In my head cannon, that’s more or less how the borg started. I can see it starting off as a much more basic networked community that started off legitimately respecting people’s wishes to join/not to join. But over time it grew and changed, and become so invasive to the point they snowballed into the borg we know and love today.
And if we REALLY want to speculate, their first act of violence/force may have been against some entity that sought to attack them for being new and different. And whatever war or conflict that turned into ended up shifting the values of the borg such that forced assimilation was then seen as morally acceptable. And once that’s condoned, why stop?
I’ve had a fan fic on the back of my head where the Borg start out as a small group exploring networked community like that, but some of the members are more radical than others. One believes that people need to be brought under collective influence in order to solve their social problems and sees individuality as a problem. However, when the more virulent form of the collective gets going, she becomes a hypocrite who refuses to subsume her own individuality to the collective while inflicting the same on everyone else.
That’s why the Borg Queen seems so contradictory. She actually is.
maybe they just assimilated hostile species, but I think they’ve always been kind of invasive.
I imagine the borg started as a peacefull cybernetic species who radicalised them self or their ai made some mistakes maybe. Or they started as an ai that became evil and assimilated biological life on it’s quest to perfection
