Assimilated by the Collective, Part 1: Cultural Marxism according to Star Trek's Borg
Conquer, assimilate, repeat. Star Trek's fictional Borg collective illustrates how the real collective of cultural Marxism operates, with one important difference that makes the latter even worse.
“We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.”
You don’t have to be a Trekkie (a fan of Star Trek) to have heard the phrase above or at least some variation of it. The phrase “resistance is futile” has especially entered the popular lexicon beyond the popularity of the Borg themselves. But if it had not for the failure of the creators of Star Trek: The Next Generation in introducing their first villains in 1987, this absolutely brilliant concept of a horrifying alien race probably would not have existed.
When the debut of the successor series to the original 1960s Star Trek was greenlit, creator Gene Roddenberry wanted to create an alien race that would be as much a formidable recurring adversary for the crew of the new Enterprise under Captain Jean-Luc Picard as the Klingons had been for Captain Kirk and his Enterprise. Their first attempt produced a race called the Ferengi, introduced in the fifth episode of the first season, “The Last Outpost”. They are depicted as a race of conniving, manipulative short, bald aliens with big earlobes, and each of them is primarily motivated by financial profit. This initial effort failed as audience reception completely fell short of the creator’s expectations. Viewers found the Ferengi to be too comical and unintimidating to be a serious threat, especially compared to the ruthless Klingons and Romulans from The Original Series.
For the second season, the show’s creators went back to the drawing board. They drew inspiration from an uncharacteristically scary first-season episode, “Conspiracy”. The result was a breakout success. The sixteenth episode of the second season, “Q Who”, introduced us to the Borg, a cybernetic quasi-species, part machine, and part organic.
The Borg Collective is, at the time of its debut, unlike any other alien species theretofore seen on television (except perhaps Doctor Who’s Cybermen). Instead of reproducing biologically, they propagate by assimilating other alien races that they have conquered, transforming countless free individuals into Borg drones without independent thought, beholden only to the voice of the Collective’s hive mind. A terrifying force of nature and a complete subversion of the values of individual freedom and peaceful coexistence espoused by the Federation at the center of the Star Trek myth. But like all myths, there is much that this fictional threat to galactic peace can say about the perils facing our society in real life.
First I should get something out of the way. Since the creators of Star Trek seem to lean mostly left, despite the respect I have for what they have created, I doubt that they would appreciate the comparison I am about to make between their Borg creation and the source of the Left’s philosophical wellspring. But this villainous collective that they have so brilliantly created is in many ways a very apt illustration of Marxism - both in its classical iteration but especially in the postmodern manifestation that we see today.
The Borg’s iconic warning to every would-be victim is particularly instructive in understanding how Marxism operates. Here is a fuller version of the it from the very memorable episode “The Best of Both Worlds, Part 1” after drones board the Enterprise to abduct and assimilate its captain:
“Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We wish to improve ourselves. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours.”
There is something essentially ideological about this statement. It’s not just the normal warning to “prepare to be boarded” that we hear countless times coming from other races on the show. It’s more than just a simple “give us what we want or we’ll blow you up”. Rather, the Borg’s infamous declaration of intent almost functions like part of a manifesto. It makes clear to its enemies and victims the states the means and method by which the Borg engages in galactic conquest. It especially underlines that they do not destroy their prey but rather assimilate them to become part of the building blocks of their ever-expanding collective.
Cultural Marxism and the “new” Borg: “Post-postmodern” phenomena
It is appropriate that the Borg was introduced as an existential adversary to the Federation during the run of The Next Generation, a Star Trek show that reflects the Postmodern values of the 1980s and 1990s, whereas The Original Series was more a product of the Modernist mindset of the 1960s. (I owe this observation to Stanley J. Grenz in his excellent book, A Primer on Postmodernism.) The Vulcan science officer Mister Spock from the original Star Trek is still well known even beyond the franchise’s fandom for his dedication to logic and reason above all other virtues. This is very much a hallmark of Modernism’s elevation of the human intellectual and the pursuit of scientific knowledge as a virtue. It was also an era when our collective imagination was captured by feats of science and engineering, the moon landing being a prime example. The truth, in the paradigm of this era, is an objective thing that is always quantifiable or can at least be known through scientific inquiry. This is reflected in general public consciousness beyond science.
During this period, which was also the height of the Cold War, there was much less ambiguity about who the good guys and the bad guys were. This is reflected in the geopolitics of Star Trek. Aside from a few individual exceptions, The Original Series generally portrays the warlike Klingons and the guileful Romulans as a whole as pretty much clear-cut enemies of the Federation. It is said that the Klingons especially were created as Trek’s analog for the real-life Soviet Union.
