Gaius Baltar Escaping Freedom on Tau Cygna V

JANEWAY: Your new world is a prison. You are under his control.
DA VINCI: When are we not in prison? Hmm? When are our lives free from the influence of those who have more power than us? If this New World is a cage, then it is a cage of gold, of marvels, of opportunities. If this Prince is violent, violence can be tempered.

(“Concerning Flight,” 1997)

The familiar reader will recognize that I have taken great liberty with Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom. It is my hope that by the end of this post you will see the experiment I have attempted to complete.

In the Battlestar Galactica episode, “Take a Break from All Your Worries,” (2007) after failed attempts to get Gaius Baltar to confess to crimes against humanity, Adama introduces the idea of injecting Baltar with an experimental drug intended to induce severe anxiety to the point of delusions in order to get him to talk. It is agreed and what we see is a Balter, almost, but not quite drowning, which is a fitting reflection of his own continuous anxieties, which start near the beginning of the series when he begins seeing Caprica Six but does not know if she is divine or a delusion. It is commented more than once that Baltar’s primary focus is on his determination to save himself. This is a continuing theme of his character until towards the nearing of the end of their journey. While so many of the crew, not all, but many, digest their circumstances with composure, Baltar is in a readily consistent fit of neurosis. We also learn during Baltar’s formative years, he grew up poor, on a farm, but even went so far as to change his dialect to achieve greater success on Caprica. As Fromm writes,

Every neurosis is an example of […] dynamic adaption; it is essentially an adaption to such external conditions (particularly this during early childhood) as are in themselves irrational and, generally speaking, unfavorable to the growth and development of the child. Similarly, such socio-psychological phenomena as are comparable to neurotic phenomena […], like the presence of strong destructive or sadistic impulses in social groups, offer an example of dynamic adaptions to social conditions that are irrational and harmful to the development of men. (1994 reprint, 14)

Baltar’s close drowning under the hallucinogenic effects of the military drug mirror his own continuous fear of becoming subdued by his constant surroundings, his actions taken to survive, his dormant frustration with his escape from his youth on Aerilon, and even his forced signature, forced by the Cylons, on the death warrant of so many innocent fellow humans. Consider his demonstrated frustration with his father. Consider when Caprica was being bombed by the Cylons and all he could think about was if he were to be found as inadvertently, but guilty all the same, of being complicit. Consider his delusion that he died and woke in a resurrection ship, showing himself, however briefly, that he, too, was a Cylon.

Baltar’s deluded righteousness for survival is not unlike the transformed warrior from Ikarra VII in Babylon 5’s “Infection.” He, too, sought out his own determined cause, that was completely off course from reality. Sinclair essentially encouraged a sort of talk therapy to get who was formerly Nelson Drake, now an advanced walking weapon programmed to eliminate anyone who was not a pure Ikarran. This neurosis of seeking control where it could not be justly found was manifested into the creature that Drake became. This was all in search of a foremost freedom, freedom that could never be gained because it was not determined within true circumstances to begin with, but within a war.

Freedom can lead to a misdiagnosis of reality. When Data confronts the human settlers on Tau Cygna V in “Ensigns of Command” (1989) that they must evacuate or be destroyed by the Sheliak, they do not believe him. They take comfort in their freedoms, their freedom of adaption to the harsh environment, their freedom of accomplishment of having created an aqueduct in the desert, they consider their freedom of thought to be a complete weapon to be used against the Sheliak, despite Data’s warning to the contrary. As Fromm states, “[f]reedom is […] an ambiguous gift” (32). Humans begin their lives helpless and dependent. Helpless, much like the early settlers on Tau Cygna V. Humans go “through all the dangers and fears [the] lack of instinctive equipment implies. Yes, this very helplessness of [humankind] is the basis from which human development springs; [humankind’s] biological weakness is a condition of human culture” (32). The settlers in the desert of Tau Cygna V lauded their own achievements and believed they had escaped weakness itself. They mistook independence for strength, and freedom for indestructibility.

Fromm deconstructs this malleability of human freedom, writing, “the structure of modern society affects [humans] to two ways simultaneously, [they become] more independent, self-reliant, and critical, and [they become] more isolated, alone, and afraid” (104). Perhaps the Valakians from Star Trek: Enterprise’s “Dear Doctor” (2002) represent this stage very well. Independent on their own planet but succumbed to an isolation of what they know to be a great independence that could save their species out among the stars, if only they had warp technology to get there in a meaningful way. Again, freedom is a trap, much like a telepathic pitcher plant. Just like with the settlers on Tau Cygna V that Data could not convince to see reason, “[b]ecause in the fight for freedom in modern history the attention was focused upon combating old forms of authority and restraint, it was natural that one should feel that the more these traditional restraints were eliminated, the more freedom one had gained. We fail to recognize, however, that although [humanity had] rid [themselves] from old enemies of freedom, new enemies of a different nature have arisen” (104-105). For the settlers, it was the Sheliak. For the Valakians, it was the illness that spread through their population.

