The Politics Of Star Trek

Thoughts from Ilya Somin:

Instead, it is the Federation that turns out to be a sort of kinder, gentler Soviet Union. Both are multicultural, federal, socialist states with an official ideology of egalitarianism. But the Federation lacks the Gulags, secret police, and mass murder (or at least we never see them on-screen!). Meanwhile, the Romulans represent several of the negative qualities that many leftists associate with the present-day West: elitism, arrogance, and intolerance for other cultures. The same can be said of many other Star Trek villains, such as the Ferengi, who represent the supposed evils of capitalism. At some level, of course, Star Trek is a projection of Western values. After all, egalitarian socialism is a Western ideology. However, Trek is far more hostile to the present-day West than Nussbaum and some other left of center critics recognize.

Some say Roddenberry was a dreamer. But (sadly) he’s not the only one. Imagine.

27 thoughts on “The Politics Of Star Trek”

  1. One of the commenters, after another tried to compare various ST:TNG races to various countries, asked what the Borg were. I always thought the Borg was the evil side of socialism that Somin thought should be questioned. Then again, I was much younger then and just enjoyed the science fiction mixed with Natasha Yar and Counselor Troy.

  2. The Borg are the cult-like lockstep talking-points culture of environmentalists, animal-rights activists and AGW types.

    Also the kind of “feminist” that likes to hear Sarah Palin called a whore but defends someone like Bill Clinton.

  3. And the Ferengi are a species marked by extreme greed and a predatory attitude toward all other groups, lust for other groups’ females (assuming other species are divided into two sexes) and exaggerated facial appendages. Hmmm. And what historical human group’s derogatory stereotype sounds like that?

  4. Arrgh. I wish people would quit taking examples from a single series (e.g. ST:TNG) and applying them to the entire genre.

    There are no examples of socialism inherent to ST:TOS of which I am aware. In fact money, economics, and political structure were all deliberately ignored by Roddenberry, as stated in Whitfield’s The Making of Star Trek. About the only specific mention of money in the Federation or associated territories was the negotiating scene in The Trouble with Tribbles, and the Federation itself was only defined by its name.

    It would not be difficult to argue -using only original series material- that the Federation was more libertarian than socialist, then.

    The actual foolishness started later, as in the movie Star Trek IV in which Kirk says there’s “no money in the 23rd century.” Very much after the fact, considering the original series had ended twenty years previously. The worst offenders were Berman & Braga, who ended up defining the course ST:TNG ended up taking, from which most of the socialist cant (and technology) emerged.

    As for the Ferengi, the word derives from the Arabic word for “Franks” (i.e. Europeans). The race may symbolize a commentary on commercial greed in general, or more specifically European exploitation of the rest of the planet c. 1500-1900. Note I am speaking from the viewpoint of the show’s writers, not myself. 🙂 Neither the name nor the species is arguably racist, unless you really stretch things.

  5. Star Trek was also notorious for being anti-life extension. There were several episodes in both the original series as well the next generation episodes and movies that were stridently against life-extension. This always irritated me about the series.

  6. I always liked that obscure episode where Picard was trying to discover the origins of the Fugawi…

  7. If we ever actually did get something like a replicator – something that takes a software specification and outputs matter to order in an arbitrary configuration, with almost no input of human time or attention – I wonder what the actual economics of a situation like that would be (assuming abundant energy, input base material, ect).

    Would it end up being centralizing or decentralizing on the distribution of industrial capital? Would most people eventually end up with one in their garage, or would the fact that it requires little attention eventually force a centralized situation where only a few companies own all the equipment and serve it (by way of analogy to the IBM big-server to terminal model of computing)? (Presumably because you still have to know what you want it to do, and people would outsource this).

  8. Presumably it would shift emphasis away from any sort of machining trade, and reduce the economic weight of the manufacturing stage of production (almost to zero) relative to the design of the product (something that already happens to some extent in certain products, like software, or complex enough objects like military jet fighters).

    That leaves services and intellectual property as driving economic considerations. But without doing the math, it still doesn’t resolve the question of where a zero-weight economic process ends up – distributed, or centralized?