This relationship changed during the run of The Next Generation. Gone are the scheming Klingon commanders from the old show. Aside from a completely new makeup (forehead aliens!) and costume design, in this new series, the Klingons are now portrayed much more sympathetically as a warrior race who holds honor as their highest virtue. At the time of its debut, the series also drew attention for featuring a member of the formerly adversarial race, Lieutenant Worf (Michael Dorn), as part of the new Enterprise crew. The blurring of the line between friends and enemies was further solidified in the 1991 original series feature film, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which portrays how the actions of Kirk’s crew helped to establish the peace treaty between the Klingons and the Federation.
This is not to say that this newfound peace is a bad thing. The way The Next Generation portrays its geopolitical narrative is a product of its era, the Postmodern era, a period that rejects the spirit of confident certainty of the modern era. While the Modern era champions reason and scientific inquiry and eschews that which cannot be investigated by the scientific method, the Postmodern era asserts that “knowing” can be achieved by other means. Where Modernism generally rejects “softer” ways of seeking truth, such as religious faith, as untrustworthy, Postmodernism embraces them with open arms. It marked the return of subjective knowledge such as feelings and faith as a valid and accepted part of how we know things.
This aspect of the postmodernist mindset is even an essential part of the Star Trek series that came after The Next Generation. Where The Next Generation projects a postmodern openness to diverse perspectives about the universe while maintaining a commitment to scientific supremacy, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, first aired in 1993 and set during the same period, features a religious faith surrounding godlike wormhole aliens as part of its central narrative and character development. If nothing else, this shows how good Star Trek can be as a barometer of Western society’s continuing shift from Modernism to Postmodernism.
This era of Postmodernism, with its rejection of Modernism’s confidence in scientific certainty, marked the beginning of the mindset of extreme relativism that we see today. The Postmodernist paradigm does not only dismiss the idea that reality - factual truth - is always objective, existing outside of our subjective experiences. A natural consequence of this denial is also the rejection of moral objectivity. After all, if reality is subjective, then it follows that the parts of reality that define morality are also subjective. It is no longer a matter of who is right and who is wrong about moral truths; it is now that all moral truth claims should be considered valid. (Unless your moral truth claim disagrees with moral relativism, of course!) This was the starting point of the hyper-postmodern madness we see today.
It has not been a huge leap from the postmodern assertion that truth is subjective to every individual - that every truth is relative - to the hyper-postmodern contention that even mathematics is not an objective way to determine truth. And suggesting it is might mean you’re a “racist”. Similarly, it has only been a short hop, skip, and jump between the postmodern claim that gender is a subjective social construct and the hyper-postmodern proclamation that being pregnant and giving birth is not the exclusive territory of a woman. And suggesting this doesn’t make sense might mean you’re “transphobic”.
This has an implication for the evolution of Marxist thought as well. It is ironic that while classical Marxism and cultural Marxism both carry the same Marxist DNA, the cultural Marxist worldview held by today’s Leftists that champions the subjectivity of truth and moral relativism is, in a significant way, a negative response to the past confident scientific objectivism and moral absolutism of the kind of classical Marxism embodied by the likes of the Soviet Union.
It is not surprising, given the “progressive” leaning of most of its creators, that Star Trek generally depicts society’s development from Modernism to Postmodernism as a positive change - and in many ways it is. After all, whether in fiction or in reality, moving away from a dogmatic good guy-bad guy dichotomy can often go a long way to make peace possible. But not if doing so means compromising with the reality that some things are objectively true; doing otherwise would only be playing along with people’s delusions. Furthermore, along with this moral good, the underlying paradigm shift goes deeper and wider than mere geopolitics. The philosophical gene of this paradigm unfortunately also carries a deconstructionist tendency that opens the door to nothing less than the questioning and even the dismantling of the foundations of Western civilization. The same postmodern relativistic skepticism behind rethinking a society’s social and geopolitical relationships beyond given allies and enemies can be turned against that society’s foundations for determining what is true and what is good. Even ideas that have stood the test of ages and have proven to be consistent and dependable foundations of society can be painted with a negative brush in the lens of cultural Marxism - and their very success turned against them as evidence that those ideas support the “oppressive” status quo as imagined by neo-Marxists.
