Lessons from Star Trek
June 29th, 2005 by Steve Pavlina
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One of the best examples of the fulfillment of human potential can actually be found in the Star Trek universe created by Gene Roddenberry. Roddenberry was more than just a TV producer — he was a futurist who spoke at NASA, the Smithsonian Institution, and many universities. His vision began to take root in the original series but became far more mature in Star Trek: The Next Generation. After Roddenberry’s death in 1991, the other series and movies drifted from his original vision. So my comments will be focused on the Next Generation series, which originally aired from 1987 to 1994.
In case it isn’t already obvious, I’m a trekkie. But what I liked most about the show wasn’t the technology or the aliens but rather the vision of humanity’s future that Roddenberry developed. Despite the fictional elements, it’s actually a compelling model for thinking about where the pursuit of personal development might take us.
Consider the vision of future human beings that Roddenberry created, particularly the way his characters behaved and the social structure in which they lived.
Virtue
First, all the main characters (i.e. the Enterprise crew) behave virtuously. They appear to be guided by an inner moral compass. They’re brave, honest, honorable, just, and self-sacrificing. They don’t rely on religion for their values, and there doesn’t seem to be a pervasive belief in a higher power. Their values are very humanistic in nature and are an integral part of their high-trust society. Every character has its moral failings now and then, but they quickly self-correct.
The three primary virtues are clearly represented in the show’s characters: truth (Data), love (Troi), and courage (Worf). Many of the plots revolve around the interplay of these virtues. For example, “The First Duty” and “Hero Worship” are episodes about the courage to face the truth. “Lessons” is an episode about the courage to love. “The Outcast” is a blend of conflicts between truth, love, and courage. While some episodes are mostly designed to entertain, there are many which explore ethical conflicts between these virtues.
Riker as second in command has all of truth, love, and courage in his character, but they’re more fully balanced in Picard, who serves as the show’s ultimate model of human behavior — the captain that everyone respects and admires. Of all the characters on the show, Picard is the most consistent example of virtuous behavior.
You also have whole alien races representing these virtues: truth/logic (Vulcans), love/empathy (Betazoids), courage/honor (Klingons).
These virtues were present in the original series’ characters as well: truth (Spock), love/passion (McCoy), and courage (Kirk).
If you think about other fictional worlds you like, you’ll often find strong characters representing aspects of truth, love, and courage.
Purpose
Each character is clear about his/her purpose in life. Each one works within the area of overlap between passion, expertise, need, and purpose. They don’t work for money but rather for personal fulfillment. There is some type of economy referenced in the background, but it’s virtually irrelevant because the accumulation of material possessions isn’t highly valued or respected. Social status isn’t determined by wealth but rather by achievement and merit.
There’s an overall purpose of exploration, which all characters help to fulfill. They’re constantly working on goals that derive from that purpose, and they often have tight deadlines.
Technology handles all the gruntwork, which gives characters the freedom to pursue their purpose without worrying so much about meeting their basic needs. People work because they want to, not because they have to. The characters have the freedom to be lazy and do nothing in this world if they wanted to, but they choose to contribute.
Today’s technology doesn’t quite support this level of freedom yet, but I’ve been able to get pretty close in my own life by leveraging technology to create passive income via internet businesses, so I can devote the bulk of my time to fulfilling my purpose instead of meeting my basic needs. This was no accident. One of my long-term goals has been to reduce the importance of money in my life. I think that as technology improves and the level of skill required drops, this will be easier for others to do as well. I know the “need” part of the equation is paramount for many people, but if you can manage to semi-automate the satisfaction of your needs, it will free up tremendous time for higher level pursuits. Working at a job just to make money to meet your needs is certainly not the most interesting thing you can do with your life today.
One question you can ask yourself is this: If you lived in the Star Trek universe, what would you do with your life? My answer would be that I’d do the same thing I’m doing now — working to grow and to help others grow — only my methods of doing this would be altered by the environmental and technological conditions. What would you do if money were irrelevant and all your needs were abundantly met?
