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The recent flurry of posts on family formation, @PyotrVerkhovensky's post on Chesterton and MAGA, along with the proliferation of Penguin and Starfleet Academy memes in my feed has gotten me thinking about Star Trek again, and the role that aspiration plays in fiction, politics, and life in general.
What can a 24 year-old spin-off of a 60 year-old TV series teach us today's Culture War?
Star Trek is often presented as utopian, but it would be more accurate to describe it as post-post-apocalyptic. While the date and circumstances of "Post-Atomic Horror" have shifted over the decades, the idea that Trek's world is separated from ours by a massive catastrophic event that wiped out a significant portion of humanity has been present since Trek's inception. I find this interesting not, only from a lore perspective but in context of how the real-world has changed around it over the last six decades.
From the original series' premiere in 1966 through the end of the 20th century Star Trek had always been "linear" always moving forward into its own future. That is until "Star Trek: Enterprise". (STE) Enterprise jumped backwards in Trek's timeline to the early days of Starfleet.
In Trek's lore this is a frontier period full of unbounded optimism, but Enterprise premiered in September of 2001, and as those Americans here old enough to have first seen Fight Club in the theater or experience 9/11 as adults will recall, the early 2000s were not exactly an optimistic time. The dot com bubble had just burst, and the US was on a bit of a downs-slope both culturally and economically, the first cracks in the presumptions of progressivism had already appeared, and the quiet suggestion in Star Trek's backstory that "you can't get there from here" was starting to feel much louder. Enterprise sought to be a bridge, not just between the atomic wasteland and utopian vision of the original series, but between the progressive optimism of the late 20th century and the cultural "funk" of the year 2000. This is why, for me at least, Enterprise is simultaneously the most under-developed and under-rated iteration of Star Trek.
The series opens approximately 30 years after a drunken mad scientist living in the black hills converted a surplus nuclear missile into mankind's first FTL-capable spacecraft (*1). This triggers an intervention on the part of a paternalist Vulcan civilization to prevent this band of psychotic gun-monkeys from disrupting the delicate balance of power in our local galactic region. Earth now exists as sort of an indulged vassal of the Vulcans. A vassalage that while largely benign has begun to chafe. There is an increasing vocal faction of humans, most of whom who came of age post-Horror, who wish to see Earth set its own path and develop its own technology base. The situation is somewhat analogous to that of Japan in the 50s and 60s, economically vibrant but also still somewhat traumatized, the mass death and devastation of the Horror still very much within living memory. It is with this as background that the NX Program, a project to build and launch mankind's first proper Starships, is undertaken.
Our heroes are the captain and crew of the NX-1. All through the first season, there of this of their mission being this watershed moment that will determine whether Humanity sets its own path in galactic affairs or simply settles for having ended hunger, war, and disease. At best stagnating under the benevolent colonialism of the Vulcans, at worst losing some vital part of our collective soul.
Unlike the smugly enlightened Starfleet of the TNG era, the humans we meet in STE are clearly rooted in our modern world both aesthetically; The NX series ships follow NASA naming conventions (Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger), while their crews wear uniforms based on contemporary NASA astronaut uniforms. And more fundamentally; They have bitter political disputes and a bit of xenophobic streak. They can also be recklessly forthright when something gets their ire up. They have one ally, the Vulcans, and Archer burns them by revealing one of their covert listening posts operation to the wider galaxy. These humans are arrogant, violent, impulsive, illogical, and they're effectively betting the future of their entire species on a single ship. If the Enterprise gets destroyed or accidentally starts a war with the Klingon Empire that might just be the end of humanity's story right there.
Speaking of the Klingons, let's take a moment to talk about them...
The modern pop-culture image of Klingons as these weird Samurai space-orcs with bumpy foreheads talking endlessly about "honor" while they stab each other in the back mostly comes from Christopher Lloyd's Captain Kruge in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Kruge seems to be more of a pirate or privateer than a naval officer, operating on his own initiative rather than as part of a wider organization. While subsequent portrayals would try to walk this back, they were never quite able to shake that image. Even in Star Trek: Deep Space 9, a series that was usually pretty good about giving its aliens depth and nuance, the Klingons come across as a remarkably simplistic and socially primitive society. This is in substantial contrast to how they were presented in the original series.