It was against this backdrop of a Postmodern Western society that the Borg was introduced. While The Next Generation’s Klingons and Romulans are postmodern reinterpretations of the 1960s original, the Borg is arguably something that can only be conceived by a Postmodern era creative mind. More significantly, one can call them a quintessentially postmodern villain in the sense that while they are portrayed as terrifying and destructive, they are also depicted as considering themselves above any notion of morality in their philosophical dogma. If the Borg had an in-hive philosopher, that drone would likely be a fan of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. To the Collective the only ultimate goal is “perfection”, not in the moral or even aesthetic sense but in the functional sense, and efficiency above all else being part of that perfection. Any moral truth is, as the Borg are fond of saying, “irrelevant”.
This irrelevance of objective facts and moral values is also a hallmark of postmodern neo-Marxism. This is why many conservatives and classical liberals bemoan that much of what “progressives” say and do seems to defy common sense. The fact is it would require commonly held shared moral and/or logical points of reference for any idea of common sense to be “common”. Cultural Marxism rejects any such objective point of reference and insists that the whole of society views every issue using their own Marxist point of reference. Hence their brute force incessant ramming down of loaded neo-Marxist terms like “whiteness" and reinterpreted words like “fascist” down the throat of public discourse.
For example, Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (popular designation: AOC) once famously said, “It’s more important to be morally right than to be factually correct.” What she said makes no sense until one realizes that despite speaking of being morally right, she did not say this with a set of commonly shared objective moral standards in mind. An objective moral standard would be impossible without being factually correct. What is morally right has to also be factually right, independent of any subjective perspective, or else the fact would be that it is not morally correct. Rather, she was speaking from cultural Marxism’s subjective perspective of what is morally correct, and since it is subjective, it does not depend on factual correctness to exist.
Marxism: The real-life Borg Collective?
Of all the races and species in science fiction - and indeed in all of fiction - the Borg is arguably the best analogy for Marxism. The most obvious comparison with the Marxist vision is the Borg’s collective nature. Like in a classic Marxist collective utopia, there is no social stratification in the Borg Collective, where everyone is equal, and with shared possession contributing to the same goal. It was only in 1996 in the film Star Trek: Contact, seven years after the Borg debuted on television, that we are introduced to a leading figure in the Borg collective. In Star Trek: First Contact, arguably the best The Next Generation feature film, we finally meet the Borg Queen (played by Alice Krige), who was retconned as the personification behind the Collective’s hive mind. She was presumably introduced to give the movie a central villain to focus on. Before her introduction, however, the Borg Collective was envisioned as a quasi-society without rulers quite akin to the Communist utopia that classical Marxists dream of. “From each drone according to its ability, to each drone according to its needs” would perfectly describe the state of the relationship between Borg drones and the collective.
However, this Borg collective analog to Marxism is not limited to classical Marxism. Marxism’s Postmodern form, the cultural version of neo-Marxism that seems to drive everything in Western is also collective in nature. (For the purpose of this article I will use the term “neo-Marxism” near-interchangeably with “cultural Marxism”.) Like classical Marxism, this cultural Marxism is also characterized by a Borg-like collective hive mind. It is not a secret that uniformity is the order of the day among neo-Marxists. They see the world through ideological Marx-colored lenses where everything is framed in terms of power dynamics and the struggle between oppressors and the oppressed. The difference is that classical Marxists largely focus on power dynamics between socioeconomic classes, while cultural Marxists turn those Marx-colored lenses to other types of social relationships and in doing so see the struggle between oppressors and the oppressed in every social interaction in society.
Nowhere is this uniformity of thought more apparent in Marxist-dominated university campuses. Conservative speakers are regularly heckled and threatened by Leftists activists, both young and old, who refuse to let a dissenting or alternative voice be heard on their campus. Swimmer-turned-activist Riley Gaines is a recent example of this as of the time of writing. Gaines is a female college swimmer who had been given second place to biological male swimmer Lia Thomas despite having tied with the transgender swimmer. She spoke out against the erasing of girls from their own sport at a university, and for her trouble, she was physically assaulted and held hostage for three hours by transgender activists. The university leadership, on their part, decided to support the activists and offer them any emotional support they needed instead. This does not make sense in a rational society, except in reality, this is not just about transgenderism but about the madness that is cultural Marxism. It is only through the twisted mindset of that ideological philosophy’s intellectual lens can a violent mob be seen as the oppressed despite their violent behavior while the victim of that behavior, a young girl no less, is seen as the oppressor.
