Star Trek and Collectivism; S. Yates

Star Trek's vision of the future is optimistic, implying that we humans will eventually con quer our major faults, transform our planet into a poverty-free ecological paradise, go to the stars, and become a civilizing force throughout our "quadrant" of the galaxy.The vision is also rather statist, at least by impli cation. The political philosophy of Star Trek appears only in (sometimes inconsistent) bits and pieces. A world-government-as-savior theme appears in several episodes. At the same time, ironically, the United Federation of Planets, despite its civilizing influence, is centralized, bureaucratic, procedure-laden, and sometimes utterly unable to handle the Dr. Yates is adjunct research fellow with the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty and the author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1994). complexities of new challenges (its "prime directive"-not to interfere with indigenous cultures on developing worlds-is violated countless times).

There is environmental correctness. For example, in an episode where the Enterprise is on a mercy mission to a world whose inhab itants devastated their natural environment, chief engineer Geordi La Forge asks some thing like, "Why didn't they just do the sensible thing and regulate emissions?" Sug gestions are also rife that "all cultures are equal," a staple of multiculturalism. The Borg Despite such (occasionally glaring) flaws, Star Trek nevertheless presents perhaps the most disturbing example of full-fledged col lectivism currently available. This depiction occurs in four episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (ST:TNG) , the paperback novel Vendetta, and the movie Star Trek: First Con tact, released last November. These all fea ture encounters between the Enterprise and a race known as the Borg, the deadliest foe yet faced by the Federation. The Borg are a race of cyborgs, the product of a technology that "hardwires" artificial intelligence directly into the brain and central nervous system. Immediately after birth, Borg infants receive neural implants, which provide physical nourishment as well as information from a network connecting all the Borg brains 200 and nervous systems with the rest of their technology. The Borg grow completely de pendent on the implants, with every Borg brain in contact with every other Borg brain at all times. They share a "group mind"-a kind of organic Internet accessed with thoughts instead of computers.

Thus, their vast spaceships automatically go where the "group mind" wills, and if dam aged, the craft repair themselves. There is no hierarchy or chain of command in any normal sense. Significantly, this "group mind" was eventually labeled the· Borg Collective. The Borg have numerical "designations" instead of names and a repulsive physical appearance. Surgically implanted mechanical devices of ten replace their eyes and limbs. Individual Borg have extreme difficulty initiating action or even reacting to immediate surroundings without a cue from the" group mind" that can see through their eyes and communicate through their implants. The Enterprise crew first encounters the Borg in the second-season episode "0 Who?" when the whimsical and enigmatic character 0, member of a race of omnipotent beings who call themselves the 0 Continuum, hurls the Enterprise into a previously unexplored region of the galaxy. The Borg's one obses sion, the crew quicklylearns, is to "assimilate"

other intelligent life forms, adding new tech nologies to their own and thus "improving themselves"- destroying the other races in the process. It is impossible to reason with them, since one can't communicate with them in any ordinary sense. When they have se lected a target, they are relentless. In short, Star Trek'swriters have succeeded brilliantly in presenting their audience with an unsettling vision. In "The Best of Both Worlds" (the cliff hanger that ended the third season), the Borg attack the Federation and zero in on Earth. After destroying a number of Federation outposts, several Borg appear on board the Enterprise and kidnap Captain Picard. They "assimilate" him by giving him implants and create the evil Locutus-who inherits Picard's encyclopedic knowledge of Federation tech nology and defensive capabilities. The Borg use this intelligence to launch an apparently 201 unstoppable attack on Earth. Against seem ingly hopeless odds, the Enterprise crew fig ures out how to exploit the Borg's weakness their total interdependence and dependence on a technology consisting of subroutines and programs instead of procedures capable of being checked byindividual minds. The equiv alent of a computer virus essentially shuts them off!

This story from the 24th century has lessons for us as we approach the end of the millen nium. Some might interpret these episodes as a commentary on how much we fear having our humanity ovelWhelmed by technology in a world growingmore computerized everyday. It is true that technologyis a double-edged sword, capable of being either friend or foe of liberty, depending on how and by whom it is used. The Threat of Collectivism I believe the Borg stories yield yet a more important message. Ayn Rand once wrote that "there is no such thing as a collective brain." The writers of ST:TNG and First Contact, intentionally or not, have given us a chilling depiction of what a collective brain would look like. Their vision can be viewed as an extended metaphor for what collectivism offers individuals: a stark choice between submission to naked force or destruction. Captain Picard was violated in the worst possible way-his body is literally no longer his own, invaded by the alien will. In a terrifying sequence early in the second part of "The Best of Both Worlds," the alien tech nology renders Picard less and less human and more and more "Borglike." He is aware of what is happening but powerless to stop it-a close-up reveals a teardrop on his oth elWise expressionless face. Picard's handling of the situation, however, demonstrates indi viduality in action: eventually he breaks through the will of the Collective and is able to communicate to the Enterprise crew the clue that destroys the Borg vessel.