While originally envisioned by Star Trek producer Gene L. Coon as a mash up of the Soviet, Ottoman, and Mongol Empires, ie a stand-in for every "Eastern Horde" that has threatened Western civilization throughout its history, the original series gives them a lot of background for what could have easily been a just another throw-away villain of the week. The Klingons of TOS are presented as a fully functional society with scientists, lawyers, and diplomats, as well as warriors. They engage in diplomacy and undertake organized campaigns as seen in their introductory episode Errand of Mercy, they make use of proxies as shown in the episodes like Day of the Dove and A Private Little War. They have deep cover operatives as shown in *The Trouble With Tribbles". We even get passing references to famous Klingon actors, popular songs, and mytho-historical figures. While aggressive and expansionistic the Klingons of TOS are a civilization that venerates its warriors rather than a civilization of warriors. A distinction that STE explicitly calls out in the Season 2 episode Judgment.
Though much of it is now considered non-canon, the Original Series expanded universe novels, fan-guides (presented as in-universe guidebooks), and TTRPG took this even further, fleshing out the Klingons' history, and religion. Even giving them an entire constructed language that would be spoken on-screen in subsequent Star Trek movies and spin-off series. These Klingons are not just mindless brutes slobbering Gahg, while their children may train for war as part of their basic schooling, they also enjoy theme-parks and schlocky teleplays. Klingon adults listen to opera and have nuanced conversations about history and philosophy over glasses of Blood Wine. These Klingons are warlike, but they aren't obsessed with war for war's sake. Rather their militarism is an expression of a broader multi-domain aggressiveness.
And it is through this aggressiveness that they perceive something crucial about the other races they come in contact with. There are "Eev" that is beings like themselves, possessed of individual agency and ambition (The Humans,, Vulcans, Romulans, and Andorrans, all falling into this category), and then there are "Kuve", zombies, servitors, livestock, contemptible creatures worthy only of being conquered or consumed. There are shades of the Bene Gesserit's Gom Jabbar test in this distinction complete with Klingon youth having to be "tested with pain sticks" before becoming a legal adult (Coon, Fontana, Ford, Et Al. had clearly read Dune).
It is with this as context that I would like to highlight a scene from the novel The Final Reflection by John Ford, published the same year that Star Trek III would cement the pop culture image of the Klingons. In this scene a Klingon envoy is meeting with a wealthy Earth tycoon, Maxwell Grandisson the Third (this was written before Star Trek IV dropped that line about people in the 24th century not using money into the lore without any thought about how it would work). This man, Grandisson, is the leader of a "Back to Earth" movement that wants to do away with all this expensive and dangerous colonization of other planets bullshit in favor of building a paradise on Earth and he is trying to convince the Klingons to back his political campaign on the basis that if he wins there will be no need for conflict between their two peoples. The Klingon response to his overtures is worth thinking on...
To me, this speaks to the core story/premise of Enterprise. At the start of the series Earth is well on it's way to becoming a post-scarcity society but humanity is also starting to lean toward the Khesterex side of things. A vassal to the Vulcans, a junior ally at best. The NX Program is the physical manifestation of a conscious decision not to sink into comfortable dependency. This isn't the end of the humanity's story where we live boringly ever after, it is the beginning of "To Boldly Go..."
...and it is by "boldly going where no man has gone before", by inserting themselves into the middle of galactic affairs as though they belong, that by the end of Season 3 Humanity has gone from an indulged vassal to regional player and full partner in a powerful 3-way alliance that would have never come about had this band of psychotic gun-monkeys not disrupted the status quo. It is a quintessentially "American" story in that it's both the story of a child culture supplanting its parent as Hegemon and deeply rooted in the frontier mythos. But it's also a more universally human story about how cultures rise, fall, and occasionally merge. At the start of the series the Vulcans are powerful but also stagnant. Too rigid to adapt to changing circumstances and too conservative to tolerate uncertainty or risk even when doing so is arguably necessary. Meanwhile Humanity is both staggeringly ignorant and boundlessly confident. A confidence buoyed in part by the fact that there is nothing anyone can threaten them with short of extinction that they haven't already done to themselves. By the end of the series the two have moderated each other and become the closest of allies. It's a story about finding that balance between realistically assessing your limitations but also having the sense of confidence, self-worth, and "fuck it we ball" attitude necessary to pursue greatness. A worthwhile message for not just for individuals but for entire cultures.
Which brings us to the Culture War angle.
A common critique I see leveled against conservative populists on this forum be is that they lack the intelligence and positive vision for the future necessary to attract "elite human capital". MAGA is obviously the central example here, defined as it is looking backwards to try and recapture a piece of what once was, but I've seen similar complaints leveled against Abe and the LDP in Japan, and as as characters like Javier Milei in Argentina. But something the critics don't seem to grasp is that positive vision or no, their messages resonate, they win elections, and their rallies draw passionate crowds because it's a better story than anything the other side has to offer. A question our resident anti-Populists are going to have to grapple with is what does "elite human capital" have to offer the base-model human other than growing social dysfunction and death via "managed decline"?
