The phrase, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” is famously attributed to Star Trek II, The Wrath of Kahn. But that movie is also chock full of references to Dickens, in particular to A Tale Of Two Cities.
I’ve always wondered if the “needs of the many” phrase also comes from Dickens, or if it was original to the ST2 script. Having read a little bit of Dickens in high school, I know that I could never survive a hard target search through his writing without eating a bullet. I’m hoping someone else around here is enough of a Dickensophile to tell me if Dickens wrote that phrase, or if the Trek writers invented it out of thin air. Or if maybe it is even older than either of them?
Bonus question: “Revenge is a dish best served cold” - does this predate Trek, or is it another original?
As far as I can tell, that particular phrase is original to Star Trek, however the concept is basically the same as utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentham, one of the primary utilitarian philosophers said, “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong”.
I don’t know where it originated but I first came across it in a mid-80’s British comic strip where it was one of the favourite lines of the heroic but somewhat ambiguous alien character Doomlord aka Vek:
Not a big Melville crowd here, huh? He’s not an easy read…
I don’t remember a lot of Dickens outside of Kirk’s eulogy for Spock. But Kahn certainly laid the Moby Dick quotes pretty thick (" I’ll chase him round the Moons of Nibia, and round the Antares Maelstrom, and round Perdition’s flames…", “from hells heart I stab at thee…”).
I know the phrase “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” was used in a TOS episode, but it’s bugging me that I can’t narrow down which one. Might have been Journey to Babel or The Empath, which now that I think about it represent the range of episodes that were very good to ones that were just god-awful.
This quote from a documentary on the growth of the conservation movement in the US caught my ear tonight. I thought it applied nicely to this thread.
Two schools of thought had developed on maintenance of the nation’s parks: completely hands off, or to allow limited harvesting in order to provide “the greatest good for the greatest number of people”.
It has been in the English language since at least 1846, via a translation from the French novel Mathilde by Joseph Marie Eugène Sue: la vengeance se mange très-bien froide [sic], there italicized as if quoting a proverbial saying, and translated revenge is very good eaten cold.
Actually, in my humble opinion, a better translation would be: ‘‘Revenge can be perfectly well eaten cold.’’
Matthew 18:12
New International Version (NIV)
12 “What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off?
It might work if the idea was to identify good policies. “A good political decision is one which results in the most individual good for the most people.” “Public good” and “individual good” might be implied without being stated.
I once tried to read Aristotle, and kept getting bogged down in the density of his prose. The good is that which is right. The right is that which is necessary. The necessary is that which is good. etc. (Not exact quotes.) Nothing he said ever seemed to be practical. At least Bentham is saying something (somewhat) practical here. “Share the weal.”
You may have heard that phrase before as it or something like it has been used by every tyrant to justify crushing individual rights. It’s an abhorrent phrase.
Bryan Ekers: I just finished watching the first season a while ago, and if anything Spock takes the opposite view several times. For example, in '‘Space Seed’ Spock is horrified at the utilitarian arguments for Khan’s dictatorship on Earth, even if it did bring an end to war, because it came at the cost of individual freedom. He also explicitly said in another episode that the rights of the individual should not be sacrified to the collective, or words to that effect.
Another of the many reasons wht TOS was the best Star Trek.
