To the Editor,
Re: Motley assortment of socialism offered, Letters, June 30.
Long ago, Star Trek featured technology idolizing hybrid humanoids known as the Borg, who integrated beings and cultures into their collective conscience through assimilation and ‘hive dynamics’. I always thought this a metaphor for our industrial cultural assimilation.
We go willingly, mindlessly intoxicated by our industrial proficiency and its ability to satisfy our inexhaustible thirst for material possessions produced through technological advances.
We have built a hive culture that requires group assimilation and continuous economic expansion of its requisite industrial engine. Similar to the Borg who idolize technology, we have honored industrialization as the secular pillar of our civilization, and like the Borg, we have focused our “collective” energy and minds to perfecting and expanding it.
Like the Borg collective, supportive technology has advanced so fast the average person cannot keep up with all the consequences, and the few that can, supplant our collective minds and undermine our intelligence with computers that think for us.
As hive drones, we willingly give our power to politicians who promote industrial assimilation with the promise of riches and to economists who invent and reinvent ways to invigorate economic growth based on industrialization.
This cultural assimilation has been so effective that somehow, we have become convinced that there are no limits to industrial economic expansion, even though we live on a planet with finite resources.
We can profess capitalism where poverty and death for some is the price of being the fittest, but in the end, we are all socialists as we live in the industrialist “hive” assimilated by a culture that requires collective co-operation.
Socialism and capitalism are simply tools to market industrialism.
While we diminish each other with labels, we are missing the real issue. Industrial expansionism is dependent on exponential extraction of finite resources and that formula is not sustainable.
Ron Heusen
Nanaimo