Competence
The Star Trek characters are extremely competent, well-educated, and highly skilled. Each has developed themselves in a variety of areas, but they each have an area of expertise at which they’re particularly well-suited. Each seems a near perfect fit for their particular duties. They’ve developed their strengths and worked to minimize their weaknesses.
Characters achieve their social standing primarily based on their level of competence (which contributes to their rank). There’s no sexism or racism, but nor is there anything like affirmative action. Merit is what matters most. The cream rises to the top.
The society is structured such that achievement is expected. Stick an overachiever in this universe (Wesley Crusher), and he receives encouragement and support instead of resistance, red tape, and bureaucracy.
Self-Discipline
The characters have high self-discipline and are emotionally mature. They own themselves. Abundant food and entertainment are available via the replicators, but no one overindulges. You wouldn’t see a character on the show having trouble with oversleeping, unless of course an alien influence is the cause (i.e. “Schisms”).
The characters are even disciplined in their thoughts to the degree that they can feel comfortable around telepathic/empathic beings that can read their minds. Their public and private personas are congruent. They have little to hide.
Maturity
The characters are mature and responsible. They do their jobs without complaint. They assume 100% responsibility for their lives and don’t blame others for their situations. They’re passionate about what they do, but it’s a quiet, mature passion, not an unfocused juvenile passion.
Hard Work
The characters are productive hard workers. They don’t push themselves to the breaking point, but they’re far from lazy. They use technological resources to get things done efficiently, but they direct those resources towards hands-on action rather than overintellectualizing to avoid work.
Mutual Respect
When doing their jobs, the characters interact within a formal structure, but off duty they’re on a first-name basis. At all times they treat each other with mutual respect. If one character begins to self-destruct, the others step in to help restore balance and integrity — they look out for each other. Trust and trustworthiness are high. This is basically the opposite of how the characters in a soap opera would behave.
Principle-Centeredness
The characters place the highest trust in their own individual principles. They respect the laws and customs of other societies as well as those of their own, but in cases of conflict, they will violate laws to uphold their own principles, even when serious personal consequences are likely. They do not follow laws or orders blindly — they think for themselves and do what they believe is best. They will even follow their principles to the grave if necessary.
Intelligence
Given the circumstances they find themselves in, the characters’ behavior is usually reasonable and intelligent. They tend to follow a systematic approach to problem-solving: gather data, form hypothesis, test hypothesis. They are bold but not stupid. They have both intellectual and emotional intelligence.
Growth
The characters are highly growth-oriented. They continually work to develop their skills, they self-educate, and they have many creative interests which they pursue during their leisure time (art, music, drama, poetry, etc). They attend conferences, maintain personal journals, and discuss personal challenges with each other to solicit feedback and advice. They mentor each other.
The value of growth is often shown via interaction with weaker characters. Take a character that is more like the typical human of today such as Lt. Barclay — he’s timid, incompetent, and lazy. So he’s given counseling to help bring him up to speed, and as the series progresses, his character actually begins to mature as he integrates more and more of the social context. Growth is expected.
Even the android character (Data) aspires to be human, not to be like the typical human of today but rather to adopt the best qualities of humanity expressed by the other characters.
Self-Awareness
The characters are highly self-aware. They’re open-minded and often become aware of their own lack of objectivity in certain circumstances. They’re aware of their own weaknesses, but under adverse situations they work from their strengths and do their best. The fish out of water episodes like “Disaster” or “Remember Me” help depict these qualities.
Order
Everyone keeps their quarters neat and orderly. There’s no clutter. Everything is well-organized.
No Marketing
There’s no marketing in the Star Trek universe… no sponsors’ logos emblazoned onto the Enterprise. People select and use objects and technology because of their genuine usefulness, not because of clever sales techniques. The characters on the show are too intelligent to succumb to marketing gimmicks anyway, so today’s type of marketing wouldn’t likely be effective with such people anyway.
What About Us?
