The Devouring Mother In Your Life
and the temptation to be consumed
I was a massive Trekkie in my 20s. I consumed every episodes of The Next Generation countless times. By the time the second offshoot of TNG came out, I lost interest in the enterprise altogether. It lost its originality despite introducing more interesting characters. I can’t bring myself to watch the newest incarnation today because... no.
I unknowingly carried the Borg with me from my parent’s basement into various sharehouses, workplaces and relationships to see how easily I slipped into accommodating dominant personalities and becoming more as they expected me to be to my detriment. Analysis of these experiences helped me understand the mechanisms through which any of us can undergo passive and partial assimilation in narcissistic relationships, whether they are with another individual or in a group like a cult or a workplace. I’ve also written about assimilation as a process that women (and men) undergo once they are recruited into modern feminism and begin to see the world through the eyes of the oppressed rather than the eyes of someone developing capacity to navigate the human-system interface with greater skill and discernment.
This piece is an attempt to build a broader model of passive assimilation to describe a recurring civilisational phenomenon that ultimately sacrifices liberty and negatively impacts all of us. I have described related components of this model in other writing, so I don’t explore them in detail here.
The Borg Queen
While contemplating the Borg recently, I was reminded of the introduction of the Borg Queen (thank you Somatology7). The original Borg were a collective consciousness that assimilated entire species into a shared identity and required no central personality to make them compelling. The writers added the Queen because audiences wanted a villain they could connect to. The Borg needed a face and a force behind their function.
The Queen possesses enormous power through the Collective she commands. Entire species are assimilated through force while being told that assimilation is a gift. She also has a gift for gaslighting as she reframes the loss of individuality through assimilation as evolution and liberation. Resistance is futile because resistance is also ignorant. The Borg Queen understands human needs and uses that understanding to recruit exceptional individuals into a system that has already demonstrated its willingness to conquer anyone who resists.
The significance of that decision extends far beyond Star Trek because the Borg Queen transformed a collective consciousness into a personality. As any true narcissist, her attention is directed toward exceptional individuals rather than ordinary drones. Picard, Data, and Seven of Nine are all highly intelligent, influential, respected, or uniquely gifted figures whose assimilation provides legitimacy, prestige, and influence to the Collective itself.
The Borg Queen also exposes a cultural blind spot. Contemporary culture readily recognises male aggression, male narcissism, male domination, and male predation. Female expressions of the same traits attract far less scrutiny for many reasons. The Borg are overtly coercive, assimilating entire species through force. The Queen adds another layer by directing her attention toward exceptional individuals whose assimilation would strengthen the Collective. She understands human desires and exploits them to get what she wants. She demonstrates many of the behaviours associated with Cluster B pathology while embodying a form of predation expressed through feminine traits often observed in women with dark tetrad traits.
The dark tetrad describes four personality traits associated with socially destructive behaviour: narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism. These traits describe recurring patterns of behaviour that pursue advantage, control, domination, and the use of other people as instruments through manipulation, coercion, exploitation, force, and cruelty. The Borg Queen embodies many of these characteristics while relying heavily on feminine traits that lower resistance, secure trust, and facilitate possession.
The popularity of the Borg Queen shows something telling about human nature. The audience wasn’t satisfied with a faceless collective because people instinctively search for the force directing events from behind the curtain. The writers supplied a female incarnation of the Collective whose methods relied on dark masculine and feminine traits aimed at furthering its agenda by recruiting and assimilating influential, high status individuals. This character gave form to an ancient fear of annihilation through surrender to a more powerful force.
Expansion Through Assimilation
Other people become hosts for the needs, identity, ambitions, and objectives of the person or collective being served. Expansion depends upon securing access to increasingly valuable individuals and converting their status, credibility, influence, and achievements into resources that serve the collective.
Peter Turchin's concept of elite overproduction can help explain why assimilative movements become attractive during periods of social instability. As increasing numbers of educated, credentialed, and ambitious individuals compete for a limited number of positions that confer influence, authority, and prestige, many find themselves unable to achieve the status they anticipated. Collectivist movements provide an alternative route to significance and prestige. Membership offers a range of privileges and influence through association with the collective itself. The individual acquires status by serving the movement while the movement acquires authority through the recruitment of increasingly accomplished and influential members.
