Many Not One

There’s an old Jewish joke. Half a congregation believes tradition requires them to sit during one prayer. The other half believes tradition requires them to stand. The two sides argue and argue—eventually to the point of disruption. The congregation can hardly get through a service without the groups coming to blows. Neither side likes the disruption, so they try to make peace. They seek out a mediator. But this doesn’t help. Each side just gets more deeply entrenched in its own view. The arguments intensify. Things get so bad that they bring in the oldest and wisest man in the congregation. Perhaps he can solve the problem. They ask him, “During this prayer, do we sit or do we stand?” The old man stares at them for a while with a warm smile. Then he speaks. “You’ve got it all wrong,” he says. “The tradition is not that we sit or stand during the prayer. The tradition is that we argue about it.”

In the sixties, hippies brought a kind of utopianism to the forefront of the American imagination. In their minds, the whole world could and should come together, lay down its weapons, and live in harmony. In Imagine, John Lennon dreams of a world with “nothing to kill or die for.” No doubt the optimism of the sixties has faded. Few among us think that Lennon’s world of harmony is forthcoming—or even possible. Yet many still think it is something to strive for, something we should get as close to as possible. This feels obvious. Conflict is painful. It is painful even on a small scale. When a parent tells their child he cannot have the toy he wants, he cries (and then the parent becomes frustrated). And it is more true on a larger scale. War is hell, of course.

In this essay, I plan to walk a tightrope as best I can. I want to partially defend the wise man in the joke and his embrace of conflict over harmony. He seems to be onto something. Perhaps the members of the congregation benefit from fighting for their positions even if they never change anyone’s mind. Yet we know the dark side of conflict. So I want to be clear: I am not embracing conflict full stop. But I do think being overly obsessed with reducing harmony is harmful.

In the joke, the wise man refers to the strife in the congregation as a tradition. Traditions bind communities together. The wise man has noticed that if we excessively preoccupy ourselves with reducing conflict, we will forget and denigrate what binds us. We will even forget each other altogether—forget that we are different people. Put more precisely, my thesis is this: only if we accept some conflict can we truly see and love each other. Failing to realize this, we’ve traded love for peace too often in modern life. And that’s a bad deal.

Vince Gilligan’s new show Pluribus can help us see why some disharmony is a necessary condition of love. In Pluribus, a virus takes over the minds of nearly all humans, merging them into a single hive mind. Over seven billion people are now one. They have different bodies and different names, but they are one. They have access to all of each other’s memories and share all the same goals.

Only thirteen people are immune to the virus and thus have not—and cannot—join the hive mind. One of them is the protagonist, Carol Sturka. Carol is not happy with the virus’s effects. She wants to break up the hive mind, so she convenes the thirteen unaffected people, expecting they will join forces with her. But they don’t want to. They are content with the new order. After all, as one of them says, since every member of the hive mind shares the same goals, every conflict has ended overnight. There is peace on earth.

The show, thus, raises a question—should they break up the hive mind? Carol is adamant that they must. But obviously the benefits of the hive mind are significant—they have brought world peace. So if Carol is going to defend her position, she is going to need to offer up some serious disadvantages of leaving the hive mind in place. When pressed on these disadvantages, Carol struggles to make a compelling case. She calls the hive minders weird and otherwise insults them. Yet, her struggle to articulate these disadvantages does not mean they are nonexistent. Instead, I will argue, it indicates that she—and the rest of the characters—are looking at the problem from the wrong perspective.

I call this incorrect perspective the ‘global perspective’. This global perspective looks at humanity as a whole and asks what is good for it, altogether. World peace sure seems like a good outcome for humanity. But we will soon see that focusing just on humanity as a whole leads us to forget an important ethical feature—the differences between people. To properly evaluate the costs and benefits of the hive mind, we will need a new perspective. The narrative form of Pluribus helps us find this perspective. And when we find it, we will be able to express what Carol could not—what is so bad about the hive mind.

In one episode, Carol learns that the hive mind knows how to break itself apart. She tries to drug one member, hoping that in a drug-induced state she will reveal the secret. It doesn’t work. The member refuses to tell her what she wants to know, and the attempt upsets the hive mind. They have always been friendly to Carol, even when she is angry or aggressive toward them. But drugging one of them—a part of them—is a bridge too far. When she does that, they cut off all physical contact with her.

After spending less than a full episode on this plotline, the show devotes the several following episodes to Carol’s loneliness without the hive mind (remember, there are only twelve other people on earth who are not part of it, and many do not speak English). Though Carol never got along well with the hive mind, she now misses it. She thinks about killing herself—she almost kills herself. But instead of doing so, she sends the hive mind a message saying she longs for it to return. And it returns.

This plotline moves from briefly having global stakes (will Carol save humanity by learning how to break up the hive mind?) to much more local ones (will Carol and the hive mind reconcile?). The show consistently makes this move. It pushes the viewer down from the global to the local and holds them there. Or it dwells in the local when the viewer expects the global. The episode in which Carol drugs the member in an attempt to learn her secrets devotes far more attention to minor details (Carol going to the store to buy the drug, for example) than to the climactic moment when she administers it and attempts to get the secret. In doing this, the show makes us take up a new local perspective—a perspective on which we think not about what is good for humanity as a whole but instead about the wants and needs of different people. We think about Carol’s need for connection but also the hive mind’s need for safety—and in a way, we see how these needs are in tension. We don’t think as much about what is good for everyone altogether.