To me this is a reasonable model of how mature human beings should behave and interact with each other. Granted this is a fictional universe, but putting aside the fictional elements and the imagined technology, the human aspects are very real. It may be enormously uncommon today, but it’s certainly not impossible for individuals to behave in this manner.
I believe that what holds us back more than anything else is our social conditioning. We’re born into societies that install many values in us, values that most people never take the time to consciously challenge.
The solution is to raise our awareness and begin acting more consciously. This requires self-reflection, using our own consciousness to examine what we currently hold in our own minds. We must force our subconscious beliefs and assumptions to the surface, challenge them, and consciously decide if we wish to keep them or replace them.
In some ways the Star Trek universe reminds me of the world view Ayn Rand created in her book Atlas Shrugged. However, her characters were primarily motivated by selfishness, which Rand considered a virtue in itself. The Star Trek characters seem to be motivated by meaningful contribution. The most selfish alien race (the Ferengi) are looked down upon by the main characters, perhaps as a commentary on the way humans largely behave today.
It would be interesting to build a microcosm of this type of universe today if we could find enough people who’ve achieved this degree of private victory and challenge them to turn it into a greater public victory.
June 29th, 2005 at 5:47 am
Love the article!!! What a great way to find out why I am such a fan of Star Trek….
But the best part is the microcosm idea… do it! would be great!!!
Thanks again for this blog.
Aguante Steve!!!
Daniel
June 29th, 2005 at 7:30 am
Thanks Steve, that was an interesting article – this and the Wil Wheaton interview on Slashdot have gotten me nostalgic for TNG,
Anyway, I one part of the article grabbed my attention:
“I’ve been able to get pretty close in my own life by leveraging technology to create passive income via internet businesses…”
Have you discussed this before? If not, I would love to see a future entry on how to manage finances to ease one’s transition into self-fulfillment…
June 29th, 2005 at 8:06 am
Wow! I may have to start watching the show, from a new perspective of course. Thanks and have a good day Steve!
June 29th, 2005 at 8:08 am
Star Treck depicts an Utopia. Pretty much like Communism, it can’ be implemented because it is not a Stable Behavior Strategy. See “The Selfish Gene”.
June 29th, 2005 at 8:42 am
The powerful people on this planet are misguided by their fears, prejudices and greed. It is sad to see all the available time and energy being spent in the wrong direction. I often ask myself “when will we learn?”. I hope the answer is not “never”, but we don’t seem to be making too much progress in time.
June 29th, 2005 at 8:49 am
Steve, the USS Enterprise is an extremely expensive starship. Of course that on such a starship only the best are selected for the command ranks.
It’s like saying “look – what a wonderful, high performance human beings the people who gone on the moon missions were” – yes, of course, the missions were billion dollars missions, and we wanted to minimize the chances of something going wrong, so only the best went.
June 29th, 2005 at 10:54 am
The closest thing we have to the Trek-topia meritocracy is the free-open-source-software movement. I always wondered about the money-less economy of Star Trek, but it makes more sense now. The technologies used in Star Trek and open source have made transaction costs and material scarcity almost irrelevant, so people trade in intangibles and work to increase their reputation capital.
June 29th, 2005 at 11:28 am
@Nickey – I disagree with you, partially because I read “the Selfish Gene”. Humans are nearing a point where our intellegence can override the default behaviors for selfishness and greed set in motion by evolution. I’m not saying it wouldn’t take a lot of work, but because we have concious control over our own lives, we can strive to adapt more altruistic behaviors.
Such a society is not going to come out of a philosophy and a quick fix. That would take centuries of people like Steve to help us all achieve a better potential.
June 29th, 2005 at 3:43 pm
[...] t on their blogs: Radhika Nathan Mouli – where are you ?
Steve Pavlina in Lessons from Star Trek : …The solution is to raise our awareness and begin [...]
June 29th, 2005 at 4:01 pm
Interesting take on things
I’ve never been a Trekkie – Star Wars got into my head first
As a kid, Star Wars was my first introduction to the concept of self-awareness. The Jedi teachings seeded the ideas of recognising and controlling my feelings – my fear, anger and hatred in particular.
