A welcome dream of the future
I hope we can someday get there
But damn do we have a lot of work to do
Unless we kill all the greed, which I personally don’t see happening, we will never break the chains and reach this reality.
Another thing I like about Star Trek is the breakdown of religious belief that we are not created equal and everyone is emboldened to someone else to live.
I really hope humanity can reach this pinnacle, but until we quit living for the almighty dollar, we won’t. We are the Ferengi from the show.
To be fair even in trek - there’s a world war 3 that’s driven by pure greed before humanity decides it’s enough. And the climax of the greed and that war starts in 2026… so we might be on the course to the utopia … but not before suffering some more.
I like to look at old science fiction shows/movies and see the blind spots.
In the 1960s, no one objected to Kirk dating women from other planets, but no network would have allowed Kirk to date Sulu.
TNG also failed to flesh out the details of how their economy worked.
It is very easy to say “everyone is just happy and behaves well”.
I’m willing to believe that for the most part, the world Star Trek inhabits is postscarcity - the widespread replicator technology leads me to believe that with easy access to energy and organic material, everyone can be fed and clothed with a minimum of expenditure, and with access to FTL travel and terraforming tools, land scarcity is no longer an issue either.
The economy is just a tool for the distribution of goods, services and land; it becomes unnecessary if everything necessary to sustain life (and probably quite a few luxuries and leisures) is readily available as it’s needed.
I can’t remember what series it is, but one of the newer series has a scene where someone is asking why the federation won’t give them replicator tech. And the federation dude basically lays out how replicator tech before society is ready leads to oppression not liberation. That humanity only got replicator tech after they already came together and threw off the old ways. Replicator tech didn’t lead to socialism for them. Socialism lead to replicator tech.
While the technology of star trek definitely plays a role in terms of it being anti capitalist, it’s not just the tech. If today somebody invented a replicator, it wouldn’t be a full decade before its use would be locked behind a dozen different tiered paywalls on top of the instalation cost, and then eventually it going through enshitification.
The societal values and culture in star trek values life, far, far above weath and profit to the point that such concepts are basically alien. And that has to be the first step for post scarcity tech to actually be used for the purpose of post scarcity.
The original TV shows were indeed very progressive, but the movies ruined everything on so many levels.
I miss being this optimistic
