Everyday life in Gene Roddenberry's Utopia
I'm re-posting this because it somehow got posted in the wrong forum.---RW
As an avid and longtime Trekker, I have often wondered what the average person back on Earth is doing while brave people like Jim Kirk, Jean-Luc Picard and the other incarnations of Gene Roddenberry's Starfleet nobly expand the borders of the Federation and the limits of knowledge.
I'll tell you what they're doing: they're sleeping all day, getting up at 4pm and cracking open another bottle of Romulan Ale (yes, it's illegal, but what the hell.....) and getting bombed, or shooting up with Denebian Whacky Cracky.
Gene Roddenberry was a devout liberal, and envisioned a future with "no greed, no hunger". There was no need for money, as technology had advanced to the place where there was enough of anything for anybody. Nobody needed to work because nobody needed money; all they had to do was go to the replicator and ask for whatever they wanted, and it would be made for them right there and then. Of course, who built the replicator and how they were paid for their effort was never explained.
There was plenty of food, since any schmoe could simply stagger over to the food slot and say "I'll have a 20-ounce prime rib, medium rare, three lobster tails infused with butter and some truffles," and it would appear.
The main thing wrong with Roddenberry's vision of this future is that, if you remove hunger and greed, you've pretty much removed any motivation for humans to do pretty much anything. Those two things have been the engines behind a lot of history, good as well as bad. What he saw as a Utopia of plenty would actually be a technology-driven and based welfare state.
Roddenberry, as a stereotypical, and very hedonistic, I might add,liberal, saw a future where people, no longer having to work, just sat around reading poetry or the works of Shakepeare, or somehow found motivation to dedicate their lives to the betterment of humanity because there was no longer any need to struggle (of course, if there were no longer any need to struggle, what would be the point of dedicating your life to its aleviation?) . Those of us who are realists can clearly see that anything as efficient and disciplined as a Starfleet or Federation could never actually grow and be sustained in such an environment. No one, having no reason to get out of bed in the morning other than to sit in the sun and revel in life itself, is going to be motivated to do much of anything. Period. We can see this for ourselves in those who make a living from playing the welfare system. If you hand them free food and money, you take away their desire to do more than get stoned or drunk and lay around doing nothing.
One thing that always struck me as odd was the dichotomy in the tastes of the heroes in Trek.
They lived in a society where everything was instantly manufactured for them by machine, yet both Kirk and Picard, especially, favored antique this and hand-crafted that. Why should they so appreciate these things, created from the sweat and struggle of someone for whom such things were a way of life, when that was clearly not the right way of thinking? Isn't it better that no one has to work anymore? No one has to get out of bed to get to a job on time to simply be exploited and made to work to produce things instead of being able to do as they wished? Welcome to Roddenberry's future.
The future is now, people. You just have to be able to play it right.