  9. I used to be a very frequent commenter on a Trek board, and was amazed at how the liberals Trekkies believed wholeheartedly that the Federation was peaceful (while constantly denouncing Bush as a warmonger). They couldn’t even understand why a conservative might like Star Trek, so convinced where they that the federation represented socialist utopia.

    I would easily needle them from almost any angle. For example, if there was no money and people just worked to better themselves, why were there so many miserable federation miners needing rescue so often (ie. Harry Mudd’s clients, the miners attacked by the Horta, etc). Who would take a job in a deep mine on a hostile planet to “better themselves,” and why the heck didn’t they form a union, seeing as how they were worked like dogs, killed on the job, and didn’t even get paid anything? Similarly, if nobody got paid anything, who did all the welding to make those fancy starships? If their economy was so advanced, why didn’t everyone just have their own starship?

    But most tellingly was how liberals believed the Federation was peaceful just because the actors would mouth those words at least once an episode. Peaceful? Really? The Enterprise alone fires off more nuclear megatonnage in an average episode than the US has used in 60 years, and they nuked just about half the species they met. If Bush was like that we’d have nuked 100 countries just since he’s been in office, and the average ballistic missile submarine would never complete a three-month patrol because they’d have to return early to load fresh ICBM’s. And that’s just the one Starship. The Federation had a vast fleet of them, so they were probably nuking a dozen new species a week. But they did it in the name of peace….

    My conclusion was that as long as the actors (or politicians) keep announcing that they’re peaceful explorers, with every word matching the chosen narrative, liberals totally ignore the obvious reality (photon torpedoes launched, ships and planets destroyed, etc). I suppose something similar could be said about a police drama where the lead cop kills more people in a typical season than the nation’s top three serial killers of all time, combined, without anybody even commenting on it.

  10. Assuming replicators as seen on the show, production requires three inputs: capital (the replicator itself), raw material (e.g. garbage), and energy. Looked at another way, each item produced by a replicator has a price equal to the depreciation of capital (wear and tear on the replicator), the raw material (including the cost of transporting said raw material to the replicator’s matter input) and the energy used to run the device. (Labor — telling the machine what you want — is essentially free.) Add to this the (presumably amortized) cost of R&D and software development and you arrive at the natural price of replicated items.

  11. The thing with replicators, one only needs to invest in building the first replicator. After that, the replicator would make more replicators. Then it would be exponential. How long would it take before the entire universe would be turned into replicators? Hey! that would have been a great episode. The Ship and Crew battle replicators threatening to convert everything. Grey Goo anybody?

  12. @George Turner: you’ve highlighted the Ugly Truth about Star Trek. The original series, anyway. 🙂 Recall that the U.S.S. Enterprise was defined as a “heavy cruiser,” and carried all sorts of phasers & photon torpedoes.

    I think David Gerrold nailed it in his analysis of Star Trek, when he pointed out the absurdity of the Prime Directive; Enterprise was, in fact, “a galactic Mary Worth,” forever interfering with other cultures.

  13. Well, ya know, we could have gotten a glimpse at the development of human culture that led to the formation of the Federation.. if Scott Bakula hadn’t dragged us all into his stupid temporal war subplot.

  14. So what are the comic-page equivalent of the other races?

    Klingons = Moe the school bully (Calvin and Hobbes)
    Romulans = Dogbert (Dilbert)
    Ferengi = Sid Fernwilter (Piranha Club)
    Borg Queen = Danae (Non Sequitur)

    Hmmm…Vulcans are a) logical, b) way too emotionally numb, and c) a bit snooty toward us emotional humans. Not sure what comic strip character comes closest to that description. Arlene from Garfield?

  15. With the exception of my wonderful wife and one or two others, all of the Trekkies that I have known had no interest in the sciences, engineering or any skills that would actually help get us into space. They seemed to think that the engineers would build their little Federation as Utopia society, and then they would come in and run it.
    It is the main reason that my wife and I dropped out of sf fandom many years ago. We both still read sf and fantasy, but even for my wife, the allure of Star Trek has long faded. And as for the follow on series, the allure passed very quickly.

  16. [replicator] production requires three inputs

    E=mc^2. One input, you just need energy and the first replicator. Well, you do need capital but it’s not the capital of the replicator. It’s human capital in the design of things.

    What wouid it do to society? Two roads… IP and secrecy or free exchange… or a combination with a subculture of lawless free exchangers hunted by the federation.

