How To Tell If You’ve Been Assimilated By The Borg

1. You presume that because someone thinks differently from you, they know less than you. A novice and a master can appear similarly. Be very careful who you feel the call to educate.

2. You accept existing or established metrics as signifiers of power or position. E.g., you equate money or access with power.

3. You mistake force for power and operate within that paradigm where you either have force or resist it. Resistance creates force, and force creates resistance.

4. You apply your unexamined motives to others; if you were in that situation, what would drive you? You do not understand that there is a class driven by a totally alternative motivation, and once you tap into that yourself, the world and your ascriptions turn upside down.

5. You fail to comprehend the deeper power, liberated, of pull and thus exist in a realm of finite power where you are always dominant over or at the mercy of external forces. When the tractor is stuck in the riverbed, which has more power? Failing to employ the creative power of pull leaves you always with a fundamental sense of powerlessness.

6. You ingest scripted reality unexamined. You become a mule, a slave to the invisible forces operating, with agenda, beneath the surface. You get a sense of righteousness, virtue, and certainty, provided you carry the messaging. You are easily spotted by the free as you use the jargon of the times. Today, it’s: trauma, abuse, oligarch, billionaire, crisis, narcissist, Nazi.

7. You take on word-badges—the signifiers to others that you are “fighting evil,” “informed,” “brave,” “compassionate”—and in doing so, you identify yourself as a ghost in the machine. Enslavement can only occur where you are absent, mindlessly taking on an ideology. It occurs when you do not want to do the unending work of examination and thinking for yourself in exchange for moral superiority. A great clue that you are possessed is the sense that you are “right,” that “you must educate,” the proselytizing impulse.

8. You are a knee-jerk thinker. You enter conversations that you disagree with in a condescending or insulting manner, with the built-in presumption that you know better. There is an urgency to inform that has you bypass civility.

9. You are a label whore. Rather than the slow, conscious work of building rapport—the only place where true change can occur—you enter with your diagnosis. The person who disagrees (or about whom you are speaking) with your view is “privileged,” “a narcissist,” or “doing a spiritual bypass.” You reveal your ignorance in labeling.

10. You allow that slightly smug, even exhausted sense of being the caring, compassionate one to enter—the one who speaks for the disenfranchised, the rescuer who, through great martyrdom, must educate the ignorant.

11. You fall prey to the fallacy of allness: you see “all” of that class as X, and you see individuals as all X. You feel threatened by noting excellence in the perceived adversary because you are playing an all-or-nothing game. You chunk reality rather than look at it in units—person 1, person 2, person 3, or incident 1, incident 2, incident 3—each judged on its own merits in the moment. You are addicted to being right in a way that runs slipshod in your mind.

12. You see sides.

13. You can know that you are under mind control when you must withdraw or unfollow because someone thinks differently from you. Your mind, under control, is easily threatened, and so ready-made excuses are built in that conceal the feebleness of thought.

14. You see it as a zero-sum game—there is a winner and a loser, and you must win this conversation rather than simply enjoy the play and inquiry. You have a point to prove.

15. You are temporally determined rather than situationally determined. You have been an X all your life—a Christian, a liberal, an activist for XYZ—in such a way that you do not see where a foreign force, like a poisonous plant that takes over an ecosystem, has taken over, where what once was is no longer. You are attached to a form that no longer represents what it once did.

16. When your viewpoints get shaken, you go back to your cohort in order to restore the superiority of your view.

17. You won’t cross “enemy lines” in true open dialogue. You are such a slave to the fixity of your views that you see enemy lines. But more importantly, you live in such a paradigm of powerlessness that you drastically underestimate how you could impact a system and justify withdrawal as a result.

18. You feel justified in feeling compassion for these people but not for those people.

19. You get angry when someone spends their money in a way that you presume you would not if you had it. You demonize money and power, not realizing that this only cuts you off from the two and makes you, with your high ideals, totally impotent to carry out those ideals.

20. You can’t enjoy the fact that you will disagree on points with people with whom you agree on other points. You need others to see things the way you do in order to have intimacy.

21. You play the upmanship game—the new version being that you get one up on others by so having one down. You trade in the currency of who is the most victimized in such a way that you practice the real narcissism: that of robbing people who are in genuine torment of their experience by cheaply using your “identity.” For example, the talk show host making tens of millions of dollars whining about the system—that is parasitic.

22. You know that you are off when you have the most minuscule drop of resentment. Resentment can be marked by frustration, irritation, or political exhaustion. Any place that you feel aggrieved, outraged, or indignant. You will see poor character or behavior magnified: greed, power-hungry, manipulation. You will have the playbook for what they did that was wrong, what they did not do that was right, and what they should do to correct it. This is a trick. Don’t fall for it. It is the ego’s sleight of hand that, in order to keep you from seeing your own flaws, sees them everywhere out there. It sees in terms of “fault” and blame. Even when there is a true infraction from outside, it grows to outsized proportions. Rather than seeing your part in every situation, you project the cause outside of yourself. To be clear, this disempowers you, not the other person.

23. You martyr or suffer “at” people. “I’ll show you for not behaving as I want you to by suffering loudly.”

24. You have one and only one source of power. It is right here, right now. It is always available, and you can always plug in. It has zero—and I mean zero—to do with your circumstances. And you can only alter your circumstances when you are plugged into it. A good reminder: the only enemy is ignorance.