I love Star Trek, but found it funny how they created an enemy called the Borg, which is based on everyone connecting to each other called “the collective”. I sometimes wonder why the collective is perceived to be an enemy.
My analysis is the collective is an enemy because it goes against individuality, which is something cherished in the modern world. All that matters is yourself, individual rights, so on and so on, as if there should be no responsibility to others or to the community.
At the risk of being a conspiracy theorist, there could be those out there that do not want us to connect, because together we may be stronger than them, those who want to control us.
I say let’s connect. Let us be who we were meant to be, a social animal. Let us “Nobodies” get together and say “NO”. You may have the money, the power, the influence, but you will not break us. We are many and we believe in certain things and will work together to accomplish them. We want a better world for everyone. Not a dog eat dog world where the powerful become more powerful to fulfil their own interest.
SWARM VERDICT 
In star trek, the borg destroy existing civilisations, forcing them to become part of the collective – adding that civilisations biological and technological distinctiveness to the borg. Also they have a queen!
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You are absolutely right Mathew. The Borg were a lot more than just “the collective” they forced assimilation and were all bent on destroying cvivilisation. Wouldn’t have been much of an enemy if they didn’t. I guess.
I was just taking about the concept of the collective thinking, which by itself did not necessitate all the bad things they did. Also, I was not a big fan of “The Queen”, which was added later. The idea of making her a conduit of collective thought, was fine, but she became autonomous, which kind of contradicts the concept.
I’m sometimes fascinated on how art imitates reality, and vice-versa. Being, somewhat, a trekky I would look at some of the different alien characters, both the ones part of the federation and enemies and tried to see who they tried to emulate. Deep Space Nine, went much more in depth.
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I do agree that our culture’s esteem for individuality is connected to a tendency to make the collective the “bad guy”. But I don’t think the main reason behind why the collective is consdiered the “bad guy” is because individual rights are important, but individual freedom of thought. I think the villain you’re mentioning represents either oppression, conformity or herd-mentality. These phenomena have been emphasized by major thinkers like Freud and Neitzsche, to the effect that our culture has tended to denigrate groups of people. What we have not as often considered (to speak to your point) is that people who freely come together can form a harmonious unity.And in some ways the collective is smarter than the individual, as some studies have shown where the average estimate of a group of people (say, of a number of balls in a car) is much closer to the real number than any individual estimates.
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Thanks for your insightful comments
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I agree with you. Thanks for correcting me. Free thinking is essential, for robust collective solutions. I like your example of the of estimates of balls in a car being more accurately predicted by the average of a number of people than any single person. I heard something similar with a crowed guessing the height of someone on stage.
The original idea behind this site was to have the free thinking you are talking about collaboratively discussing issues and coming out with verdicts that may be more accurate than individual experts. Imagine if court cases where judged by a jury of thousands or hundreds of thousands. Chances are the courts will probably work better. Of course there is the problem of insuring that only the presented evidence is looked at,or may be not, but its a cool idea I think. I may have to expand on this idea in a separate blog. Thanks for your post. It made me think.
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