In Star Wars, I see the embodiments of the three virtues in the Jedi (truth), the Rebels (courage) and the father and son pair (love). One of the deeper lessons of the Jedi is that the Truth, which they stand for, changes at the end of the series.
In the beginning, the Jedi are stuffy do-gooders that see things in absolutes of light and dark. There’s a line in Episode 3 where Obi-Wan says “Only a Sith thinks in absolutes” – but at that stage, the Jedi aren’t much better. They are officially Good, but they suppress their anger and love equally, becoming emotionless. They deny their own feelings – except for Anakin.
By the end of the series, the Truth has changed – Anakin brings balance to the Force. He’s the first Jedi to know both the light side and the dark, overcoming the self-limiting belief that “once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny”. At the end, Vader listens to his conscience and makes a choice. He ignores his years of Light/Dark dogma and makes a choice from his conscience – Love.
That single act of proactivity was worth making 6 movies for
In the extended universe where Luke trains the generation of Jedi, there’s no light or dark side of the force to blame for your actions (”The dark side made me do it!”) – there is just the Force, and what a Jedi does with it is up to his own choices.
I wanted to be a Jedi when I grew up, so I started by throwing less tantrums
I’m not in touch with the Force yet, but I haven’t thrown a tantrum since. That’s clearly something Anakin never got the hang of 
June 29th, 2005 at 4:13 pm
@Nathan: The Star Trek world is not actually money-less. Starfleet personnel do earn a salary, which is what they use to make purchases on shore leave and give to Riker when playing poker.
In the books there are stories that include civilians, and they too make money. It’s just that people don’t need money to purchase the basics like food, clothing, shelter. They use their money to buy things they want, not things they need.
June 29th, 2005 at 8:46 pm
Wow…no offense, Steve, but this is malarkey. Just enjoy the show at face value – pure scifi entertainment.
June 29th, 2005 at 11:52 pm
I do not want to rain in anyone´s parade but … seriously Steve….you can’t be serious.
The world of Star Trek is the best possible example of Socialist Dystopia ever thought of (with the USSR a close second), it is a world the Steve Pavlina I’ve been reading for the past weeks would hardly tolerate living and as for Ayn Rand….well she most certainly would have taken arms againt it.
Consider this: the basic tenet of the Star Trek Economy is none other but the marxist one: “All people should work according to their abilities and receive resources according to their needs”. The fact that resoureces are produced by funny machines is neither here nor there.
You said: “They don’t work for money but rather for personal fulfillment.”
Well it has been proved time and time again that humans respond to material incentives. In the world depicted by ST (a world created by what i would term, for lack of a better word”Hollywood liberals” promoting their own agenda in which freedom is not necessarily paramount, lest we forget that.) individual freedom is not important. Economy should be centrally planned by the government, since they know best who needs what. Commerce and competition are necessary evils. (cfr. The Ferengi) Federation citizens have access to all the material things they need thanks to the Federation government, so they are free to be truly happy and to maximize their human potential.
Problem is, no society organised along thee lines of what you describe has been viable not to mention excellent .NO human civilization has successfully combined excellence in all areas of human endeavor with collectivist, socialist economics and politics. Time and time again has been proved that people respond to incentives and there are basically two motives behind all human advances: profit and religious belief (I am personally agnostic if you must know but that does not make me blind to the reality of things) Both have been behind all the advances made by the human race, including Space travel (whose development has been so far encumbered by the lack of economic incentives to get private companies interested and by the stifling presence of the government).
If I were to find myself (Mark Twain-like) beamed up to the Federation Regime, with its despise for human nature, for profit, with its entrenched, second-natured political correctness, with its atheistic Weltanschuung, with its holier-than-thou characters I like to think I would join the undercover Ferengi & Human insurgency.
Aux armes citoyens! Engagez-vous! Down with Picard!!!