What is the opposite of this imprisonment of freedom? It turns out it is the very freedom of imprisonment itself. Consider when Delenn and Lennier lock themselves in with the ailing and dying Markab in Babylon 5’s “Confessions and Lamentations,” (1995) only to subject themselves to possibly catching the illness, only to subject themselves to witnessing death. The two have expressed a high order of freedom, by rejecting it altogether. By being willing to potentially sacrifice themselves in order to bring comfort to the dying. This in polar opposition to Baltar’s typical mainstay of self-preservation:

Selfishness is not identical with self-love but with its very opposite. Selfishness is one kind of greediness. Like all greediness, it contains an insatiability, as a consequence of which there is never real satisfaction. Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction. Close observation shows that while the selfish person is always anxiously concerned with himself, he is never satisfied, is always restless, always driven by the fear of not getting enough, of missing something, of being deprived of something. (Fromm 115)  

In the episode, “Take a Break from All Your Worries,” (2007) we indeed see Baltar’s literal bottomless pit, his pleas of innocence, his worried insistence that he is not culpable in the destruction of humanity. He only finds freedom in denial and overt concern in which he strains his logic to fit his premise.

This straining of logic almost works with Worf’s intent to have Riker assist him in performing the hegh’bat ritual in the episode “Ethics,” (1992) so that he may die after an accident leaves him paralyzed. Is Worf abiding by Klingon tradition, or is he finding escapism through those customs despite having lived most of his life around humans and having full knowledge of human customs and adaptations to an impairment as well? Worf knows that his son would rather have his father in his life, in any capacity, but Worf has lived so committed to Klingon ideas, it may be difficult to see past the cultural mores.

If we differentiate the two concepts of normal and neurotic, we come to the following conclusion: the person who is normal in terms of being well adapted is often less healthy than the neurotic person in terms of human values. Often he is well adapted only at the expense of having given up his self in order to become more or less the person he believes is is expected to be. All genuine individuality and spontaneity may have been lost. (Fromm 138)

Without the successful procedure, Worf would have only lived to normalize himself – to be what he was expected to be and live a disabled life. As Picard points out to Riker, a human could do it, but it was unfair to expect the same detachment from individuality from a Klingon just to normalize to human standards. A part of him would be lost, just as he only lived because he was expected to. Worf would in essence have to perform the role of a magician. Just as Worf’s life would have been performative, so, too, can we compare the expectations of the Valakians. They also sought a magician, or what Erich Fromm calls a “magic helper” that only leads to a falsity of existence.

If the magic helper is personified in an actual person, the disappointment that follows when he falls short of what one is expecting from the person – and since the expectation is an illusory one, any actual person is inevitably disappointing – in addition to the resentment resulting from one’s own enslavement to that person, leads to continuous conflicts, which is usually followed by the choice of another object who is expected to fulfill all hopes connected with the magic helper. (Fromm 175)

When Archer decides against giving the Valakians a cure, so that Starfleet does not put itself in a position to play God amongst other species, their first thought is to request warp technology so that they might find another who could create a cure to save their species. In essence, another magic helper. This is one instance in which science wins. Their illness is not viral, but genetic as its clear evolution is favoring the other species on the Valakian homeworld, the Menk. If it were not for Phlox’s observations of the rapid evolution of the Menk, Archer would have likely provided a cure. Starfleet would have played God. The ramifications of that can only be imagined. The result, with Phlox being honest with Archer about finding a cure, was spontaneity for the Menk. “Why is spontaneous activity the answer to the problem of freedom?” Fromm asks,

We have said that negative freedom by itself makes the individual an isolated being, whose relationship with the world is distant and distrustful and whose self is weak and constantly threatened. Spontaneous activity is the one way in which [humans] can overcome the terror of aloneness without sacrificing the integrity of [themselves]; for in the spontaneous realization of the self [humanity] unites […] anew with the world […]. (259)

Worf being cured of his disability could be said to have been a matter of spontaneity, given it was never attempted on a living being, and seemingly, only would have been successful on a Klingon. It was the living grip of spontaneity that changed the settlers’s minds on Tau Cygna V. It was certainly spontaneity which saved Baltar’s life on the baseship when President Roslin had an experience during the jump that caused her to change her mind about letting him bleed out and die. It was a matter of spontaneity in which Sinclair trapped himself in with the Ikarran and convinced him to look inward to see the truth of what happened to his people, deescalating the scenario. Spontaneity is a gift that allows freedom to withstand itself.