    Suppose free exchange? Then energy becomes currency. Poverty is limited access to sunlight.

  17. Well, no poverty. You just replicate an energy source.

    Enterprise had such potential. They screwed it up because they didn’t know what they had.

  18. E=mc^2. One input, you just need energy and the first replicator.

    Yes, you need a lot of energy. Approximately 50 grams of matter converted to energy at 100% efficiency is the equivalent of a one megaton hydrogen bomb. So, you’d need about 10 megatons worth of energy to produce every one of Picard’s “Tea, Earl Gray, Hot” servings (remember to include the cup and saucer).

    Likewise, to transport 100 KG of matter (say a person), you’d need to handle roughly the equivalent of 4000 megatons. By way of comparison, all of the nuclear warheads in the US inventory are likely well under 4000 megatons. You’d better have a damned good containment system.

    And don’t even think about beaming in those whales and all that water as in ST4. That’s a lot of mass. Plus, why beam in so much water? The whales would’ve drowned because there wasn’t enough air in the tank for them to breathe.

  19. Well, I was thinking in terms of something we could actually build – a matter rearranger (very refined 3d printer capable of producing all the parts necessary to make itself, ect), not an energy-to-matter converter. One is within the scope of engineering possiblity, the other requires having enough energy on hand to blow up the planet and using it to make breakfast.

  20. I was going to post a link to a Dan Simmons tale of pitching the ‘Star Trek’ brain trust but I cannot find it. Suffice to say that the Berman, Braga and all their stable of writers (drawn from such heady shows as ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’) collectively were about as dumb as a bag of hammers. During the stewardship of B&B they managed to squeeze all of the life and wonder out of the ‘Star Trek’ concept and left it an empty but stylish corpse.

  21. My favorite is the Nomad episode where Nomad fires torpedoes at enterprise many times the size of a photon torpedo and Scotty declares they can’t take more of that. Then when they make a direct hit on Nomad they are amazed because nothing could stand up to that.

  22. One the issue of what cheap replicators could do to society, read Damon Knights “A for Anything”. It skips the conservation of energy problem, but does include the replicating replicator.
    Once it gets loose in society, you end up with a focus on a service/ human labor based economy and maintenance of the “natural” birth nobility. The dark side is that even talented individuals can be replicated and become a “permanent” slave labor class.

  23. Pardon my ignorance of “treknology”, but I thought that the replicators were matter-stacking machines, something like 3D printers. You put in bulk raw material, the replicator takes it apart (mechanically) into elemenental matter, then re-stacks the atoms to make tea or cloth or whatever. I didn’t know they were energy-to-matter converters. Sorry, all.

  24. Remember that Science Fiction [especially the most popular types] is almost always about the present. The racial conflict [Frank Gorshin in half-blackface], pacifism [Organian peace treaty] and cold war [any episode with Klingons] tropes of the original series exemplify this.

    Do not blame Star Trek too much for doing a poor job of depicting the society of the future – most writers simply recycle social/political frameworks from the past with new names [often very entertainingly].

    The legendary Poul Anderson took on really different future societies in his last few stories, but few of them had particularly happy endings. For example, what would you really do if “work” and “family” became obsolete?

    In any case, if I were a member of the Federation, I’d have piled on the anti-matter and headed for the Rim Worlds long right away – they always seem like the best place to be.

  25. If the later Trek’s had been written half as well as Buffy they may have been worth watching.

  26. If Joss Whedon cranks out some more Trek, we’ll have a test for Chris’ thesis.

    I just can’t buy John Cho as Sulu. The voice and the eyes are just all wrong.

    Now if Whedon could come up with somethign radically different from the let’s-destroy-the-superweapon plots of the last three films. Or let’s-escape-from-the-exploding-mad-scientist-experiment (Treks 2 and 3). Or Or stop-the-aliens-from-destroying-Earth (Treks 1, 4, First Contact).

    I’d like to see the next Trek emulate an old-fashioned gangster movie. Less space opera and more Damon Runyon. In two unrelated incidents, Kirk investigates some sort of crime that leads to the mob, and a small-time conman named Harcourt Fenton Mudd has inadvertently crossed said mob, and the two eventually cross paths…

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