“Resistance is
Futile”.
In the movie “Star Trek: First Contact”, the Borg were a
humanoid species wired together in one ship that shared one mind. They were
part organic and part electronic like our friend above. President Obama has
been criticized as a bit cold and aloof but it’s never been suspected he is part
machine. However, he and his philosophical kind have much in common with the
Borg and we should be just…as….wary.
On 7/13/12, the president gave a speech that talked about the virtues of government. He reminisced how his grandfather
got the GI Bill and an FHA loan and how his single mother went to school on
grants and scholarships. “Of course, I’m always struck by people who think, well, (I must be successful) because
I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be
because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there
are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful,
somebody along the line gave you some help…Somebody helped to create this
unbelievable American system…that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in
roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody
else made that happen.” Now when he said, “You didn’t build that”, he
was talking about the roads and bridges. But he did seem to be saying something
Americans don’t often hear: If you
sacrificed your blood, sweat, and tears, if you risked every penny you had to
create a popscicle stand or a multinational corporation, it really wasn’t that
special.
Some say it was a
gaffe but I think it was one of those rare moments where he spoke his heart.
The idea is that because you live in a system with good education, rule of law,
and infrastructure, you owe something to that system. That might be true if
everybody didn’t already pay taxes for that system in the first place. The
business men, high priced lawyers, and wealthy investors have already paid for
the roads with gas taxes and for the public school down the street with their
property taxes (And they pay double to send their kids to private school.) They
already paid for the salaries of their congressmen and the defense of this
country by being part of the 5% that pay 58.7% of all income taxes.
What is this
liberal obsession with unity, sameness, the collective? The unity rhetoric has
always struck me as pure baloney. They don’t mean it. How could they when class
warfare is the mother’s milk of the Democratic party? Is there a conservative
position they don’t view as primitive or hateful? What they really mean by
unity is that humanity is improving and it’s only a matter of time until we all
see the light. Theirs is the enlightened position. Liberals push higher
education so much, not necessarily because half the professors are to the left
of Castro himself, but because they really believe education equals
enlightenment and enlightenment is liberalism. So all of humanity is on
this march. Some individuals are slower than others but there will be unity one
day.
What is instructive is how Progressives, the intellectual
fathers of modern liberals such as Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt
explained this thinking. With unlimited optimism they had deep faith in
historical progress. The dangers of factiousness present at the founding were
dust in the wind. They openly despised the Constitution with its protections
for property and its idea of God-given Natural Rights. The people confer the
rights on themselves. By the people, of course, they meant that perfect
representative of the people: the state. Pure democracy was mankind’s
salvation. The great irony, however, is their remarkably undemocratic tool for
bringing about this whole project. The grand plan was essentially a fourth branch
of government: a lifetime tenured, well paid bureaucracy unburdened by the
ugliness of special interests, i.e. politics. The dream? An army of enlightened
technocrats free to execute the “true” unified will of the people.
In “The New Freedom”, Wilson explained his utopian vision:
“We are architects in our time…(and we will build a system of government and
society) until finally, a generation or two from now, the scaffolding will be
taken away….where men can live as a single community, co-operative as in a
perfected, co-ordinated beehive, not afraid of any storm of nature, not afraid
of any artificial storm…”
So when our president denigrates individualism and says we
all have responsibilities to our society, when he says there are no red states and no blue states, just the United
States of America, what he really means is that we’re all one big blue state
and we need to get on with the business of letting go of the broken down
ideas of the past. When we free our minds and enlighten ourselves, we will finally
see his vision. We will become one and be unified in this great Borg ship, I
mean beehive. It’s gonna happen. Resistance is futile.
*Steve Mann appears to be a stand up guy who only wants
McD’s to pay for the repair of his equipment and to maybe donate some money to
vision research.