From this perspective, the Borg Queen's pursuit of exceptional individuals reflects more than simple expansion. Elites possess credibility, influence, expertise, networks, and symbolic authority that can be converted into collective power. Every successful assimilation increases the legitimacy of the collective while reducing the authority of independent centres of influence. The status of the assimilated becomes a resource that attracts further recruits, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of expansion. Does any of this sound familiar?
The Devouring Mother
The devouring mother is an archetypal figure who impedes the psychological development of others by making separation difficult. Rather than encouraging people to become fully independent, she maintains influence by encouraging dependence and identification with herself or the system she represents. Over time, people become less able to trust their own judgment and increasingly rely on the person, group, or institution that tells them what to think, believe, and value.
She can appear in mythology, religion, literature, families, intimate relationships, workplaces, institutions, and political movements whenever the development of the individual becomes secondary to the preservation or expansion of a person, group, institution, or belief system.
The Borg Queen embodies a form of the devouring mother shaped by Cluster B pathology and dark tetrad traits. Her drive to assimilate is amplified by predation, transforming dependence and distorted nurturing into possession while turning expansion into a destructive force.
Every assimilation increases the power of the Collective and creates pressure for further expansion. Every independent source of authority, judgment, influence, knowledge, or identity becomes a target for assimilation. She seeks possession, not coexistence through the Borg Collective.
The devouring mother resembles a counterfeit divine competing for universal expansion. Her appetite is total assimilation. Individuality, distinction, independence, and separate centres of consciousness become targets for consumption. Expansion continues until nothing remains outside her influence. The objective is to consume everything that exists and assimilate it into a single consciousness.
Her appetite for expansion is inherently destructive. People who remain distinct, capable of independent judgment, and resistant to assimilation eventually become obstacles to expansion and therefore threats to be eliminated. Assimilation is preferred because it increases the power of the collective, making destruction a necessary strategy when assimilation fails.
That’s why the Borg is such a powerful metaphor. Assimilation is not a means to an end. Assimilation is the end through its quest to engulf everything. The terror is in encountering a force whose appetite for destruction has no natural limit.
The significance of the Borg Queen extends beyond Star Trek because she embodies a particular dark expression of the devouring mother, an insatiable force that appears repeatedly throughout human history and can be seen clearly in the world today.
The devouring mother operates through social and political movements by exercising power through distortion and sustaining her authority through sanctification, granting moral status to identities, beliefs, and behaviours that serve the interests of the collective. The individual acquires a ready-made identity, purpose, and explanation for suffering while retaining the delusion conviction that these conclusions were reached independently through the exercise of free will. Collectivist movements become effective vehicles for this process because they supply identity, status, morality, belonging, and meaning simultaneously, reducing the need for independent judgment while preserving the illusion of autonomy.
Modern feminism, therapy culture, activist movements, communism, socialism, transhumanism, and parts of institutional life increasingly appear to embody the same fantasy of transcendence through collectivism. The individual becomes the problem because of independent judgment and distinctiveness that makes us human. The solution is absorption into a morally superior collective identity that promises perfection through transcendence and embodying the belief “surrender yourself to the collective and your suffering will disappear.” It is propaganda built on the promise that surrendering individuality and liberty will bring about a better future for everyone.
The devouring mother behind any assimilating collective reaches beyond the movement even after it has been abandoned, wherever the promise of perfection and transcendence through surrender continues to have appeal.
People who eventually leave these systems often discover that they no longer know what they think because their capacity for independent judgment has been neglected through disuse. The collective supplied interpretation, meaning, and direction for so long that exercising discernment became increasingly unnecessary. Leaving one assimilating collective can create the experience of awakening because they recognise the system for what it is and walk away from it without ever dismantling the fantasy that made them vulnerable to assimilation in the first place. Many are lulled back to sleep by the soothing promises of another collective while believing they have become more conscious and enlightened than before. The devouring mother has no intention of letting them go and gives them what they need in a different form.
"I am the beginning, the end, the one who is many. I am the Borg."
-The Borg Queen
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