June 30th, 2005 at 4:30 am
I’m not describing a model of a compulsory political system like socialism or communism. You’ll get no argument from me that compelling people to contribute is backwards. Even in the Star Trek universe, societies of that nature are depicted as totalitarian.
The model I’m describing is one of mature human beings choosing to contribute of their own free will, not because they feel they must but rather because they believe it to be in their own best interest to do so. They’ve reached the point where service to self and service to others both point in the same direction.
In my opinion spending one’s whole life working for money or latinum isn’t an intelligently selfish behavior. The argument that working for money is what a sane, selfish person would do with their life falls apart when you extend it far enough. Part of the problem is that people are raised to believe in the godlike importance of money, when it’s only a means to an end. But what is the end? Most people never take the time to figure that out — if they did, they would consciously decide to pursue those ends directly, using the intermediary of money only when it was the best means to get there.
I shall write more on this subject in future blog posts.
June 30th, 2005 at 9:55 am
@Erin– I stand corrected. The scene in Star Trek IV where Kirk says about 1980’s San Francisco: “They’re still using money, we’ve got to find some…” always led to me to believe that in the future goods and services had become too cheap to meter. For the record, I don’t believe a money-less economy is possible or even desirable. It’s hard to make change when bartering mammoth tusks for sabretooth skins.
June 30th, 2005 at 11:57 am
Smarter Stuff
One of the blogs I enjoy is the aptly titled Smarter Stuff, by friend and former coworker Mike Duffy. In today’s post, he links to 30 Days to Success from the personal development blog, Steve Pavlina . com. I’m a big fan of incremental progress, the …
June 30th, 2005 at 4:08 pm
Roddenberry seemed to hold simple agrarian cultures in high regard. I would suspect his political leanings were to the left.
Having worked in agriculture, I would NOT hold agrarian cultures in high regard. It is hard work for long hours in cold and hot temperatures.
I think Star Trek is great fun, but I don’t think I’d hold it as a model society.
I do think, however, that Picard was not a bad model for management.
June 30th, 2005 at 6:25 pm
Thanks, Steve, but Star Trek was a fictional TV show in which the writers could draft the perfect characters who never had to deal with real world realities. We have always had these characters throughout the years in every piece of fiction; they are simply a vision of what could be if we all had the opportunity without the weight of the reality. I highly doubt anyone aboard the Enterprise grew up in Watts or faced the pressures of the dot.com economy. Besides, most of the principal characters were military, not civilian. People who are used to a more demanding, less self-centered lifestyle. Roddenberry’s fiction was Utopian blather. I think a more sensible sci-fi show depicting potential real life in a few hundred years was Babylon 5. Full of achievement and full of human hubris, hand in hand.
Ayn Rand’s characters may have been selfish in our eyes, but their belief was that it was disserving to anybody’s good to be lavish to those who would never produce or make the best of themselves. People with a lot of money had a gift and responsibility to use their wealth to futher mankind, not squander it on philoanthropic endeavors. Build a railroad but don’t squander your profits on cheap fares because the underclass would like to afford travel on it or the government demands it. I don’t agree with her views, but Objectivism does have some strong points. I think it is more of a “survival of the fittest” wherein money and having it makes you more fit.
Your articles are usually very good, but please don’t waste your time falling back on the purported ideals of a fictionalized utopia. Keep your head in this world where we need you and your excellent advice; a place it is appreciated.
Regards,
Jack Greenwood
July 1st, 2005 at 12:24 am
Check out Marshall Brain’s Manna short-story (http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm) for another view of the future. The Australia Project is THE dreamworld
July 3rd, 2005 at 2:44 am
> Star Treck depicts an Utopia. Pretty much like Communism, it can’ be implemented because it is not a Stable Behavior Strategy. See “The Selfish Gene”.
1) It is undebatable that the Enterprise represents the Best and Brightest among them. As such, it isn’t a totally accurate view of the society/culture as a whole.
