Watch the full video essay on YouTube
What is it with people?
Why do people choose comforting fantasy over real literature? BOOK SIGNING CLIP
Why is the lowest common denominator so very low? TAXI CLIP
Why don’t people think for themselves? CLIP
Why are people just so f*cking dumb??!
This churning, pulsating mass of mediocrity. The mob. The collective. This is what humanity looks like to the rugged individualist.
Or to an American.
Vince Gilligan’s shows do what they say on the tin. Literally.
Breaking Bad follows Walter White on his journey from a good but weak man, to becoming his bad-ass self…destroying everyone he loves along the way.
Better Call Saul is the story of Jimmy McGill desperately trying to be better than he is, even when we know he’s on the path to becoming Saul Goodman.
And while the X-Files isn’t Gilligan’s creation, it might be where he developed his obsession. Vince Gilligan loves characters whose certainty is their doom.
Characters driven by their self-belief to self-destruction.
Keep that in mind while watching Pluribus.
Styled “Plur1bus” when written.
From the many, the one.
“E Pluribus Unum” is a founding motto of the American colonies. It’s been right there in the Great Seal ever since 1776.
A motto so ambiguous it’s basically a national Rorschach test.
Ask one American, it’s about the Thirteen Colonies coming together as a collective.
Ask another, it’s about the American dream to pursue your own happiness as an individual.
So right from the start, Gilligan’s telling us:
This is a show about America’s split personality.
The eternal conflict between the Collective
and the Individual.
Between We the People
and I, Me, Mine.
Imagine you’re an alien civilization. Looking down at Earth.
Coolly, calmly, drawing your plans against us.
Because you’re a post-biological super-collective. So you’re highly organised.
At first, you see this dominant biological type descended from apes, covering the planet, and you think, “Good for them! They really built something!”
Then you zoom in.
And you see we’ve spent most of our history murdering each other.
For what?
Skin tones.
Flag colours.
Preferred imaginary friend.
And yet, despite being entirely dependent on collective systems, food, language, Wi-Fi, each of these fragile ape-brains believes themselves to be
“An individual.”
Like a raindrop, declaring itself “different” as it joins the flood.
And that’s the problem. All the wars. The murders. The concentration camps. The shopping malls.
They all start with this deranged belief in a separate I. With ego.
But you can fix it. You can make these mad apes part of the collective. You can end all suffering and create peace on Earth for everyone.
Except this one angry Karen.
DISCLAIMER : I’m in love with Rhea Seehorn.
I know. You can’t really love a person you’ve never met, so I have to acknowledge it’s probably more of a stalker grade obsession.
I’ve never finished watching Better Call Saul. Because it’s the story of a man who destroys everyone he comes close to in his quest for self-fulfilment.
And I couldn’t watch him destroy Rhea Seehorn.
Because she is a really, really good actress. With amazing eyes.
As Carol Sturka, Rhea Seehorn uses all her gifts to give us a portrait of the
INDIVIDUAL
Carol’s fans love her. But she holds them in contempt, because they are dumb enough to like the “historical speculative romantasy” she cynically produces for them.
Carol’s assistant endlessly fawns and provides ego strokes. Oh wait, this compliant minion is Carol’s partner??
And Carol lives at the end of a cul-de-sac in the desert. Because of course she does.
You can’t be a rugged individualist and still live near a Tesco Metro.
She’s ruggedly independent…but the wi-fi’s still on. The bins still get collected. Amazon Prime still delivers twice daily.
Because here’s the paradox:
Every successful individualist is utterly dependent on the collective. Every “self-made” person was crowd-funded by society. The myth of independence only exists because we maintain the plumbing.
You’re not Thoreau.
You’re Carol from Arizona with a Substack.
And while we despise the mediocrity of the masses, the collective of normies, sheep, drones, we’re only free to despise them because they love us enough to keep us alive.
It’s like biting the hand that feeds you, but insisting the hand is the problem with Western civilization.
Ah. Meditation. The gateway to mindfulness.