And nowhere is such violent drone-like behavior manifested more regularly in the actions of radical Leftist activist organizations like Antifa. As an activist movement, Antifa is not a hierarchical organization. It has chapters but is only loosely organized in each city with no main leaders, very much like the Borg collective. But the general tenets and goals of Antifa as a movement are largely uniform, to destabilize what they see as the oppressive social structures in society and establish their own version of utopian collectivism.
While cultural Marxism is preoccupied with dogmatic uniformity, at the same time its proponents also continuously obsess over “diversity”. By this, of course, they do not mean diversity of thought or ideas. They only mean diversity in superficial traits and immutable characteristics like race, gender, sexual orientation, and the like. This is the only kind of “diversity” allowed in cultural Marxism’s totalitarian lexicon. When it comes to ideological diversity, only the Marxist worldview is allowed to exist and prosper. This also makes the cultural Marxist collective very much like the Borg collective, in that on the surface you might see some semblance of diversity since the collective has assimilated individuals from various backgrounds, but there is little freedom of thought inside, only the thought of the hive mind.
This ideological fetish for uniform thought is not without reason. In Star Trek lore, the Borg’s collective thought serves to make them very efficient in achieving their purpose. In fact, they view individuality in other species condescendingly, in their view at least, individuality results in inefficiency. To them, the absence of individuality also means the absence of conflicting goals between individual drones. Because the collective is essentially a machine dedicated wholly to one single purpose, nothing matters more than the results that the machine is designed to produce. Conversely, this also means that each drone is nothing but an expendable cog in that machine. Any possible individual interest or self-preservation is sacrificed for the sake of the collective’s objectives. And, yes, you can probably guess by now that I might as well have been describing the Marxist collective vision for society.
For all their talk of “diversity” coming from neo-Marxist rhetorics, that diversity is only diversity in the sense of differently colored and differently shaped cogs serving the various functions in the same neo-Marxist collective. No part of the machine is allowed to serve a different agenda. Many former leftists who now speak up against the bankruptcy of Marxism would tell you that one of the things that opened their eyes and ended up taking them on the journey away from the Left was the hostility of their former comrades toward any dissent against the hive mind, even if it is in the form of a genuine question. (Examples here and here.) The collective does not respond well at all to one of their own breaking away from the hive mind and thinking for themselves (a liberated drone, if you will), sometimes even violently.
The neo-Marxist fixation with ideological uniformity also means that there is always a sense of insincerity whenever its most radical proponents outwardly champion members of a certain “marginalized” group. They would speak up on behalf of certain “oppressed” communities, especially in the aftermath of high-profile events involving members of those communities. But should any member of those same communities reject the cultural Marxists’ narrative, should they reject the status of being “oppressed” and/or espouse a non-Marxist perspective of the state of things, the neo-Marxists would turn on them and treat them as much as personas non-grata as any member of the “oppressor” groups, if not worse. Slurs such as “Uncle Tom” would be thrown at ideological dissidents who refuse to follow their narrative. Cultural Marxism tolerates no philosophical vision or worldview other than its own, not even those of supposed “oppressed” or “marginalized” groups that cultural Marxists supposedly champion.
A very sobering example of this is the neo-Marxist concept of “whiteness”, which has recently become very popular among ideologically committed Western Leftists. What is telling about this concept is that it has less to do with one’s actual skin color than with one’s ideological paradigm. I once found myself at the pointy end of a Facebook rant by a committed cultural Marxist, who lectured me about how much I have apparently been indoctrinated into a cultural system driven by “whiteness”. Neither of us was (or is) “white” by the definition of most people in the West; he is Hispanic, and I am of East Asian descent. Unfortunately, this concept is not limited to the unsolicited lectures of random Leftists on social media. As an indication that the cultural Marxist worldview has indeed assimilated the mainstream, the Smithsonian Institution offers this clear and uncontested explanation of “whiteness”:
“Whiteness and white racialized identity refer to the way that white people, their customs, culture, and beliefs operate as the standard by which all other groups of are compared. Whiteness is also at the core of understanding race in America. Whiteness and the normalization of white racial identity throughout America's history have created a culture where nonwhite persons are seen as inferior or abnormal.
This white-dominant culture also operates as a social mechanism that grants advantages to white people, since they can navigate society both by feeling normal and being viewed as normal. Persons who identify as white rarely have to think about their racial identity because they live within a culture where whiteness has been normalized.
Thinking about race is very different for nonwhite persons living in America. People of color must always consider their racial identity, whatever the situation, due to the systemic and interpersonal racism that still exists.”