2) DS9 is a frontier outpost, and as such, “money” is relevant there, unlike throughout most of the Federation. They also explicitly note that Federation citizens don’t have “money”. One episode has Captain Sisko’s son, Jake, approaching his Ferengi friend Nog because he wants to get something that requires money, and, being a Federation citizen, he has none. DS9, after season 4, is much better than any other ST series, btw. Far better writing, a wider character/alien set than any other, and a wider use of storytelling techniques. At the moment, both are running on Spike, and 6th season DS9 stories are, on the whole, much, much better than the season 7 ST:TNG stories. In their best stories, both peak about the same, but DS9 is consistently better.
3) If you want to see a not dissimilar attitude towards the future, I would highly recommend “Voyage From Yesteryear” by James P. Hogan. It, too, postulates on “What next?”. It, like ST, is idealistic and ignores some critical aspects of economics (more below). I think both are still valuable as an early template, but they both miss some critical points.
The key issue of ST is an important one. We now produce virtually all our food with 1 to 2 percent of the population. It should not be long before the same can be said for our need for manufactured goods (which is why “exporting jobs overseas” is so ludicrous as a problem… sooner or later it’ll all be done by machines anyway).
We are now ready to advance into the next society — the one, whatever it is, which follows the Agrarian/Feudal society and the Industrial/Corporate one.
Each of these were radically different, and each had its own control structures and reward systems. Just as the peasant or Lord of the Agrarian society no doubt scoffed at the idea of most people working in factories for a living (”Pfahh! How will they eat? Will they eat cloth? Shoes? It’ll never happen!”), so, too, many scoff now at the idea that most won’t work in factories OR farms for a living, yet somehow, our systems will continue to function and, likely, continue to find ways to reward people for work.
Currently, it appears that the basis for the new economy is going to be a mix of IP and Services — that is, to say, that all new wealth will derive from increasing the type, variety, and quality of those things (IP and Services).
There’s a problem here — IP has very, very different qualities from the way it has been historically treated, which is equivalent to Real Property. While it was not the centerpiece of the economy, this did not matter — but, as its significance grows, the difference is becoming more and more critical, and The Powers That Be are attempting to thwart this shift in The Rules which is inherently needed to follow. Hence you get the current insanities of Napster suits and WIPO, and ISPs being held responsible for the actions of people using their systems. This is basically TPTB, attempting to, in the words of John Perry Barlow, “rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic of IP canon” (”The Economy of Ideas”, Wired, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.03/economy.ideas.html — Very, very, VERY recommended reading for futurizing!!!)
The flaw in both ST and Hogan’s work is that neither really deals with the central problem of economics (i.e., why it exists, and why money exists) — How do you allocate scarce resources? More simply, who gets to decide how something which is shorter in supply than the demand gets the right to use it?
No amount of manufacturing efforts will eliminate this. Just as there are rare foods, there will be goods which are rare, as well — either through some limited material component (”Tantalum”, say) or the use of some new processing technique which has not yet become widespread. In other cases, it can be that the object is unique — in the aforementioned DS9, Jake Sisko wanted to get a 20th century baseball card for his father… not a reproduction, but an original.
“Who gets those”?
Money is the method we use to decide that. It invokes choices — you do without this so that you may have that. Others choose to not do so, and so do without.
ST:TNG pretty much handwaves past this, but it’s there, from time to time as a dramatic element. DS9 deals with it directly, in the course of the series. It doesn’t really solve it, but does ack its existence, and this shows some of the cracks in the Utopian Federation system. ST:Voyager dodged it as a problem by being away from the social base and thus implemented a “rationing system” for dealing with it… In some societies, they call this “money”.
Don’t think that I don’t like ST:TNG — by no means is that the case — but it does fail to address this central issue of any social system utterly.
Nick
obloodyhell–at–yahoo.com
July 6th, 2005 at 4:09 pm
Carnival of Optimists #12
You’ll never guess what my favorite holiday is…
July 6th, 2005 at 9:00 pm
I’ve long thought of the Star Trek world as one where communism actually works, since apparently there’s limitless energy and the ability to turn energy into any material goods. Thus, there’s no longer the conflict between unlimited wants and limited resources.
