Janet Testerman

This paper explores how the fictional narrative of Pluribus addresses the modern epidemic of loneliness by staging a psychological return to Julian Jaynes’s theory of the bicameral mind. In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Jaynes hypothesized that pre-conscious humans lacked modern inner dialogue and operated largely on instinct. When confronted with novel crises, these individuals experienced auditory hallucinations—interpreted as the literal voices of gods, ancestors, angels, or rulers—that guided their actions within a culturally supported framework. This paper argues that the infected population in Pluribus mirrors this cognitive structure as the infected trade individual agency for a shared, collegial, symbiotic groupthink. By analyzing the psychological state of the infected, this analysis demonstrates how their collective consciousness eliminates modern alienation. The paper illustrates how Pluribus utilizes a pre-Neolithic psychological framework to replace isolation with internal companionship and communal contentment. This method of dealing with loneliness and alienation by inventing and adhering to an omniscient other is similar to the political lack of self-consciousness experienced by many today. This chapter will also employ Tajfel and Turner's (1979) Social Identity Theory to the origins and consequences of contemporary political behavior, as intense hyper-partisanship has become the source of an important, often super-conscious social identity mirroring both the hive mind of Pluribus and the hallucinatory voices of the age of the bicameral mind. As people today increasingly have their identities created from their cyber-lives, the erosion of human agency rapidly gives way to AI-generated idealized forms that speak to an alienated part of humans and use an identity-friendly algorithm to include them in a like-minded group, which, once salient, determines self-definition and behavior.

Dr. Janet Testerman is an educator and researcher dedicated to shaping the next generation of global leaders. She teaches in St. Thomas University's PhD Ethical Leadership Department and guides doctoral candidates on dissertation committees at William Woods University. Dr. Testerman's scholarly work includes education and consciousness studies. She currently splits her time between Miami, Florida, and Tegucigalpa, Honduras.