Look I'm not a trekkie. I watched my first Star Trek series five years ago as an adult. I know of a single other person IRL who watches Star Trek and they use it as sleep therapy. I don't care about the minutiae of canon. But this is straight up evil: the foundational fact of Picard s2 seems to be that humankind has two paths ahead of it. On one hand it can go to space and find a magical microbe that literally solve all of it's problems. If not then it becomes a genocidal space empire.
Trek canon on how exactly humanity built an utopia is somewhat vague, I guess? Priorities really do seem to change with each generation of writers. Vulcan solidarity reflect the quasi religious beliefs in alien saviors that rose up strong in the last century. WW3 and the eugenics wars are deep seated in the post WW2 psyche. Enterprise reminds us humans (and vulcans!) didn't have replicators when they eliminated poverty. DS9 was certain to make it about a political struggle. Sure, it was naive about it. The Bell episodes seem to think the internet would eventually unleash a torrent of regenerative empathy across humanity and boy did that idea crash and burn. But the end of the literal concentration camps was still triggered by actual resistance.
Oh, sure you might say: what about the mirror episodes? Those hit different. The parallel universe is about a campy cartoonish sort of evil and silly personality switcheroos. It's not supposed to be a critique of our actual human society. Picard is. People say that the writers of newer Star Trek don't 'get it'. Like, they don't realize Star Trek is supposed to be optimistic. They do. They've decided that is too naive about it, that they must make room for current issues like the climate collapse, but the way they've done so reflects their own worldview. A sort of ideology where, should effective altruism fail, then the only way forward is hyper fascism. The optimism of 'New Trek' is thus: there is nothing we can do on Earth but we can find salvation in space, either in the form of literal magic or new others to kill.
What the hell happened in the last decades that an egalitarian utopia is more 'pie in the sky' today than it was at the height of the cold war?
I think its worth recalling that Communism was, at its heart, a Utopian project. And Americans were no less immune to the allure of Utopianism than their Russian or Chinese peers. The American media simply harnessed the belief in a Utopian future and projected it 300 years forward in time on their own terms.
Star Trek was an Obama kind of Utopianism - the end result of a Long Arc of History - that denied anyone living in the current moment the possibility of living to see a coalition of liberal scientists traversing the cosmos. You weren't allowed to believe in better things tomorrow. You just had to have faith that the Liberal Project would bare fruit centuries from now.
But the poverty/crime wave of the 80s and the market crash of the 00s and the rising tide of fascism in the last decade demolished the idea of a Liberal Great Society. The collapse of the USSR destroyed the counter-narrative of a foreign Utopia we had to compete against. In its place, we've been plagued by Communism's Ghost - the Dystopian fantasy that warns against ever trying to build a better world. Modern Russia, complete with its ugly wars and cartoonish dictator, is the fruit of the failed Communist experiment. Modern China, with its soulless brainwashed hordes working menial factor jobs and beholden to their Social Credit Scores, is the promise of authoritarian communism that modern leftists gullibly endorse.
Now Star Trek writers are raised to believe in the inherent impossibility of the Utopian experiments of the past. So they're forced to rewrite the heroes of the 60s and 80s as Randian Ubermensch who defied an incompetent global dictatorship, rather than valiant loyalists embodying the goals of a perfected social order.
Incidentally, The Orville defied the odds and perpetuated the optimistic underpinnings of Star Trek. Particularly in Season 3, they showcase the Evil Aliens as perpetrators of modern American fascist and paleo-conservative ideologues, while the Human-centric alliance prosper precisely by rejecting reactionary thinking and embracing a socialist understanding of the world. S3E10, in particular, articulates a Utopian vision that is the consequence of historical materialist social action. It rejects technocracy as a path to prosperity, even so far as to call it a poisoned pill that enables the worst impulses of bad actors.
:countdown:
I'm not sure that Zif is necessarily presenting his own opinions on the matter here.
I guess I might be misreading it, it's worded ambiguously IMO. This could easily just be a Trot/LeftCom take.
Was intended as hyperbole built on Western anti-comm tropes.
But PPB is still absolutely the appropriate response.