Oh? Nice ship you’ve got here. Where can I get one?
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“We are going to get eaten by self replicating space-toasters, and, do you know the worst part? I’m not even supposed to be here today!”
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I guess the humans of the future are no longer lazy. IMO It takes a lot more work and effort to comprehend calculus or Ulysses or learn the violin than to show up at a dead end job and mash some buttons 'till closing time. Considering how many people are content to just go home, dose themselves with the drug of their choice and turn on the tube, I fail to see how removing the dead end job side of the equation means that people will be more intellectually curious, when they have the option now and ignore it. And I include myself in this as well.
Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street is on my desk next on my reading list, and now I’m even more curious what it’s going to have to say.
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Admittedly, we only see the Federation’s best and brightest in Star Trek; I kind of think that most of Federation Space resembles “Red Dwarf” instead.
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Noone understands Ulysses, least of all Joyce.
Also as a public service announcement, when in college and you are assigned Joyce, under no circumstances read it slightly stoned.
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Yeah i think that’s basically Tasha Yar’s colony.
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A friend of mine, old school anarchist punk, insists that Star Trek is impossible.
“Because someone is always going to want to make square wheels.”
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You’d think reading it stoned would make it more comprehensible, but this is not the case. Like, really not. At all.
I love Sinclair Lewis, but I’ve never read this one. He has a vicious sense of humor. Time to add Main Street to my reading list.
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Must be an idealist.
Square wheels only work on an ideal sinusoidal surface, and the wheel has to fit perfectly.
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It is the only time I ever felt as if I was physically falling into an obliette version of a book. (Adjusts tie) I bet Joyce wrote in emacs with a single recursive lisp macro.
(Someone, someday will find me and give a wet Willy for that joke)
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Well, “money doesn’t exist” isn’t the same as “you can get anything you want free of charge.” Could be more like the communist idea of “to each according to his needs”, with everyone having a home replicator and enough raw materials (replicator goop?) to make whatever home goods they want, but some kind of democratic decision-making process to decide which larger-scale desires people might have are actually “needs” in the sense of being worth it to society to invest a lot of resources in. In “The Neutral Zone” episode I quoted before, Picard also scoffs at the idea of anyone having overly extravagant desires for personal possessions, saying “A lot has changed in the past three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We have grown out of our infancy.”
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But we do get a hint, Chifoilisk tries to claim that Thu is similar to the society on Annares, which Shevek dismisses with some sharp words.
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Seems to me this is about as true as the Prime Directive, both are routinely broken in the course of the shows. But it’s more true for the TNG Enterprise crew who seems to be all on drugs suppressing all personal desires. Very few are ever angry, horny or ambitious. I much preferred DS9, where everyone was more or less pissed off all the time.
Such as a “lived in” chest cavity, for example.
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The left have a “critical mass” problem where people hope to get “everybody” on board with a new way of doing things - so it never happens. To get things started, people need to be willing to start small groups and do it anyway. One of the fictions of liberalism is that we can make governments or corporations which will function as benevolent monarchs which will enable an egalitarian society by voluntarily treating people with fairness. Despite the fact that this basically never happens.
What holds back organization on a fundamental level I think is bad economics. Groups of people need to decide how they measure wealth, rather than default to the standards of others. What makes rich people rich is mainly consensus, so it can be dangerous and self-defeating to buy into that consensus. The left does not find value in the same things that the right does, and this needs to be reflected in their distinct economies if anything is going to happen.
It can be seen now in “virtual monopolies”, where users complain about services such as Google, eBay, Facebook, etc. Literally anyone can set up an alternative - yet hardly anybody wants to until such time as the alternative is sufficiently large and powerful, has concentrated a similar amount of capital and influence. Surprise! If it got there, it would only be the new bully on the block. The trick is not to become “the next big thing”, but not to have a next big thing. Any totalitarian system, no matter how beneficent, can only provide an illusion of choice and diversity. The only way to achieve these is through networks and parallelism, through letting people live by many different systems. Most people still do not understand this, and the left is no exception.
Fun discussion on the “is Star Trek a utopia or dystopia” debate:
Salient point: judging by what is depicted in the show there’s very little indication that the human race has produced any art, music, literature or entertainment of note since the mid-20th Century. See what happens when you take away the financial motivation created by draconian Intellectual Property laws??
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First thought that popped into my head…
Tying the value of wealth to gold is artificial scarcity.
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I’m a little surprised there aren’t more people around here who are interested in defending utopian sci-fi. (Although, way to go, @Hypnosifl!)
Do you disagree with the following from TOA? If so, why?
our fondness for dystopian narratives is a pretty nasty indulgence, especially for those of us who live mostly comfortable lives, far-removed from the visceral realities of human suffering. Watching scenes of destruction from the plush chair of a movie theater, or perhaps on our small laptop screen while curled up in bed, heightens our own immediate sense of safety. It numbs us to the grinding, intermittent, inescapable reality of violence in neglected parts of our world, which unmakes whole generations of human beings with terror and dread.
Immersing ourselves in narratives where 99% of the characters are totally selfish also engrains a kind of fashionable faux-cynicism that feels worldly, but is in fact simply lazy.
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Yes, I disagree. Given the choice, the dystopia resembles the real world far more closely, and can make one more not less aware of contemporary injustice. The various ST shows often took on subjects that were veiled contemporary references. And I disagree with the 99% count, It doesn’t even take 50% to create a dystopia, read the current news. Lastly, for dramatic purposes, utopia’s are boring. They’re only interesting when they go bad, like Logan’s Run. If the ST-NG Enterprise never went anywhere and encountered conflict it would be stultifyingly boring.
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