So, we watched a pretty intense Star Trek episode last night, “The Mind’s Eye”, in which Geordi is kidnapped and psychologically tortured by Romulans, in order to turn him into a sleeper agent who will assassinate a Klingon government official.
What’s interesting about this plotline is the fact that, when the crew of the Enterprise begins to suspect they have a spy/saboteur onboard, it’s Geordi himself who is tasked with leading the investigation. (And, of course, he has no idea that he’s the one doing the sabotaging.)
They keep narrowing down the possible culprits to Geordi and some other small number of people, and then everybody including Geordi himself simply writes off the possibility that he’s the one responsible. Nobody even makes a joke about it, it’s just treated as an OBVIOUS glitch in the search mechanism that it considers Geordi as a possibility — presumably because he’s the one leading the search.
I’ve often used the concept of “sleeper agents” to talk about the way we’re raised to unconsciously perpetuate oppression culture. That part of the problem with believing that we’re not part of the problem is that we very well might BE not part of the problem until things get particularly hairy — and then something unexpectedly triggers us to be misogynistic or racist or abusive or whatever, because we hadn’t done the work to defuse that trigger prior (or even know that it existed.)
I thought it was salient, in this episode, that Geordi actually is doing the work to try and root out the saboteur, but isn’t able to do so because he can’t imagine himself as the problem, and neither can anybody else. This maps, in my mind, to the idea that many of us — even those of us who are actively trying to lead a search for the problematic elements within our own systems (ourselves) might have blind spots that make it impossible for us to consider that a particular belief or behavior might be harmful, dangerous, problematic, abusive, whatever.
This is why I don’t buy arguments from “ethical” authority figures who claim they’ve “done the work” to know their authority isn’t hurting anybody. Even putting aside the anarchic argument that the existence of authority by nature does harm, it just simply sounds ludicrous enough to me when someone claims they know their own subconscious mind well enough to KNOW that they can’t be triggered by the system and used as a tool of oppression. Hence why I’m particularly in support of people who tend to be highly resourced and empowered by the system (and thus more likely to be victims of systemic brainwashing) not being handed weapons — whether that weapon be a gun or a whip.
Incidentally, it’s Data — the computer — who ultimately figures out that Geordi is the spy. Presumably because he’s able to look clearly at the evidence for what is going on, without being distracted by personal feelings or social short-cut heuristics about who possible spies are. And I also like the fact that his response, upon discovering this, is not to blame Geordi for being the assassin, but rather to realize he must prevent Geordi from doing the harmful thing for Geordi’s sake, most of all. Whereas others might’ve been resistant to blame Geordi because they don’t want to feel bad feelings about him, Data doesn’t need to feel bad feelings about Geordi to notice that he’s been programmed to do a harmful thing, and to rescue him from doing said harmful thing before it’s too late.
That’s kind of a rolequeer moment right there. Framing it not as preventing person from doing something bad; but rather framing it as rescuing a person from acting out abuse they were unconsciously programmed to act out.