I still think we can get to a better future without a catastrophic hard reset but we can't do it with the sort of "Khesterex" thinking that seems to have become endemic to blue spaces. Grievance-mongering might stir up a crowd but gripes alone are not a solid foundation to build upon, nor are the likely to inspire anyone to greatness. If we are going to build a better future, we will need to get away from both the nostalgia of the right and the doubling down on failure that is the left. We need a unifying myth, and I feel like we might be in the early stages of figuring that out.
Well... that's an interesting post! As a fellow Star Trek nerd I'm conflicted on how to respond. You've made so many different, interesting points that I'm disoriented.
On the Enterprise series, personally I still hate it. I hate the opening theme song (trading the classy dramatic music of previous series for a cheesy pop song), I hate the way it retconned an earlier ship named Enterprise, I hate Scott Bakula as an actor, I hate how the showrunners were obviously running out of ideas, and I especially hate how they were trying to shoehorn in then-current year politicals about 9/11 into Star Trek. But I suppose it does have its place as the last of its era, and as something of a time capsule for early 2000s network TV.
I agree with you that Original Series Klingons deserve more respect. They get a lot of shit because of their appearance (which admittedly does look like a weird racial caricature of Turkish or Mongolian people, plus hilariously low-budget). But they're written as intelligent and respect-worthy adversaries. In many ways, not that different from Kirk. When they're first introduced Kirk is trying to blend in among a planet of pacifists, but the Klingons instantly sus him out as being different and more like themselves. They both share contempt for the pacifists, even when it's revealed that they're secretly a more advanced race. And the Klingons are very much a match for the Federation and a huge threat. Later series make them look cool, but act kinda goofy, just blundering around with swords and being stupid. "Samurai/vikings in space" turn out to be no match at all for hyper advanced humans.
Culture War angle: basically, I agree. But this is admittedly a spicy hot take. Most people take it for granted that the ideal utopian future is one of perpetual peace. But why should that be the case? We could openly embrace our identity as an Empire in the mold of the Roman Empire. End birthright citizenship, and make citizenship by blood only. Embrace war as a standard way of life. We will fight perpetual wars, to make ourselves stronger. Some die off, but the rest become even stronger. The reward of winning war is a continuous flow of resources and services, to make ourselves rich, instead of forcing us to have an underclass stuck doing dirty jobs that no one else wants, or an excess of unemployed unwanted men with no purpose in life. Trump's recent rhetoric on Venezuela seems to be a step in that direction- he says that he did it partially for security, but also partially just to take the oil and make us all richer. We'll see if that's actually the case, but I can appreciate the vision.
Even assuming it works and we never come across a power that manages to beat us or disrupt us in a significant manner (there's a reason peace is the default), genetic engineering and technology is multiple times more efficient for this purpose.
Because we already have a better method, it's called markets. They're naturally efficient and have consistently proven themselves to be better than centrally controlled economies. It's one of the reasons why even slavery has died off too, the free market is simply far more efficient than wasting resources on enforcement of what essentially becomes a mini form of a centrally controlled economy. Slave ownership helped to keep the American south in the past while markets industrialized the North and made them richer.
The empire model didn't go away because of morals. If that was the case, then the empires would have outcompeted the moral pussies who ceded power and they wouldn't be gone to begin with. The empire model is gone because it is inferior to the market. You notice how the three examples you gave of modern empires all failed?
The British empire kept losing territory and power, not just the US but plenty of other colonies. The American South lost to the North. The USSR racked up loss after loss until it fell apart. Over and over again the empire model is filled with losers.
The market model keeps winning. The US, one of the earliest and most ardent embracers of capitalism who largely kept war away from us is the greatest and most powerful country in the world. While Europe was ruined by war, we innovated and grew. The only thing now that is even close is China, and that's despite them having significantly more human capital to rely on because they insist on self sabotage with communism.
You're making the "end of history" argument ala Fukuyama. 20 years ago I would have agreed with you, but I think we're starting to see the cracks in this sort of market-focused liberal democratic model. Plumeting birth rates, rising social problems, and a general sense that people are not as good as they used to be. Technology is very good at solving market problems like "how can we target people with ads," but not so good at actually enhancing human lives. And genetic engineering has yet to overcome basic human differences, eg men and women are still different despite the best efforts of feminists and trans activists to erase those differences. Ditto the racial differences.
