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4play See other 4play Articles Title: Read This or be Assimilated "Orthodoxy means not thinking, not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." -- George Orwell, 1984 StarTrek: the Next Generation's "Q," that lisping interstellar drag queen, didn't impress me, and every time I saw Jean Luc Picard I thought, "Three hundred years in the future and they still can't fix baldness? Can't they reassemble him in the transporter with a full head of hair?" At least no one wore glasses, except for that Gordi LaForge guy with his goofy car air-filter visor. I kept expecting him to take it off and shake the dust out of it. What did he think he was, the carburator off of a '68 Barricuda? I did like the original series, although I thought they should have dumped William Shatner and replaced him with James Coburn. And Sean Connery would have made a great Klingon. And I'm sure they could have found a place for Raquel Welch, too, especially in her One Million Years BC two-piece fur bikini. I will give credit where credit is due: the Next Generation's Borg are the scariest villains ever on TV, even more frightening than James "Snakehead on a Stick" Carville. They are a perfect example of the welfare/warfare Empire (and all Empires are welfare/warfare, which is what causes all of them to collapse). Today, the US government is engaged in what I call "the Borgification of America": collectivism at home, including talk of "biometric" national IDs and Number of the Beast implanted microchips, and "Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated" warfare abroad. I don't know if the creators of the Borg knew what they were doing, or if they just chanced upon the concept. Either way, it's confirmation of Ezra Pound's comment, "The artist is the antenna of the race." They were portraying the universal truth that the cradle-to-the-grave mommy state is the other side of the coin of the let's-blast-them-to-hell warfare state. It's the way it's always been, and it's the way it always will be. I have resigned myself to seeing this as a law of human nature, although like all laws it gets broken. The upshot is that this is certainly one law that needs to be broken, and permanently. Why this "let's be children at home and bullies abroad"? The desire for complete security, which is one of the curses of humanity. It's the belief in getting rid of enemies at home -- unemployment, poverty, lack of health care, drug use, cigarettes, potato chips, whatever -- through the idol of the State, and using the same idol -- a modern-day Golden Calf -- to rub out perceived enemies abroad. But it's a fake, self-deluded security. People think they can have security guaranteed by the State and freedom. But they can't. Security comes from society (and true law, which is Natural Law), which can only blossom when they are free from the State. As Proudhon wrote, "Liberty is the mother, not daughter, of order." People who think they can have security -- to be enfolded all their lives in the arms of the mommy-state -- and freedom, are Borgifying themselves, only they don't know it. They think they're going to have security, but what will happen is that their "security" will disappear, and so will their freedom. As Benjamin Franklin wrote,"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety." The novelist Somerset Maugham (among many other people) noticed the same thing: "If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose that freedom, and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose those too." The reason, as Albert Jay Nock pointed out in his Our Enemy, the State, is because there is eternal warfare between Society and the State. Society is persuasion and freedom; the State, force and slavery. The State can only expand by destroying Society. Hence, when people give up their freedom for "security" they are turning themselves into slaves. When they finally look up and say, "Hey, no fair!" it's too late. Then people revolt, the violence starts, and the State falls. The Borg are the ultimate collectivists. Commies in a Cube. Everyone has a place, and is taken care of from birth to death. There are a few unpleasant catches: the Borg have absolutely no freedom, and they are engaged in eternal war -- perpetual war for perpetual peace -- to annihilate their enemies through absorption. It's not the case of One-World Government; it's One-Galaxy Government. Whether you want it or not. The people who are the Lego-blocks of the Borg have complete security, at least until they get in the path of a phaser or a photon torpedo. They don't even have to think anymore. They have no fear or anxiety. No unpleasant feelings at all, as far as I can tell (this can only be due to all those wires running into their brains, numbing the fear centers and probably stimulating the pleasure ones. This is a fairly old concept in science-fiction: the implanted wires are called "wire-heading," and the contraptions on their heads that control the wires are called "drouds.") The Borg Cube is a gigantic womb, flying endlessly through space. No one has to think; everyone is taken care of from womb to tomb. That desire to return to the womb is a catastrophic problem for the human race. It's the desire to lose all unpleasantness, and in some ways, the desire to lose self-consciousness,and the ability to think. This is why when the Borg character Seven of Nine (played by Jeri Ryan) was detached from the Borg she wanted to go back. The only way you can have complete security is to give up your freedom and self-consciousness and thought completely. But it's not possible. Mark Vonnegut (son of Kurt) has written exactly one book, The Eden Express, about his episodes of schizophrenia and his days on a commune. The title is about the desire of the human race to return to Eden, to give up freedom