The show can feel frustrating. We want global stakes. But we get little, slow moments—we get Carol wandering around for nearly an entire episode, playing golf alone, eating at a restaurant alone. Yet, though this narrative structure is frustrating, it is also subtly compelling. It is hard not to find it beautiful even if it isn’t all that entertaining. I think this is because, as appealing as global stakes may be, there is something delicate yet even more appealing that we find in the local perspective, namely love. As I see it, there is a constellation of emotions, some painful, some wonderful, which constitute love. And these emotions only arise when two people with different desires interact. I’ll now explain why these emotions require the interaction of people with different desires. Once I do so, we will be able to see how, in showing us the local perspective, Pluribus helps us express what is so bad about the hive mind.

Suppose I go out with someone who likes many of the same things I do. We both like the New York Jets, the Grateful Dead, and Westerns. That would be a lot of fun. But suppose that, as our relationship evolves, we realize we like not just some of the same things but all of the same things. If I want chicken for dinner, so does she. If I suggest we change it up and watch film noir rather than a Western, she agrees. This holds for big things too. If I say I want three kids rather than two, I can be sure she’ll agree. If I say she should quit her job so that we can move for my career, we’ll be moving without a complaint. If I say we should have sex more or less often, she readily complies. At this point, I don’t have a partner—I have a mirror. There aren’t two people in this relationship. There’s just me.

To have a partner to love, one must be different from them. This means that the two people in a relationship must at times want different things, and thus occasionally be in conflict. These differences could be small—they might want different things for dinner. Or they could be big—they might want different amounts of kids or to live in different places. Some of these differences might induce anger (you might hate your partner for leaving you because she doesn’t respect aspects of your lifestyle) or guilt (you might feel bad that you don’t value financial security as much as your partner). Perhaps there will be reconciliation (if you, say, decide that you care enough about your partner to change elements of your lifestyle she doesn’t appreciate, leading her to take you back) or growth (if your partner teaches you to enjoy something you previously didn’t care for). Accepting these emotions and the differences in desires and therefore conflicts that give rise to them is the cost of entry for living in a world with other people to love.

From the global perspective, we  struggle to effectively express this point. From that perspective, we ask what is good for humanity as a whole (like world peace, for example). There are, of course, certain things that are good for all of humanity. But in taking the global perspective, we forget about the needs of concrete people. We gloss over relationships in which, for example, one partner might need a lot of physical connection while the other needs to avoid sex much of the time because of prior trauma. But when we notice these competing needs, we feel the constellation of emotions that make up love.  We may, for example, feel guilt or grief. Or, we may feel a tenderness in seeing a new kind of struggle we didn’t earlier understand (because we often only see our own needs, but from the local perspective we finally acknowledge others’ needs and understand the unique pain that comes when those needs are not met). We can’t see this from the global perspective, because we’ve abstracted away from our differences. We’re thinking about all of us but not about each of us. The local perspective, then, allows us to see each of us again, and thus to remember love.

Conclusions are building thick and fast. So let me try to make my chain of reasoning as clear as I can. Certain emotions constitute love. The emotions that constitute love arise only out of relationships between people with different desires or needs. The global perspective looks at what is good for everyone rather than what different people need. The local perspective shows us these different needs. And in doing so, it reminds us of the emotions that constitute love and the fact that they rely on people with different needs interacting. It reminds us of love’s reliance on some disharmony. Thus, the narrative form of Pluribus, in forcing us again and again to take up the local perspective, gives us a defense of the thesis of this essay—that love relies on disharmony.

It also helps us see why the hive mind needs to be broken up. It eliminates a lot of conflict. As we’ve seen, this looks good from the global perspective. But when we think about the times when the needs of two individuals rub up against each other and how this is necessary for love, we realize that the hive mind eliminates not just conflict but billions of opportunities for love. This is what Carol wanted to express when she was pressed to criticize the hive mind. But she couldn’t find the right words, because she was stuck looking from the wrong perspective.

Now, Pluribus does not just make an abstract philosophical point. It also serves as a subtle critique of contemporary culture. There are elements of our social lives in which we fail to see what Carol sees. We do not recognize what we lose when we seek perfect harmony.

The modern idea of a soulmate often amounts to this: finding someone who sees the world as we do. You meet someone at a party, or wherever, and they understand something you say that no one else has ever understood, or they give voice to a thought you have long felt but never been able to express. You fall in love. One upshot of this essay is that, if you love someone because they are just like you, then you do not love another; you love yourself. Loving another requires being with someone who will never fully understand you, and bearing the frustration and anger that come with that. But if you can bear that frustration and anger, then the moments when your partner does understand you become more meaningful, not less, because one is really being seen—seen by someone ineradicably different from you. To leave a relationship because one is not fully understood, as our modern conception of soulmates seems to incline us to do, may mean avoiding pain, but it also means losing out on a particularly deep form of being understood.

In the political realm, today we are like the two sides of the Jewish congregation at the beginning of the joke—trying to force each other to our side. But what if, for a moment, we stopped trying to convert each other and recognized that we cannot help but disagree—because, after all, we are many, not one? What if we sat, even briefly, in the pain—the conflict, the grief, the tenderness, the love—that comes with realizing that our disagreements can only be eliminated if we deny each other’s existence? We might then begin to see each other again—for the first time in a long time. It was painful for Jacob and Esau to meet again after all those years and everything that had come between them. They wept. But at least some of their tears were tears of joy.

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