In episode 8 of the television series Pluribus, Carol Sturka (played by Rhea Seehorn) offers her brainwashed companion a drink.

“We’ll have one if it pleases you,” answers Zosia, Sturka’s designated guide through a new world in which every human shares a brain with every other human.

Sturka fires back. “‘We’ think, ‘we’ want. . . . Would it kill you to say ‘I’? . . . All the brains in the world and you can’t navigate a f***ing pronoun?”

Perhaps the Apple TV show creator Vince Gilligan (of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul fame) was offering an opinion on the modern desire to replace singular pronouns (“he,” “she”) with the gender-neutral collective “they.” But the scene also perfectly encapsulates the show’s central point — that “collectivism,” rather than being nurturing and safe, effectively dehumanizes societies, stifling creativity and humanity.

The premise of the show is simple: The entire world is hit by a phenomenon — virus, alien invasion, electromagnetic pulse, we don’t really know — that allows virtually everyone in the world to read each other’s thoughts. That is, except for a dozen or so people around the world who were immune to the big “event,” and thus retain exclusive access to their own knowledge. Sturka is one of these independent thinkers who enjoyed a society in which cognitive activity was private, so she sets out to put the world back to what it was.

The show is astonishing in that it is a direct refutation of the type of collectivism that has recently seasoned much of the American left. In his inaugural address last week, New York City’s young mayor, Zohran Mamdani, proudly declared, “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” Not to be outdone, Mamdani’s newly appointed tenant advocate, Cea Weaver, has promoted the idea of seizing private property and has called homeownership a tool of “white supremacy.”

But Gilligan’s show cuts sharply the other way, demonstrating what happens when both physical and intellectual egalitarianism are forced on the populace. When everyone is compelled to think and act the same, individual creativity dies. Like Team Mamdani (mild spoilers ahead), the new collectivists shun private property, so the citizens all sleep together on the floor of a local arena. They refuse to kill animals or even plants, so the world is wracked with hunger, leading to predictably horrifying results.

Some have argued that the show is obviously a parable for the world once artificial intelligence takes over. The brainwashed characters all speak in unison, in the same way everyone may one day have the same thoughts when their source for information — say, ChatGPT — is universal. When algorithms are writing most of the things we read, it will flatten language and punish both creativity and innovation. The lively prose of Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion will evaporate in favor of uncanny-valley-esque slop.

This is why Hollywood has fought the proliferation of AI so vigorously. Despite the entertainment industry’s progressive leanings, its actors, writers, and executives recognize that their individual talents are what draw the public to their products. It is why they go on strike to prevent laptops from writing their scripts and replacing their actors. Politically, they may be collectivists, but at heart, they are individualists, dying to display their non-algorithmic talents.

And this is why Pluribus, a show that could have been written by Ayn Rand, has been nominated for Best Television Drama at next week’s Golden Globes: those on the left are starting to realize that when individuals are no longer necessary, the artists they revere will be among the first to go. Seehorn’s character is a novelist — at one point, she writes the first chapter of a book and her concierge (Zosia) reads it, meaning everyone else in the world will instantly have read it. You’d never sell more than one copy of a book, so there would be no financial incentive to be an author.

But of course, the show doesn’t merely address AI. It paints a dystopian picture of what society will become when human thoughts and behavior are homogenized. And it shows how easily people will forfeit their right to have their own thoughts if safety and comfort are dangled in front of them. For instance (slight spoiler ahead), when Seehorn alarms the other people not affected by the mind event, they resist her. They enjoy the new world — especially one character who becomes the sole resident of a Las Vegas casino. He gets to live a James Bond–style existence, only bland, without drama, excitement, or risk.

Just because collectivism has become the ideology du jour for Democrats doesn’t mean the right couldn’t take some lessons as well. When a Republican president vows to commandeer 50 million gallons of foreign oil to distribute as he sees fit, or begins using taxpayer money to buy stakes in private businesses, or tells Americans how many dolls or pencils they need, or threatens to pull broadcast licenses for television networks he doesn’t like, it smacks of the same collectivist impulses currently animating Democrats.

In fact, Vice President JD Vance recently called Mamdani “fascinating,” saying the new mayor working “so aggressively on the affordability question in New York City, which does have one of the worst affordability crises anywhere in the world, is smart, and he’s at least listening to people.” (And who can forget the Trump–Mamdani lovefest in the Oval Office after the mayor’s election?)

As George Will has put it, “One lesson of the twentieth century is that the comprehensive politics of the integrated state promises fulfillment but delivers suffocation.” Since the dawn of the 20th century, progressives like Woodrow Wilson have thought it was possible to create a “new man” who would eschew his individual ambitions for the collective good. Pluribus calls the progressives’ bluff and deems this new society a nightmare.