Are you stressed? Unhappy? Suffering from depression?
Well, that’s because you’re trapped in the exploitative economic system we call capitalism. Today’s sponsor can’t do anything about that, but it can exploit those negative affects to sell you yet another pointless mindfulness app.
SmoothBrain.
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Feeling anxious about global collapse?
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In… and out.
That’s it, that’s all we’ve got.
SmoothBrain uses scientifically vague language to gently dissolve your critical faculties, leaving you calm, compliant, and perfectly ready to return to work.
SmoothBrain
Because true peace comes not from changing the world, but from accepting its unbearable stupidity.
Now, where does this all come from? This myth of the “rugged individual”? The “I did it my way” meme at the heart of America?
To understand that, we need to talk about…Vikings.
Viking isn’t an ethnicity, it’s a job description. They were gig economy raiders. Deliveroo with longboats. Young men with no land, sent out to steal someone else’s. The original libertarians.
The British learned from them. Sailed west. Built an empire. Invented America. Then wave after wave of immigrants gravitated to this new frontier.
The Anglo Empire. A vast experiment in rugged individualism, supported by an army, a navy, and a global trade network of other people doing the actual work.
And that’s Carol’s lineage.
She’s the last prophet of a collapsing myth. The individual at the end of the world.
And when she finally gathers the other “survivors” aboard Air Force One, she discovers something terrible:
No one else cares about her individuality.
The Japanese. The Africans. The Indians. Especially the Indians.
They were never fully bought into the Anglo project of Individualism At All Costs. They still have families and communities and national identity. They never stopped understanding that without the collective the individual is dead.
Now we’re in the Thucydides trap. American individualism vs the Chinese collective. And just as the Americans are realising they’ve already lost…
…the American mythos produces a scifi tv show about the individual being overwhelmed by the collective.
America’s terror of the collective has long expressed itself in scifi.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
They Live.
The Stepford Wives.
My personal favourite The Invaders
A short lived scifi thriller (1967-68) in which architect David Vincent becomes the last individual battling the alien collective who literally turn RED when killed, a Cold War metaphor so subtle even FOX News would get it.
But Plur1bus doesn’t read like a diatribe against collectivism.
But more of a dialectic between the individual and the collective.
Carol’s dialogue with Ana on the death toll of the collective takeover is every online argument that pits Soviet communism vs American capitalism.
But maybe Carol has a point.
The Collective vs the Individual is one of, maybe the oldest conflict in human history.
It’s a story told in human myth.
The earliest myth is the Mother. The Great Mother who we remember now as Mother Nature.
Nature isn’t created. She just is.
We’re all one with the Mother. The Mother gives life, and when the Mother takes life back, that’s all she wrote.
And for tens of thousands of years humans lived as one with the Mother. I say lived. Maybe thirty years. Forty was ancient. Sky high infant mortality.
No doctors. No antibiotics. No 3 bedroom townhouses. No smartphones. No cute little coffeeshops. No space rockets. No Nukes. No assault rifles. No AI.
No creation.
The first depictions of God the creator, he’s a tiny little man waving his fist at the sky. But over the millenia the creator grows. He becomes the sky god. The All Father. The creator.
And with him the whole human history of wars, genocide, murder and mayhem.
Are the cost of being able to eat a Danish Pastry for breakfast.
So the question that Plur1bus leaves hanging…
…is has the collective come to make us part of their galactic peace cult…
…or is Plur1bus the 2020s reboot of V…they came offering technology, but actually wanted our water?
Is the collective actually here for a piece of our crazy human individualist creativity?
Is Mega-Karen Carol Sturka actually an anomalous survivor that they want to integrate into the collective?
Or is the whole point of this “invasion” to study humans like Carol? Is the collective desperate to possess human creativity?
Knowing Vince Gilligan we’ll never quite know. Plur1bus will keep us torn in the eternal struggle between individual and collective
capitalist vs communist
creator vs mother
Mega-Karen
vs
Woke Vegan
Damien Walter 