To Boldly Grope Where No Man Has Groped Before

by S.M. Oliva
Nov. 23, 2010

The 1998 movie Star Trek: Insurrection explores the idea that governments should never violate individual rights simply because the purported benefits to “society” outweigh the liberty of a handful of people who lack political connections. That the filmmakers projected this would still be a problem in the 24th century suggests we have quite a bit of work to do here back in the 21st century.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the hero of Insurrection, defies an order from his commander, Admiral Matthew Dougherty, to withdraw from a planet that their government -- the Federation -- has “given” to an alien species called the Son’a. The Son’a, a cross between Objectivists and a pharmaceutical company, want to develop an “eternal youth” drug from the radiation that envelops the planet, and they’ve promised to share this new product with the Federation (no doubt after the Federation subjects it to clinical trials and awards the Son’a a patent).

The problem is that another group, the Ba’ku, already live on the planet, in a small village of about 600 individuals. The Son’a can’t harness the radiation -- and develop their drug -- without killing all life on the planet. The Son’a, for reasons not relevant to my discussion here, would be happy to simply kill the Ba’ku, but Admiral Dougherty steps in and devises a plan to forcibly relocate the villagers without their knowledge. Captain Picard stumbles onto the plan and confronts the admiral, protesting his plan “is an attack on the very soul of the Federation” and notes that forced relocation “will destroy the Ba’ku, just as other cultures have been destroyed in every other forced relocation throughout history.”

Dougherty rationalizes, as any bureaucrat would, “We are only moving six hundred people, Jean-Luc.” Picard doesn’t back down: “How many people would it take ... before it becomes wrong? A thousand? Fifty thousand? A million?”

Picard’s question is something we should ask all those who reject individual rights in favor of some form of statism: How many people must lose their property, liberty, or lives before you’ll concede that the state and its policies are wrong?

There are a nearly infinite number of examples one could cite, but let’s stick with the subject of the day: the Transportation Security Administration’s illegal searches and sexual assaults against innocent air travelers. Every hour brings a new horror story: a child kidnapped from her mother’s arms, a cancer survivor forced to cover himself in urine, a small boy strip searched, and so on. At the present rate of these attacks and public backlash,

And yet I suspect a majority of Americans still passively approve of the TSA. ABC News, a good arm of the state, tried to douse the flames with this appeal to majoritarian impulses:

Only a small number of travelers have been subject to pat-downs, officials say. The White House says roughly 340,000 people -- or 1 percent of all travelers -- have been subjected to more intense searches since the new TSA procedures began Nov. 1.

So it’s just 1 percent. Who wouldn’t accept the brutal violation of the rights of such a small percentage in exchange for the greater good of “security” in air travel? The other 99 percent apparently.

The Los Angeles Times, another arm of the state, said travelers should just “shut up and be scanned.” Radley Balko of Reason wondered if the Times would have said the same thing about the forced relocation of Japanese-Americans during World War II, another false act of state “security” designed to prey on public fear. Lo and behold, Balko tweeted, the Times in the 40s offered exactly that endorsement. Some things never change.

Forced relocation, of course, brings us back to the scenario presented in Insurrection. At least in the movie the object of the statists’ desire -- an eternal youth drug -- was presented as scientifically valid. In contrast, there is no validity to the notion that random assaults of airline passengers do anything to secure airplanes from terrorist attack. The TSA’s policies are simply more welfare for our beleaguered bureaucratic class who need the security of lifetime employment in a hostile, anti-free market society.

Of course, the concept of “eternal youth” is an apt metaphor for the “security” promised by the TSA. It’s an impossible, unattainable goal that distracts the masses from focusing on the reality of what’s really going on -- an attack on the very soul of our society, as Captain Picard would say. The only question for those who continue to cling to the TSA and its false promises of eternal youth are, How many people will have to be violated and humiliated ... before the TSA and its policies become wrong?