The Borg
12th July 2024
ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.
I decided to call this show The Borg, after the fictional entity in the Star Trek universe, but I could have gone with Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone. The thing that this show describes is a self-perpetuating system. The purpose of Conservative Inc., and all nodes of the managerial ecosystem, is to maintain itself by defending itself from outside threats through assimilation and subversion.
The trouble with the self-licking ice cream cone idea is that it suggests the self-perpetuating system is benign. The United Nations, for example, is not actively trying to change much of anything. The damage it does is incidental to its existence, in the same way the damage done by the postal service is just the result of it not being particularly good at delivering letters and packages.
The Borg concept, on the other hand, is an aggressive entity. It sustains itself by seeking out and assimilating new life forms. The process by which it sustains itself is a constant danger to everything around it. Cancer, for example, destroys its host by replacing good cells with cancer cells. The death of the host is not incidental to the existence of cancer, but the end point of it.