Do the Borg not wonder why everybody hates them?

Question

The Borg tend to justify their actions by claiming that they are "improving" species, bringing them closer to perfection. They are bringing order to chaos. Basically they reckon they're the good guys.

Yet, everywhere they go they face as much resistance as their opponents can muster.

Do the Borg ever express surprise at this? Do they ever wonder out loud why literally nobody wants their gift? I'm thinking mainly of statements the Queen might have made.

I suppose perhaps they realise that the "gift" of assimilation is not something people naturally want, but have come to accept that instilling this "greater good" on the galaxy will be worth it in the end.

Answer 1

A refusal to submit to assimilation is prima facie evidence that the individuals involved are acting like stupid, spoiled children. I've selectively quoted the Borg Queen to give an overview of their thought process when dealing with those who express a desire not to be assimilated.

Do they empathise with their victims? Hell no.

You're experiencing compassion. A human impulse. You've forgotten what it means to be Borg. - _{^{Voy: Dark Frontier}}

and

They've left behind their trivial, selfish lives and they've been reborn with a greater purpose. We've delivered them from chaos into order. - _{^{Voy: Dark Frontier}}

So, do the Borg care what others think about them? Hell no.

Compassion, guilt, empathy. They're irrelevant. - _{^{Voy: Dark Frontier}}

and

All of your emotions, grief, guilt, remorse, compassion, will be irrelevant once humanity is assimilated. - _{^{Voy: Dark Frontier}}

But what about people who're afraid of being assimilated?

Assimilation turns us all into friends. - _{^{Voy: Unimatrix Zero}}

and

I was just about your age when I was assimilated. I was worried then, too. But when I began to hear the others, hear their thoughts, I wasn't afraid anymore. - _{^{Voy: Unimatrix Zero}}

But what about people who prefer their old lives?

I don't understand how anyone could prefer a crude environment to Borg perfection. - _{^{Voy: Unimatrix Zero}}

Answer 2

Everyone is the hero of their own story. The Borg are no exception.

A true hero says " I have good in me and evil in me, I need to suppress the evil and elevate the good.

A villain says "I only have good in me, so everything I do is right."

In this case, the Borg are the latter.

So do the Borg question themselves when meeting opposition?

No, because everything they do is just and right, because they are the hero.

It is natural for villains to oppose the hero. From their perspective all other life is the villain.

Answer 3

A species or people only justify their actions when they need to rationalize an action they recognize as violating their ethical code. For instance, we justify killing people in war as "we are protecting ourselves or our land." Assimilating other species does not violate the ethics of the Borg.

Lacking empathy, they do not take notice of hatred. As starpilotsix commented, nobody complains once they have been assimlated.

IMO, the Queen only tried to convince Data because the Borg saw Data as potential for huge improvement and perhaps feared that he would be destroyed if they simply converted him with implants.

Answer 4

In the films and series there are no indications that the borg ever question their way of doing things or why others don't want to be assimilated.

But we can take guesses there as to why....so lets start with a rundown.

The borg see the collective as the ultimate state of being. And that despite its griveous downsides (stagnation instead of evolving naturally). So they are elevating others who are less than them. Furthermore they themselves need to evolve more but BORG can only achieve this by assimilating others to gain new knowledge....as finding it by themselves it not the Borg way.

So the borg see others as less than themselves. That not only gives them a reason for doing what they do BUT also a reason why the others may resist. They are not advanced / evolved enough to understand that they are becoming more than they ever were.So that they resist this is understandable as most species fear changes. Especially such drastic ones.

Furthermore the borg as a species want to survive. And for that they need to evolve. Thus by assimilating others they are protecting themselves.

So all in all there are only advantages and minor (individual) disadvantages. In addition for the assimilation to be necessary for the borg to survive (before others become powerful enough to seek revenge on them....see what happens then with a specific fluid space race).

So even if an individual would be questioning their way.....the borg as a whole KNOW they have to stick to it in order to survive. Thus questining it would be inefficient and if the borg are anything then it is efficient.

One last thing here though. MAYBE if enough beings with remorse are assimilated at the same time the borg collective would change....but aside from this the Borg are very unlikely to change in their behavious.

Answer 5

In AI coding we have a property called Orthogonality.

It's the same as orthogonality in math. If you have an equation that only gives points on a plane, it will not move the projection of a point on an orthogonal line to that plane no matter what the inputs are.

Likewise if we make an AI, and it's purpose is say, to keep all the rooms in a building at a comfortable temperature, it will do that no matter how much energy it has to waste. In reality if it had control of the doors there would be simple limits in there like "don't close a door while someone is standing in it", but if the only thing you tell that AI to do is "keep the rooms at 72 degrees" it will waste all the power it has to in order to do that. If that AI became super intelligent, it wouldn't suddenly care about self preservation, or love, or all the stuff AIs in movies decide they care about. Those things are orthogonal, to it's goal. If it's not "three laws safe" and some fool made a learning AI with only the goals of keeping the rooms comfortable, it probably wouldn't kill anyone, but only because it knows that if it does they'll probably cut off it's power and then it can't keep the rooms at 72 degrees.

What I'm saying is, their goal isn't necessarily what we would consider a good goal, like happiness. Their goal as most often stated is perfection, a secondary goal seems to be power, but that's probably to help toward the goal of perfection. So it's not necessarily that they think beings are happier once assimilated, but happiness is probably just something they don't consider to be crucial to their goal of perfection. It would really depend on where their definition of perfection came from. It probably involves everything being efficient, organized, and under one unified goal. If they could make everyone happy to be assimilated that might make things easier on them, but they probably calculated that trying to understand each one of billions of vastly different cultures well enough to persuade them to want to be assimilated would be far less efficient than just overpowering them.

Answer 6

Besides “irrelevence,” another term the Borg like to throw around is “inevitability.” The key feature of what Iain Banks called a "hegemonising swarm", after all, is self-replication. It is then useful to think of the Borg as a cancerous cluster of cells that will replicate until all matter is eaten. From the perspective of the cancer, this fate is inevitable.

It's also worthwhile to take the Borg's view of perfection. The non-Borg life cycle is one of endless birth, life, and death — the Hindu wheel of karma. But the Hindu religion believes that this cycle is one of pain, and the ultimate goal of any sane person is an escape from that cycle. The end result is an empty universe, devoid of life.

The Borg are pursuing another escape from the wheel of Karma — one of perfect, eternal, ordered life. Whether that is life or un-life is a fair argument, I suppose, but as an alternative to the void they might have a point.