Orion isn’t part of the Federation.
Sure, maybe the Feds should do something about the slavery. At least, stop being part of the problem.
And the Jedi should have done something about the slavery on Tattooine.
Weren’t there several plots that involved starfleet officers taking part in the charms of the Orion slave girls? Or at least conversations that indicated they were common in various watering holes starfleet officers hung out in?
It would be kind of like the Navy putting a bar on Epstein’s Perv island so their officers could enjoy the girls. Hey, it’s in international waters, right? Not their responsibility.
Also, Star Trek’s ‘Money Free’ society clearly has some way of unequally distributing wealth. In one episode, Picard was gifted an extremely rare and expensive artifact. I’m guessing your averqge ensign doesn’t get that kind of treatment. Also guessing that not just everyone can have a vineyard in France.
Such a society might look pretty good to a starfleet officer. I wonder how a federation sanitation worker feels about it.
Oh, and starfleet has the death penalty, and penal colonies where you do backbreaking labor, and psychiatric hospitals where they subject you to brainwashing until you are no longer atavistic or whatever.
The penalty for transporting dangerous creatures without a license was 20 years in a penal colony.
Yes, Star Trek’s world was a dystopia.
By the standards you’re judging Star Trek by, then the world of 2020 earth is also a dystopia. Because there are enslaved sex women around the planet, and even the US has the death penalty.
Trivia: they wanted to get the actress in question [ Madlyn Rhue] to reprise her role, but she had come down with MS, which had ended her acting career.
Didn’t make any difference with Saavik, though. Three times. Still could have used the character.
And Khan’s people in Space Seed weren’t all cast from Chippendale’s.
I don’t think you’re using the word “Dystopia” in accordance with its actual definition.
The Federation looks like a GREAT place to live. Yes, it’s economically unequal; yes, you can go to prison for breaking the law. I mean, that sounds like Canada in 2020, and Canada is about as far from a dystopia as any society in the history of the human species. The Federation has some of the weaknesses of modern-day Canada but has clearly solved a lot of them. I’d live in the Federation in a heartbeat.
For the space travel alone!
The Federation: Come for the individual liberty, stay for the root beer.
The holosuites are just a bonus.
I find it difficult to qualify fictional societies because there is often a disconnect between the overall intent and the logical consequences of things that actually happen in individual episodes, and this disconnect in my view is often caused by incoherent and incomplete writing. I don’t hold that against the writers (at least not always), I think it’s an almost impossible task at scale. Any fictional society, especially one meant to be different from our own, is “centrally planned” (no matter how libertarian it’s intended to be) simply by virtue of it being written into being by a small subset of people.
In real life society and its laws are constantly tested by unimaginable weird corner cases, etc. that a population of 7 billion throws at it. And it changes to absorb those cases. I think that’s why law is so complicated … there’s thousands of years of real life experience encoded into them. The society in Star Trek has had no such trial by fire and it’s impossible for the writers to just “think real hard” about all these things. It’s somewhat easier for millions of internet fans and article writers, etc. Hence it’s so easy to pick out specific plot points in the series and follow them to their logical conclusion and point out where the society falls apart in a way that perhaps the writers didn’t intend.
I think it’s clear that the intent of the writers, in general, is to portray the Star Trek society as a free, post-scarcity society that values rights and is otherwise a great place to live. That gets screwed up in the details of trying to create an episodic action-based television series, especially if you’re sometimes trying to create stories that are analogous to current affairs in our real life imperfect society. It also gets screwed up by the lack of real life “testing”. It’s fine to write about a post-scarcity economy as an abstract concept, but the chances of that holding up to detailed scrutiny if it’s written by a Hollywood show writer with no economic training and no real life scalability testing of their theory are very slim indeed. Likewise for any writing about law, etc. that they may attempt.
That’s my fundamental issue with nitpicking fictional societies in this way. I think it’s inevitable that you’re going to “show” that the society is dystopian or essentially whatever you want to show, simply because the writing cannot be coherent and complete at that level of detail. I actually think it’s inevitable that you can show that the society can’t even exist as it is portrayed. That makes the exercise a lot less fun for me.
A great post! The best I’ve seen on this subject and similar threads about fictional universes.
It’s times like this that we need a ‘like’ button. 
Exactly. Society in Star Trek functions a lot like our own, which instantly isn’t believable. They would not speak English with familiar accents, or have social attitudes similar to our own. They are as distant from us as the people of the Thirteen Colonies were from us and would be similarly different. It’s not possible to make them as different as they would be and still be easily relatable.
The effects of technology are also wildly inconsistent and illogical (the transporter is extremely underused by any rational analysis) for the sake of making episodic television, and I’m fine with that.
Part of the often-inconsistent framework for Trek was along the lines of viewing this as an Age-of-Exploration scenario where there would be only a relative handful of widely-scattered starships, it would be a disruptive schlep to head back for civilization with hostiles aboard, Captains had extensive life-and-death authority and broad discretion to just wing it and “creative solutions” would be encouraged. (Which the show itself often undermines by too frequently showing the Enterprise apparently going where everyone and his brother have gone before – though I suppose they could not trust dropping them off with any regular schlubs at a station.)
I believe it may have been Gerrold who said (or quoted another writer or Roddenberry himself as saying) during or shortly after the run of TOS: this is not about 23d Century people, it’s about 20th Century people, in a starship.
Sometimes unfortunately so.
They may be so enlightened as to not notice racial insults against Uhura, but McCoy (a shining example of southern gentility) has no problem at all slinging the most hurtful racist insults at Spock. Scotty was no stranger to a racist putdown either.
Not to mention that the rest of TOS Starfleet looked and acted like a 60s republican convention. I’m surprised Chekov wasn’t held down an attacked with a number 0 shear. Damn hippie! (but NOT a commie hippie! They’d outgrown such outmoded political insults).
I always had the impression that there was “The Federation” in the sense of the ‘core worlds’, and then there was a larger sphere of nominally independent worlds that the Federation exerts a level of hegemony over, without directly governing them, such as Chakotay’s planet in Voyager. And also a fairly large contingent of unaligned worlds- Risa , etc… that Federation ships dock at, but that aren’t part of the Federation, or its extended hegemony.
I always assumed that the Federation core worlds were more or less the super dull utopia you might expect- everyone works… or not, and at whatever they choose to work at, because it’s a post-scarcity society. And that in a lot of ways, the Starfleet crews are probably the maladjusted types in that society. Not exactly dystopian, but definitely kind of… deadly dull.
Republicans, my ass. They were typical Kennedy–Johnson era Democrats.
Chakotay’s home planet is Earth.
Chakotay comes from one of the colonies lost to the Cardassians. That’s why he was in the Maquis in the first place.
Right- he’s human, but he was born on a nominally Federation world that was given to/swapped with the Cardassians as part of some sort of diplomatic negotiation.
The Maquis were a sort of resistance to the Cardassians (hence the name), and Chakotay was one of them.
I always viewed it like those border worlds were nominally Federation, even though they were clearly far removed from the heart of the Federation, both economically and socially.
I remember scenes of Chakotay with his grandfathger or father or whoever it was, as a little boy on hunting trips. Pretty sure they were hunting earth animals (a deer maybe?).
I get that he lived off world as an adult. But he was born on Earth as far as I recollect.
Seems like we’re really splitting hairs about the meaning of “Chakotay’s planet”. I meant the colony world he lived in when it was ceded to the Cardassians when I said that.