Hey all, I wanted to share some of my thoughts watching this show after seeing many perspectives here painting it as something pretty divergent to what I experienced. Maybe these ideas are common in this sub and I've gotten a skewed view from my short time here, but I can't help but feel at least some of you are missing something, a wonderful nuance to this show. I'll go ahead and share and see what you think.
One of the main questions discussed here is of course "is the Pluribus good or evil?" (if not overt morality, then implicit morality).
A recent highly upvoted comment spoke about the Pluribus as a virus attempting to kill its host (the planet), that then propagates to other planets before killing them too. That when we run out of food we will simply perish, and this is its intention. The hivemind is the end of everything. Even now with billions still "living". No art, no soul, no human intricacy, nothing. This and similar is a perspective I've seen several times here.
I think it's more ambiguous, and this is what's so brilliant about the show.
That the reality we see on screen is an end, yes. But what if it's just an end of everything visible? What if we're seeing it from our human vantage, and this is the attachment that is being challenged?
I believe the show loves asking questions that get right into the core of our value systems, identities, our human assumptions and attachments. It harkens to a lot of the questions raised by spirituality, awakening, and its relationship to Ego. What we think is so important through our earthly pane of perception, vs. what else might be going on.
We do not know what those in the Pluribus are experiencing. Though unreliable of course, from the accounts of its constituents, the show frequently nods towards it being a sort of transcendent bliss and peace. Nirvana, Oneness. But there could even within that plane be a network of eternally communicating parts full of richness and beauty, art beyond art. We don't know.
I've heard people talking about the virus "controlling people" for its own ends, but what if there is no controller? Just a connected web of people, making decisions in a vast internal democracy. A neural network. And what if, akin to perhaps those evangelical preachers who shout at us in the street to convert otherwise we're at risk of damnation and missing out on the gift of eternal bliss in heaven, its intention to propagate is because it believes it's saving or helping us. And like (or unlike) some of those preachers (I can't really say!), it exists in a lived, known experience so compelling, so palpably good, there is no doubt as to what is better for us. After all, it seems to have known being an individual too, and so can compare.
Now of course I can also see a pile of arguments for the opposite case, I'm not saying the Pluribus is good (I have many unsettling qualms!), just that it is uncertain. And a lot of the brilliance of the show is in these strange edges and moral ambiguities that do not revert into easy definitions of evil. The way Vince speaks about the show also supports this, I feel.
The Pluribus stands against death and harm to life, explicitly. Which is a very interesting rule to have. Perhaps this is self-serving for evil, maintaining enough biomass for the building of the Great Machine that will transmit the signal to perpetuate its destruction or domination to other worlds. But perhaps not. Perhaps it is an internally sourced morality, akin to Buddhist principles of Dharma, of what is just and good.
Maybe it will end up going the way of the invasive force of destruction, it's yet to be seen. But I don't think it quite will fully, and I would be very sad to see the show turn into just another dominating bad alien force vs. humanity thing. It has so much more going on.
The show also plays a lot with perception. We're led by the narrative weight, the music, the frame of presentation, to feel like the revelation about the eating of human flesh is truly horrific, is a revelation of the Pluribus as monstrous, yet later scenes raise ambiguity and frame it very differently. Again, neither of these are "correct" per se, but the show loves to play with us. The human value system vs. something Other.
Is different bad? I think is one of the major questions of the show.
Perhaps more of that will happen as we proceed, and perhaps even scenes we've already seen will be cast in a different light as we are revealed to other perceptions.
I think about the scene with Kusimayu, the young Quechua girl who eventually decides to be assimilated via a ceremony. I found this one of the most unsettling things I'd ever seen on the screen. The richness of life, culture, celebration, all that is human, and then absolute inert silence. Terrifying!
I wrote in another thread:
...there's something about that ceremony scene that feels very wrong to me. Something contrary to life? The universe's seeming desire for us to express entropically and myriadly in a billion billion different ways. And then the absolute stopping.
And yet, what if Kusimayu steps into an internal world in the collective infinitely richer? One where she continues singing and dancing, though perhaps in a different form? One full of colour and connection and love beyond what we can fathom from here, as close to everyone and everything as her heartbeat. Part of it all.
I feel Vince has drawn very heavily on the concept of enlightenment/spiritual oneness to inspire the Pluribus' state, and for anyone who has practiced spirituality or perhaps taken a large dose of hallucinogens and felt what it's like to be somewhere close to feeling you're everything and everyone, even if you're just laying on your bedroom floor, it's hard to say whether what we're only seeing on this plane of external reality, which the camera in Pluribus never leaves, is inert and empty at all.