I also think that the starships are the cream of society, and that Earth is filled with lazy people. At the very least, there are probably lots of people who consider themselves artists, actors, or musicians, even though they have no talent. They can pursue their fantasies because they don’t have to worry about being unable to feed themselves.
July 13th, 2005 at 10:01 am
I think some of you are overlooking the fact that replicator technology would eliminate the need for the buying and selling of material goods. Personal basic needs would be met at the press of a button.
Imagine homes with replicators in them instead of appliances. Just feed all your refuse into the raw material bin and start pushing buttons! No need to cook or stock food in the house, just punch it up on the replicator. Want an ice cold beverage? You know what to do. No need to do laundry, just throw your dirty things in the replicator and get a new set of clothes every day. Why be envious of things other people have? Just go to your replicator and dial up whatever you want.
One thing I can see as a possible market in this scenario is the design and ownership of certain items. If you want to be able to replicate that new designer jacket, then you may have to pay a fee.
Then again, you could probably just download copies of your favorite items from Replister……
August 20th, 2005 at 9:07 pm
Star Trek is the greatest Sci Fi Series ever! Because in Star Trek
* Earth is not destroyed to make way for an interstellar hyperbypass highway!
* It does not have garbage cans with brooms sticking out of it saying exterminate! exterminate!
* Captain Dylan Hunt does not appear!
* The Empire doesn’t strike back!
* Earth does not need a toupee to protect it from the greenhouse effect!
* Humanity is considered to have hope and a future!
Star Trek looks at the positives in human behaviour and there are few, if any, other Science Fiction shows that do that! For me, TNG was the best of all the series, but some of the best DS9 Eps (eg its final episode)certainly rated up there as well.
Star Trek has its faults, to be sure (afterall, it did give us Captain Kirk and Star Trek: Enterprise) but in the main it also gave us entertainment of an extremely high and professional level.
I love Star Trek, and I will forever.
RJKW
August 26th, 2005 at 7:40 am
Star Trek isn’t perfect. We gotta keep in mind that Star Trek is a form of entertainment. Each and every episode wasn’t written to convey the perfect society. Ultimately, every Star Trek episode is written to be fun to watch.
Star Trek has always focused on the character interaction, as opposed to the society that they live in. I think the lessons to be learned, are how the characters deal with the problems they face. In particular, the focus on peace and acceptance. I think that’s the most important message.
I love Star Trek. I hope it comes back in a couple years… but for now, we need a break.
August 28th, 2005 at 7:07 am
My view is that Gene Roddenberry used both history and modern day events of the world to develop stories for Star Trek. The film ‘Undiscovered Country’ was closely linked to the end of the Cold War. I do not know if the Ferengi were one the Gene Roddenberry’s creations but the name originates from the derisive name given by the South Asian to the Europeans who came to South Asia for trading in spices and eventually transforming the whole of South Asia into a colony.
The Ferengi seem a more convincing breed of aliens who are greedy and rapacious. Captain Kirk was a great deal like President Kennedy who wanted a US space programme but on the other side had weaknesses which is why the White House became known as ‘Camelot’.
Star Trek was not just ’science fiction’ it was also mysticism and relgion. The Klingon characterisitics were not unique to this world – the Klingons essential wee the mongols of space – vicious yet at the same time honourable. Each of the aliens represented a particular aspect of human nature although exagerrated.
Deep Space 9 was directly associated with the conflict in former Yugoslavia. The Croatians became known as the Cardassians and Bosnians were the Bajourians. What remained of the Yugoslavia was known as the Dominion.
Star Trek success is to address the issues of the world – be they religious, political or historical unless these elements are not factored in the stories of Star Trek then like the recent Star Trek Enterprise’s failure others are bound to fail. Star Trek is not simply a star ship travelling from one planet to another it is about issues the ship when it visits a world encounters a specific moment in human history or something which is occurring in modern times. Of course the lack of good science fiction writers is another problem which needs to be addressed.