The Borg conform well to the notion that collectivism is essentially parasitic. The Borg subsist by "assimilating" other cultures, add ing new technologies to their own. "The Borg are the ultimate users," 0 had explained to 202 THE FREEMAN • APRIL 1997 Captain Picard in the earlier episode. "They're not interested in humans. They just want your technology. They've identified it as something they can consume." Back here on Earth, the histories of Marx ism, Nazism, and other harmful ideologies show that every form of collectivism that has risen to power has had to enslave its citizenry and plunder its neighbors to survive. Collec tivism thrives in our society among those who advocate taxing and redistributing the fruits of other people's labor instead of producing and trading goods in a free market. Collec tivism, too, advocates the use of force when necessary. In its politically correct permuta tions in academe, collectivism is virulently anti-intellectual and regards individuality as an enemy concept. In operation, collectivists have an uglytrack record that rivals that of the Borg in Star Trek.

It is interesting that eventually the Borg become somewhat humanized. In the episode "I, Borg," the Enterprise recovers a single severely injured Borg from a wrecked space craft and nurses him back to health. At first he displays abject terror at his isolation, but slowly he acquires a sense of his own person hood and even a name, Hugh. Captain Picard considers sending him back with another virus to destroy the Borg Collective but, ever the moral actor, rejects the idea as genocide. Nevertheless, Hugh has been "infected" with something even more insidious from the col lectivist point of viewthe subversive concept of individuality. Several Borg appear in the two-part episode "Descent," the last of the ST:TNG Borg episodes-having been forged into a group following Data's evil twin, Lore. It is unclear whether the entire Collective has been infected and destroyed or just this small part of it. In Star Trek: First Contact, the Collective goes back in time-a frequent Star Trek plot device-to destroy humans and their deadly virus of individuality. Ironi cally, in First Contact, the Collective has a "queen" -who looks and talks very much like an individual, asserting, "I am the Collective."

Of course, this implicitly recognizes that no collective race such as the Borg could exist. Technology, even if once mastered, does not perpetuate itself without individuals to maintain and further develop it. Marx, the great philosopher of collectivism, correctly ob served that human beings must produce the means of their own survival; he incorrectly thought that since capitalism had perma nently solved the problem of production, the primary problem was to ensure the just dis tribution of goods. However, it turned out that societies dom inated by collectivism became economic, cultural, and technological backwaters. The problem of production was not solved, be cause it requires myriad and ongoing human actions. We inhabit a physical universe that does not take care of us. Our minds are, indeed, our means of survival:We must discover regu larities in our surroundings and act based on objective causality. This process does not be come either automatic or optional merely be cause a civilizationhas reached a certain stage of technological development. The illusion to the contrary contributed to the downfall of Marxism.

But now that Marxism has fallen into disrepute, new collectivist endeavors take such forms as multiculturalism, radical femi nism, and extreme environmentalism. Ayn Rand identified the reason why collectivism never has and never can work. With no collective brain or intellect, there can be no "collective action"; all actions attributed to groups are really metaphors for ordered se quences of actions taken by individualmembers of the groups. Thus, contrary to another philosopher of collectivism, Jean Jacques Rousseau, there is no "general will." In practice, collectivism has always "forced individuals to be free," in Rousseau's words, by assuming that "true freedom" can be had only by giving up indi viduality and immersing oneself completely in a collective. The basic problem is that there is no collective mind. We are not Borg. Most of us have no wish to be. This is whywe find such imagery repulsive.

Anyone who finds collectivism tempting ought to seek out those Next Generation epi sodes featuring the Borg. Thanks to Star Trek, it is no longer impossible to imagine what a society controlled by an actual "collective mind" would be like. It isn't pretty. D THEFREEMAN IDEAS ON LIBERTY The Myth of the "Independent"Fed by Thomas J. DiLorenzo E ver since its founding in 1913, the Fed has described itself as an "independent" agency operated by selfless public servants striving to "fine-tune" the economy through monetary policy. In reality, however, a non political governmental institution is as likely as a barking cat. Yet, the myth of an "inde pendent" Fed persists. One reason this myth persists is that statist textbooks have helped perpetuate it for decades. From 1948 until about 1980 Paul Samuel son's Economics was the bestselling intro ductory economics text. Generations of stu~ dents were introduced to economics by Samuelson. Although not as popular as it once was, Samuelson's text (now coauthored with William Nordhaus) is still widely used.