living authentically as the world falls apart

PLUR1BUS, Minneapolis, and das Man

[This essay engages the first two episodes of PLUR1BUS and does not contain spoilers for the remainder of the first season.]

The Apple TV series PLUR1BUS (Pluribus) follows Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), a discontent author who finds herself as one of only several humans in the entire world not brought under the mysterious uniting power of a hive mind identified as a collective “We.” Carol speaks to one person on the phone and another on the TV answers her. She asks a question and the collective knowledge of billions of humans replies. Promising (or threatening) that Carol will soon join them in this perverse vision of world peace, Carol sets out to reverse whatever alien force has subsumed humanity into this collective mind and restore their authentic individuality.

When the “We” informs Carol that there are several others across the world who have seemingly escaped whatever power enabled the “We” to take control of humanity, she promptly asks to meet with them. In a demonstration of power and coordination, the hive mind gathers a set of planes and flies each to a central location. However, in this initial meeting, there is not a sigh of relief but a sudden tension. Several of the others are accompanied with family members who, although a part of the hive mind, pretend to act like their former selves at their relatives’ request. Another, who requested a behemoth presidential plane for his travel, requests the “We” to provide him something akin to a mindless harem of women to wait upon his every need.

In short, the others do not see the “We” as a problem, but rather readily await their opportunity to be brought under its absolute powers.

There is a safety and a serenity in the idea of having the burden of freedom stripped from them. They embrace the perverse logic of the “We”—a way of achieving world peace through complete control. As a single mind, self-autonomy is stripped away to produce the “optimal” conditions for both happiness and efficiency. There is no crime or potential for injustice. There are no starving people or wasted resources. There is no need for rulers or laws. There is no wasted time or miscommunication. Systems of exchange are rendered obsolete as everything belongs to the single “We.”

The tranquilizing temptations of the “We” holds resonance with what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger calls the “they” (das Man). When a person is acting as das Man—as the ‘they,’—they are dissolved into an ambiguous, socially constituted set of norms. Rather than responding reflectively, according to our personal convictions, we act within the flow of what society tells us to think and do.

Importantly, Heidegger speaks of the “they” as a disburdening of ourselves from the anxieties, pressures, and expectations of everyday life. Rather than reckoning with the reality of how feeble and finite we are as humans, das Man subsumes us into a mindlessness where we are caught up in the endless scrolling of social media feeds and inboxes, never stopping to ask “Who am I? Why am I here? Did things have to be this way?”

Subsumed within the “they,” Heidegger says we are dissolved “completely into the kind of Being of ‘the Others’, in such a way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish more and more.” This is what Carol experiences as she realizes everyone around her, including her partner, have been caught in the power of the “We,” stripped of their authentic individuality or Being.

As America reckons with the actions of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in cities like Minneapolis, this kind of numbness may sound oddly familiar.

Rather than reckoning with the devastation of communities across America, some choose to follow a political “they”—accepting the narratives that are least likely to disrupt their lives or interrupt their routine scrolling. Across news outlets, press conferences, and social media feeds, a narrative about a disruptive radical left and violent protestors is perpetuated and embraced, further drowning followers in the flowing currents of nationalism. Not even videos and first-hand testimony of the event can shake them. Like Carol, our protest appears to fall on the empty nodding of deaf ears.

So, how can things possibly change?

According to Heidegger, what pulls us out of the forceful currents of das Man is an experience of uncanniness—Unheimlichkeit: a sense of not being at home. In this moment, we experience a feeling of strangeness or foreignness where our lives and our world do not feel fully familiar. We are awakened, as it were, to the strangeness of this life and our going along with the “they.” Uncanniness arises from the unsettling realization that things could have been otherwise.

Carol feels a deep sense of unfamiliarity with the world as she no longer exists alongside others or experiences any kind of co-affection, but now stands in relationship to the single “We.” In her experience of uncanniness, Carol is suddenly thrust into a radical individuality that leads to a deep anxiety. The “We” promises to rid her of this anxiety by taking away her freedom—turning the waves of cause and effect into a single, predictable, and univocal possibility.

The same is true for those who witness the actions of this administration and question how we could ever consider going on as if nothing has changed—for those who sit at the family dinner table or the classroom filled with idle talk as the fabric of our democratic society is torn asunder.

What, then, can we hope for in the world of PLUR1BUS? What can we hope for ourselves? Is there a way out of the “We?”

If we follow Heidegger’s argument, there is.

Heidegger explains that “uncanniness pursues [us] constantly.” The sense of not being at home threatens the “they” by awakening us to a fundamental truth: we exist in the world with others. We are not an island—nor are we meant to live in the inauthenticity of a hivemind or echo chamber. The great injustice of das Man is not only the obvious elimination of an authentic way of being, but the further consequence that such absence strips us of living alongside others in love. Caught up in the “they,” we cannot fill that great commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Recognizing our need for others, we must live with what Heidegger calls “anticipatory resoluteness.” This is a “running ahead” towards our future in such a way that we live in light of it. It is this future reality that keeps us away from the “they” as we are confronted by both ourselves and our neighbors in sobriety of mind. This is how we authentically inhabit time with others.

After the opening episodes, the question remains if such a futural orientation might become a cure for this hivemind or if subsumption into it is already a grim, inevitable, and singular possibility.

In these dawning months of 2026, we also do not know what this year will bring—in both tragedy and triumph. But if the early Heidegger has anything to say about it, our experience of uncanniness, anxiety, and anticipatory resoluteness might just be enough to save humanity after all.