Borgian Philosophy

If you have ever watched much Star Trek, then you are probably somewhat acquainted with the Borg (a collection of zombie-like cyborgs who share one mind and are bent on the assimilation of those who would add to their perfection). The Borg are not very chatty. The individuals almost never say anything, and the collective generally repeats the same catch phrases over and over: "We are the Borg; you will be assimilated; resistance is futile; we will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own;" "comply;" "irrelevant;" and other cordial conversation starters.

The main point of most of there conversation is we are going to defeat you and make you all mindless zombie-robots (or "drones," in Star Trek lingo), so just give up now, and we will all be much happier about ourselves. But the prospect of becoming a zombie robot generally is not very appealing to people, so they resist. Many are assimilated, but is resistance really futile? My answer to that question is that sometimes resistance is futile, but even when resistance seems futile, it may be the right thing to do. To understand when to resist and when to give in, we need to recognize that even when something is inevitable, resisting it may still have value.

Resisting can be advantageous. Take the use of my air conditioner for example. Summers in Korea are unbearably hot and humid. And the summer offers almost no cool days to break up the climatic misery. It is a sad reality that the only defense against Korean summers is to go inside and turn the air conditioner on. But that can get expensive. It is so expensive that I wait as long as I can before turning on the air conditioner in the apartment. I know the time will come when the air conditioner will be turned on, the volts will be consumed, and the bills will be high. But I want to resist the inevitable for as longs as possible, and that resistance saves me money.

Sometimes resisting the inevitable reveals that it was not quite as inevitable as you thought. Resisting sin would fit into this category. We are all sinners and we are not going to be able to stop sinning in this life. But you should not give in to sin. You will not be able to stop sinning altogether, but if you resist, you will sin less. And in resisting, you may discover that one particular sin that you thought to be in inevitability was really avoidable. I remember being told by an adult as a child that when I grew up I would not be able to resist the urge to engage in premarital sex. This was just wrong. The person who told me this false statement had accepted it as an undeniable axiom. To him it was just an inevitability. But resisting revealed that what he had assumed to be inevitable was really avoidable.

For other things, however, there may come a time when you should stop resisting even if it was once beneficial to resist. Death, for example, should be resisted for as long as possible. But there will come a time when you have to stop resisting. I remember the several weeks before my grandma died. She was living with the help of a machine, and there was some talk of taking her off. But my grandpa objected, and I was glad. But then, one-by-one, my grandma's organs started to fail. When my grandpa saw that death was unavoidably near and that my grandma was suffering, the choice was made to turn off the machines. My grandma died shortly thereafter. I loved my grandma very much, and I wish that she was still around to bring joy into the lives of all her many children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. But to have held on to her when her body was giving out would have been selfish of us. So while resistance had served her well before that point, it was time to give in.

There is a resistance, however, that is never valuable, and should always be avoided from the start. We should never resist doing the right thing. Those who resist doing right often resist because of ignorance or hardheartedness. This type ofresistance is indeed futile.

In the final episode of Star Trek Voyager, humanity triumphed over the supposedly irresistible force of the Borg, obliterating them once and for all (well as once and for all as anything ever is in sci-fi). Humanity proved that the Borg were wrong. Resistance had value. And it may have value for you too.