This matter-of-fact definition given by a longstanding American institution is clearly pregnant with a cultural Marxist view of society. Most telling is the last paragraph quoted above, which not only asserts the prevalence of systemic racism in postmodern America but also implies that racism is to be defined differently in that country. These are neo-Marxist ideas given by a major public institution stated without debate or qualification.
The term “whiteness”, though, is a very novel ideological concept that never existed before. As such, it is an example of the neo-Marxist fondness for creating neologisms for the purpose of indoctrination. The insertion of neo-Marxist vocabulary into the public lexicon is one of the major means that proponents of cultural Marxism use to assimilate the general public into their collective’s hive mind without the masses even realizing it. The normalization of such vocabulary in public conversations has helped cultural Marxist narratives to escape the confines of college and university campuses where they are incubated into the general population in the West. Before we know it, a word that used to mean something else completely ideologically neutral is now loaded with progressive meaning. This gives cultural Marxist concepts a semantic backdoor into both public conversations and the mindset of individual members of society, bypassing their critical faculties by clothing foreign neo-Marxist ideas in the verbal disguise of existing communal values. Such a means is especially effective on those who have shallow philosophical understanding or commitment to any philosophical persuasion of their own - the philosophically agnostic, who believe that they can remain independent in this moral relativist age by not taking sides.
This is why cultural Marxists love to create and assign group labels to people. A label “depersonifies” an individual and recasts that person in a specific role in their neo-Marxist narrative, much as the Borg eliminates the individuality of a victim and turns them into part of their hive mind by renaming assimilated drones with designations like “Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix 01”. Labels are especially effective in the social media age because they can be applied to other individuals they disagree with without caring about those individuals holistically as complex human beings. The label becomes the totality of the other person’s identity.
Word assimilation: How cultural Marxists use labels as a weapon
Labels also help cultural Marxism in attempting to force everyone to play the role it assigns in its narrative vision, whether they want it and even whether they realize it. Even those who reject the neo-Marxist ideological view of society and resist being assimilated as cogs in the collective’s machinery are then cast in a role that is very familiar to Marxism’s twisted morality play, namely that of the “oppressors”. Think of the labels that those on the left regularly and unilaterally slap onto people who resist their ideological vision of the world. They regularly call those that disagree with them “fascists”, “racists”, “white supremacists”, “TERFs”, “transphobes”, and so on. These labels need not be either factually or historically correct. Cultural Marxists are fond of throwing the label “fascists” because they see themselves and their enemies through a Marxist-Socialist historical lens, where the longtime enemies have always been the fascists. Never mind that the historical definition of fascism as defined by actual Fascists like Benito Mussolini has no resemblance to the political ideology of American conservatism and libertarianism. Not only that but the neo-Marxist vision of utopia with its oversized government power, not to mention Antifa’s political tactics, actually resemble the vision and methods of the historical Fascists more than anything from conservatives who favor small government and just want to be left alone.
Neo-Marxists also impose their ideologically charged slurs without bothering to provide an explanation or example of how those people deserve those labels exactly, as though the very labels are self-explanatory. In fact, the most effective response to such charges has been to ask them for examples of how such labels are valid. Nevertheless, cultural Marxists impose these labels on their opponents as a way to give their enemies a role in their ideological narrative - to turn them into “the Other”, to use the academic parlance of which Leftist academics are so fond.
It is unfortunate that, in some cases, some labels born by cultural Marxism’s semantic project have come to be unwittingly adopted even by its opponents, thereby helping to cement the idea behind it in the public consciousness. It’s a subtle form of cultural assimilation. An example of this is the term “cis-gendered”. This term, meaning the opposite of “transgendered” was created and introduced to normalize transgenderism via the use of an opposite classification. It is through this that we no longer just have “men” and “women” but “transmen” and “cis-men”, “transwomen” and “cis-women”. Note that the labels “cis-gendered”, “cis-men”, and “cis-women” are not designations that anyone, especially not conservatives, has ever asked for nor ever wanted to have applied to oneself. These labels are neologisms, real-life “Newspeak”, newly made up and ideologically pregnant words created by proponents of cultural Marxism in order to assimilate the public consciousness into their worldview.
The Borg collective assimilates countless individuals through assimilation tubules from their hands that inject their bodies with Borg nanoprobes until they, too, become drones for the collective. The neo-Marxist collective assimilates countless individuals through words that inject their minds with cultural Marxist ideology until they, too, become drones for the collective.
This is the end of the first part of the series. Click here for the second part. We will see how the Borg’s parasitic assimilation is a perfect analogy for cultural Marxism’s ideological modus operandi. And despite how it feels sometimes, resistance is NOT futile.