The Value of Individuality: Lessons from the Borg of Star Trek
by Thomas Walker-Werth
Human history is replete with social and political systems that sought to subjugate the individual to the supposed needs or will of the group. Communism, fascism, and direct democracy are all examples of such systems.
Ultimately, however, the people who implement these systems can only control others through physical force. They cannot control what others think. To the extent that people are able to live under such systems, they remain able to think freely (although censorship can severely limit what they can easily think about because they would lack access to media that can teach and encourage free thought). Their access to information may be controlled, but their freedom to think as they see fitt is not and, with present-day technology, cannot be.
But what if it could? A system that repressed not only freedom of action but also freedom of thought would thoroughly override each individual’s power to choose his own values, and thereby destroy his unique identity as a human being. It would render individuals unable to act as anything other than units in a larger machine. By imagining such a society, we can draw attention to the importance of individuality—the fact that thinking for oneself and building one’s own character are the essence of human nature. This is exactly what Star Trek does in its depiction of the fictional Borg Collective.
Introduced in the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Borg are made up of individuals from thousands of alien species who have been forcibly “assimilated” into a collective consciousness through the use of cybernetic implants. They become “Borg drones” that are utterly incapable of independent thought and are psychologically dependent on their connection to the Borg consciousness. Like the citizens in the dystopian society of Ayn Rand’s novella Anthem, Borg drones know only the collective pronouns “we” and “our”—they cannot think of themselves as singular individuals. In place of names, they have only numeric designations such as “Third of Five.” If severed from the Collective, they become lost animals, desperately lonely and unable to function.
Such a severance is depicted in the episode “I, Borg” during The Next Generation’s fifth season. In it, the Enterprise crew brings aboard a drone cut off from the Collective after his ship crashed. At first, he continues to act like a drone, warning his captors that they will be assimilated and simply saying “we are Borg” when asked about his identity. But one of the Enterprise crew, Geordi, takes an interest and decides to try and build a relationship with the isolated drone. Geordi presses, asking him about who he is now that he’s isolated from the Collective, and the drone is scared to realize he can’t answer. He can’t even understand how to refer to himself, and so Geordi gives him the name Hugh, which the drone accepts with astonishment.
Geordi pushes on, explaining to Hugh how individual identity is crucial to human life:
Every time you talk about yourself, you use the word “we”: “We want this,” “We want that.” You don’t even know how to think of yourself as a single individual. You don’t say “I want this,” or “I am Hugh.” We are all separate individuals. I am Geordi. I choose what I want to do with my life. I make decisions for myself. For somebody like me, losing that sense of individuality is almost worse than dying.
Geordi’s comparison is powerful because life as a drone is almost a kind of living death. Without individuality, the drones cannot choose and pursue values, the very essence of human life and our means of surviving. Instead, they become mindless cogs in a machine—an apt metaphor for life under brutal collectivist tyrannies such as Soviet Russia, fascist Italy, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
Later in the episode, the Enterprise crew debate the ethics of returning Hugh to the Collective in the hope that he will spread a destabilizing bug through the collective consciousness. The ship’s command officers, Captain Picard and Commander Riker, take some convincing to believe that Hugh really has become an individual deserving of rights and respect:
Picard: [The Borg have] declared war on our way of life. We’re to be assimilated.
Dr. Crusher: But even in war, there are rules. You don’t kill civilians indiscriminately.
Riker: There are no civilians among the Borg.
Picard: Think of them as a single collective being. There’s no one Borg who is more an individual than your arm or your leg.
Crusher: How convenient.
Picard: Your point, Doctor?
Crusher: When I look at my patient, I don’t see a collective consciousness, I don’t see a hive. I see a living, breathing boy who has been hurt and who needs our help. And we’re talking about sending him back to his people as an instrument of destruction.
“I, Borg” is a turning point in Star Trek’s Borg storyline, with subsequent stories dealing with the fallout from the Enterprise crew’s actions in this episode. Later, the fourth through seventh seasons of Star Trek: Voyager involve an arc about the crew rescuing and rehabilitating another drone, Seven of Nine. Seven’s arc is similar to Hugh’s arc but with much more detail, exploring individuality in a much deeper way.
Assimilated as a young girl, Seven has almost no past identity to reclaim and must essentially construct a new identity as an adult while the Collective relentlessly pursues and attempts to re-assimilate her. Whereas Hugh’s story is a self-contained forty-five-minute story about discovering one’s individuality, Seven’s story is a four-year arc in which she must build relationships, learn to love, navigate loss and temptation, and ultimately choose her deepest values and loyalties.
Star Trek’s Borg storyline is an outstanding example of science fiction’s ability to use fantastical stories as allegories for real-world subjects. Not only do these arcs serve to highlight the life-destroying nature of collectivism and the evil of suppressing individual thought, they also highlight why we as individuals must think deeply and carefully about our unique identities, values, and purposes in life.
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Note: If you are unfamiliar with Star Trek and wish to explore the Borg storyline, I recommend watching the following key stories in order. These deal most directly with the theme of individuality:
The Next Generation, “Q, Who?”
The Next Generation, “The Best of Both Worlds”
The Next Generation, “I, Borg”
The Next Generation, “Descent”
Voyager, “Unity”
Voyager, “Scorpion”
Voyager, “Dark Frontier”
Voyager, “Collective”
Voyager, “Child’s Play”
Voyager, “Unimatrix Zero”
Voyager, “Endgame”