Blindness and Borgness

One of the points I regret that we did not expand on in class was that of social realities. Professor Jackson remarked that Manifest Destiny was not merely a concept, but a lens through which to view the world. A social reality is one that may not objectively be real, but because a person views a phenomenon as real due to social ingraining, a person will act on it as if it were real. For example, within pre-agricultural societies thunder may have been viewed as a deity. Although thunder is not godlike, these people acted and interpreted their world as if this were true. Manifest Destiny created many social realities. Many Americans viewed their culture as inherently superior and thus acted and subconsciously belittled foreign cultures. Many Americans also viewed Native Americans as savage and inhumane and thus treated them not as a self determined people, but as subhuman because to them that was the truth. I believe an example on this can also be seen in "War of the Worlds" when a group of indigenous Tazmanians were described not as men, but as another species. Although this was not the case, due to the imperial European mentality, to many Europeans the reality was that they were indeed an alien species. This is one reason imperialists were able to act with such savagery. Although there may be evidence to the contrary, if a concept is buried deeply within a person, defense mechanisms often prevent a person’s reality from being shattered. I wonder if our social realities will prevent us from having good relations with extraterrestrials. Would we automatically view a gruesome aliens as a foe? Would we be anthropocentric? Would we treat non humans inhumanely?
I also found the idea of America as the Borg intriguing. We view America as a melting pot, as an assimilation of other cultures to form something inherently exceptional. Outside of America we often try to enforce our values and principles on other nations, whether it is through force such as with Iraq or subtly through economic means. In order to become a full fledged trading partner, America often makes developing countries take on American principles of liberal economics and small government, even when it is illogical or detrimental. We have also been known to support shoddy democracies over popularly supported communist regimes because communism is abhorrent to American values. America also supports the democratic peace theory, which is the concept that nations that are democracies do not fight with one another and that by democratizing the world that long term peace will ensue. I would also like to point out how American culture and products are dispersed throughout the world. Part of Manifest Destiny is a feeling of righteousness that America is moral “city on a hill’ and should spread this to other nations. Although America does not assimilate other groups to take their biological and technological advances, it does seem as if we do try to make other groups to take on our customs and become more like us because we often view our way of life as the right way. I would also like to address a statement that someone raised in class that we did not forcibly assimilate the Native Americans into our society. This is actually untrue as Native American children were often forcibly taken to religious boarding schools and were often legally compelled to adapt a sedentary lifestyle.