for security, to give up self- consciousness and the choices that go with it. He wrote that what he wanted was to "lose his consciousness." To return to not just being a baby, but to the womb. And he thought he could do it through drug use and living the ritual life of a commune. There is, however, an angel with a flaming sword barring the way back to the Garden. We can't go back to it, only forward. The late Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, in his seminal book, Leftism Revisited, wrote that, "viewed from a certain angle, we are all subject to two basic drives: identity and diversity." Identity he calls "a herd instinct, a strong feeling of community that regards another group with hostility." He believes "identity and its drives tend to efface self, tend towards an 'usness' in which the ego becomes submerged." He believes this is the basis of leftism and its various manifestations: Socialism, Nazism, fascism, Communism, liberalism. I think he would call the Borg a "terrifying, bigger and more pitiless conformity." A blood brother of identity and conformity is equality. Everything that is identical is automatically equal. Two quarters or two pennies are identical and therefore equal. They're interchangeable. Writes Kuehnelt- Leddihn, "Therefore, all political or social forms that are inspired by the idea of equality will almost inevitably point to the concept of identity, and foster the herd instinct." Everyone in the Borg fits this description; they are identical, equal and interchangeable. At home, identical, equal, secure, and submerged in an oceanic unconsciousness; abroad, at war, to protect the home. In the famous "Grand Inquisitor" scene in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky has the Inquisitor say, "For centuries...we have been wrestling with...freedom, but now it is ended and over for good." What, did the Inquisitor look up one night and see the Borg heading his way? No, he was commenting on the fact that many people want to give up their freedom to "authority." The Inquisitor goes so far as to claim, "they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet." Erich Fromm, a confused socialist with occasional flashes of brilliance, wrote in his book, Escape from Freedom, that people will, in order to escape the burden of freedom and responsibility, even turn to dictators. They will bring their freedom to them and lay it at their feet. "The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton," he writes, echoing his better, Kuehnelt-Leddihn, "identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self." There is in almost everyone a desire to be part of the Borg, to return to the womb, the Garden of Eden. It would be a world without anxiety or fear, without unsureness, without envy or jealousy, without self-consciousness. It's a world that doesn't exist, but the continual attempts to create it by the State always have the downside of war. Welfare and warfare are two sides of the same coin. I have a lot of beliefs (most of which don't make much sense, even to me) but one that's holding up so far is my considering leftism to be "mother." This is why I call the leftist State "the mommy state." Leftism as mother isn't original with me; I've read it many times, through many years. There is a theory that many women are naturally collectivists run by their feelings (hence their falling for Bill "I Feel Your Pain, and Monica Lewinsky, Too" Clinton and Phil "Dumped My Wife and Family, Married a Younger Trophy Wife" Donahue). I suspect this is why women have traditionally been denied the vote throughout history; the majority of them would vote Democrat and ultimately bring society down. Their desire for "security" trumps freedom. This "mother" also exists in many (unmanly) men, such as boozehound "Couldn't Get a Woman Across a Bridge Without Drowning Her" Ted Kennedy. It appears to exist in all male liberals, whose views of the population are, "You're a baby and can't take care of yourself, so I'll be mommy and do it for you." (They're not playing daddy, whose view is, "You're a big boy, so you can make your own decisions and take care of yourself"). I don't know if it was a coincidence or a stroke of genius, but the Borg are ruled by the Borg Queen (played by Alice Krige, who I found hot even as a Borg, until her head fell off). Since the Borg Cube is a mommy state, a huge womb, logically it would have to have a Queen. The only thing missing is the Borg being vegetarians (leftist pseudo-spirituality), but for all I know, maybe they are. Unfortunately, Mommies can't fight very well. So who has to protect them? Daddy, of course. That's why Daddy goes abroad and fights wars. To protect Mommy and all the children at home. But what happened when the Borg attacked the Federation? They fought back, of course. And what's going to happen when we attack other countries? Well, they certainly aren't just going to roll over like kicked puppies. However, if the leftist mommy-state didn't rule at home, and all the children grew up and took care of themselves, then there wouldn't be any need for the daddy-army to destroy all the bad child-eating monsters in foreign countries. This are the main reasons I don't believe in democracy, and do believe in constitutional monarchy. No country should ever be ruled by a Mother Queen alone. That's the way of leftism, of the Borg. It shouldn't be ruled just by a Father King, either. It should be ruled by both a King and a Queen; that's the way of balance. Resistance isn't futile, unless you really do want to be assimilated. "Might our ability to tell right from wrong be connected with our capacity to think?" -- Hannah Arendt
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#11. To: YertleTurtle, redpanther (#0)
(Edited)
An excellent essay..and a warning.
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