peninsula, the Middle East and the Mediterranean nations saw cultural growth spikes. Baghdad grew to over one million people with 36 public libraries, and so did Córdoba in Europe.

Likewise, Costa Rica abolished its military in 1948. GDP growth jumped. Today, it ranks No. 6 globally for happiness—the happiest country in the Americas. When violence recedes, civilization explodes. Rutger Bregman argues we waste talent on meaningless jobs when we should build a society aimed at betterment rather than endless growth. His ideas often focus on safety, community and access to better healthcare with less struggle.

Whenever I watch shows like Pluribus, I often try to look behind the frameworks the creator brings. Where are we heading? What does it mean for us? Pluribus was indeed entertainment, but it also flooded my brain with questions I didn't expect: When Carol faces a world where no one can harm anyone, it feels dystopian. Something feels wrong. But maybe that's conditioning thanks to the constant bombardment of hate speech and violence on our social media feeds. When violence/hatred recedes, humans flourish (as we saw in the stats from Costa Rica and ancient Arabia).

The show made me wonder: Just like the infected humans who tell Carol they have shifted resource for essential healthcare, what if we really did have an alien virus that gave us a hive mind to solve healthcare, climate change, natural disasters together as a whole?

I was also left thinking: What if we lived on Mars and rebuilt society from scratch? What if everyone had healthcare? What if there were no billionaires, no genocide, no monopolistic countries?

These are absurd questions—but absurdity is where creativity lives. Questions that push against the status quo could be the answers we need for a new tomorrow. Maybe paradise, a ‘utopian’ society like Pluribus, doesn't feel wrong because it's impossible. Maybe it feels wrong because we've been taught our entire lives that we need suffering to deserve greatness. But perhaps we can still touch greatness if we do get access to better everything with less struggle. Maybe a Pluribus world then might not be a dystopian nightmare. |

And that’s all for today!

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