It would be an improvement. But humans aren’t like that and won’t ‘evolve’ past those basic parts of Human Nature in just a few hundred years.
Put it this way. There will still be people with grand ambitions who want to rule, control, govern. There will be people who seek riches and luxury. There will be people who seek decadence and hedonism. There will be people who are cruel and selfish. I don’t believe any of that will change just because of a post-scarcity world.
Of course it would be bad. DUH! Looking back on 6000 years of human history, things ain’t real likely to change so long as Homo sapiens is Homo sapiens, either.
You think it would be BAD if we were uniformly GOOD. :smack:
But homo sapiens can change their behaviour a great deal, that’s kind of our special feature. For most of those 6000 years women were oppressed, we had no concept of hygiene, the murder rate was sky-high etc.
Humans can learn to live differently.
Plus of course “so long as homo sapiens is homo sapiens” is possibly something that won’t be true by the time of star trek. But of course that’s broadening the discussion, as in the show only some fringe groups use genetic engineering.
… And everything you list is still true for the vast majority of humans alive today. Relatively few people live in Alan Alda/Phil Donahue/Oprah Winfrey–type societies.
Human beings are the vilest creatures on the planet. IF they survive long enough to evolve into something “superior,” that could simply make things worse: “Superior ability breeds superior ambition,” remember?
Wild animals kill for survival. Humans do it for pleasure. I do not share your optimism.
Even if I agreed with this, it concedes the point. If only X% of societies live a certain way, then the statement “humans can live this way” is true, for any X > 0.
Perhaps. I see no reason to assume the worst however.
If, at some future time humans go ahead and start modifying their genome I’d expect things like aggression would go first. It’s not a very useful trait in our current environment.
I don’t kill for pleasure, and I don’t know anyone else who does.
Even now, The new Twin Peaks was practically 100% white. Not that it stopped me from absolutely loving every minute of it.
Those who don’t generally do their best to see that the others don’t too. Admirable as it may be in theory, turning the other cheek is no way to survive. I’ll go out on limb here and say while most people preach it, they seldom (if ever) practice it. Neither do they expect anyone else to practice it, nor do they encourage their children to do so.
People are basically hypocrites. Even those who live in relatively “enlightened” societies are capable of the cruelest acts of bigotry and exclosure. Get used to it.
The environment in which you apparently live is atypical, both historically and geographically. I’ll go out on a limb again and wager I’m disappointed with people far less often than you are.
You don’t read the news? Or books on history? For every Albert Einstein and Mother Teresa there’s a Heinrich Himmler and an Ilse Koch.
Sticking with Star Trek: Some find populating a planet with blacks to be “racist.” So, the show should abstain from doing so. Are we then to infer that sticking with planet-wide-lily-white populations is **not **racist?
I fail to understand the difference between the two. Logically and ideally, the population of any planet should comprise a number of races (unless one has practiced genocide or imposed a eugenics program on the others). This is something we seldom saw on Star Trek. Populations were almost always a single genotype.
If this is the case (and things probably aren’t going to change anytime soon), would it not be racist if uniformly black populations were **never **shown? Is this not kind of a “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” kind of situation?
As an aside, I found it interesting that no only do the Klingons on Discovery have members of their species who differ in skin color, they seem to discriminate against them as well. So far as I remember, the only other time this topic was touched on was in ***TOS ***(“Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”).
Nevertheless, the vast majority of people in the world are peaceful almost all of the time. There are 7 billion of us on the planet and I live in a city of 24 million. If true scotsman humans were sadistic we would never be able to get to this level of order.
I agree with you *historically *and that’s largely my point: humans can learn to live very differently from our ancestors. We’re the most adaptable species by a long way. So there’s nothing implausible about a star trek society in a couple centuries’ time.
Geographically, I don’t agree: while there are many conflicts and crimes in the world, by and large people just get along. Not because we’re all holier than thou, but because looking after ourselves and cooperating is usually the same thing. Over time societies have become more peaceful, not less.
Nobody doubted that there are evil people / evil in the world.
Nevertheless, to your point, no; either there are not that many psychopaths in the world, or society generally does a good job of keeping them restrained. Otherwise the modern world could never have come to fruition in the first place. Modern society requires the vast majority of people, the vast majority of the time, to be peaceful.
They didn’t present him with any options. That’s kinda the point. It’s not as if Tasha was on board with this. No one was. But he’s a sexist pig who thinks women exist for his amusement. Because he’s so primitive. He was sexually harassing Tasha the entire time.
Again, the issue is not “they made everyone black.” It’s that they used the tired racist stereotype of black men going after your white women, even when they didn’t want them. They also used a bunch of tribal stereotypes.
The one where they actually did use white stereotypes was that one with the Space Irish. That was also racist as hell.
Trek represents a post-scarcity world. A whole lot of what makes humans horrible has been eliminated. Crime is largely about financial issues, but poverty is gone. So is hunger. Medicine, including psychology, has removed a whole lot of illness. Disabilities are overcome through tech.
And, yes, Trek is optimistic about how this will all work out, but that’s kinda the point. It’s optimistic SF. Is it possible it goes a different way? Sure. Is it possible we destroy ourselves before we get this far? Of course. Is it possible that we have to struggle a whole lot longer? Definitely. But Star Trek offers a (nearly) best case scenario.
That said, the Prime Directive is pretty fucking evil when used 100% literally. It exists to create tension between them doing the right thing and doing what the rules say they should do. Lectures about it ring very, very hollow. Non-intervention is not some holy policy, but something that must be tempered.