So what? The US has also lost lots of wars. Just a few years ago we had a humiliating retreat from Afghanistan after 20 years of failing to accomplish anything there. It doesn't matter. The nice thing about being a big, powerful military empire is that you can afford to lose wars. Losing some random territory in Africa was hardly an existential threat to the British Empire- even losing their American colonies wasn't. The southern planter caste lost their slaves, but they kept their land and went right back to their traditional way of life after the war ended, just paying the former slaves a small amount. Even now they make up a disproportionate share of US military officers. And while the USSR fell apart (due to economic reasons, not from war—it's kind of amazing that they kept their empire running as long as they did when it was so ramshackle), Russia kept its nukes, its space program, and a lot of its power. Its former KGB leader became president. Its currently at war in Ukraine to regain its lost territory, and it will probably win despite the west sending significant aid to Ukraine. It's not just some minor footnote in history!
Then of course there's China, which seems to be charting its own unique path with both centralized state control and dynamic markets. I don't even know what to say there, except that it's clearly a rebuke to the idea that liberal free-market capitalistic democracy is the only model that will work from now on.
Even if/when there's problems, is there any indication that the war hungry empire wannabe nations are fixing any of these? Russia has been killing off hundreds of thousands of their young men trying to take even a small portion of nearby territory.
China is probably the only working example whatsoever and that's still because Deng Xiaoping the so called "number one capitalist roader" introduced market reform to them and allows them to actually meaningfully grow. And even then they're still fucked. Even just among the other majority chinese Nations, China is the poorest per capita. They just make up for it through sheer numbers.
Technology cooks your food, gets you from one place to another, brings you entertainment, saves your life and all sorts of other things. You have more jesters (comedians) available at the press of a single button than even the richest and most powerful kings would have had through their whole life just by turning on YouTube. You can listen to and watch the best stories by the best bards around the world with barely any effort. You can travel long distances without needing a stinky awful horse. I can cook delicious meals that some poor Victorian boy would never get to taste. Every single meal filled with spices and herbs that they've never even heard of. Thanks to restaurants, I don't even have to cook them either! And thanks to delivery, I don't even have to leave my home to have food beyond the imagination of prior centuries. Even many poorer Americans can access these wonders nowadays, I have a poorer friend from a rural county nearby I met in school whose family has a PS5 and PSVR. They are "poor" and have virtual reality technology just in their home casually. And just ask the basic question of what are the ads even for? For things people want to buy to enhance their life.
Markets are making the sci fi dreams of the yesteryear real and all anyone can do is complain, psychology is incredible.
Well, I haven't done a robust statistical analysis of this, but there does seem to be a trned where the more war-hungry nations have a higher fertility rate. Africa and the Middle East most especially. Israel also, and they might be the best example of what I'm thinking of- they seem to have accepted that they'll just be at war in Gaza forever, never going full genocide but never finding a peaceful solution either. The US isn't very warlike, but we are somewhat more warlike than Europe or East Asia, and correspondingly have a higher fertility rate. Russia is admittedly an outlier, but I think they're just slowly finding their way forward after the absolute devastation of the USSR breakup in the 90s.
China really needs to be judged on a curve. Remember they went through the century of humiliation, followed by Mao just absolutely ruining whatever was left with his retarded policies. The fact that they still exist at all is incredible, and they seem to be quickly making up lost ground.
Sure, there's obviously some good uses for technology. I just dispute that technology on its own can make people happy or give us meaning in life. As you noted, even poor people now have plenty of access to technology, so we don't need to be rich to enjoy it. This is going past what we can prove with statistics, but my impression of most poor people in the US is not that they want more technology, but a deeper meaning in their life. Put another way- they want social capital, not technological capital.
...and there's something to be said for having an actual human cook food for you or provide live entertainment, instead of a robot and a screen. Nothing I've ever watched on a screen is as memorable to me as some of the events I've seen in person from a real human.
I havent either and wouldn't know the cause if so, but your examples also match up with the "poor countries have more kids" idea as well so if there's any relation it could be that war hunger makes us poorer by being less efficient and being poorer makes us fuck more.
The east asia hypothesis falls apart pretty quick if you consider South Korea is still prepared for a war, just with a long ceasemate for peace currently. And China is ramping up against Taiwan for decades now.
Well yes that's the point, Mao along with the other commies fucked things up and it took Deng Xiaoping's market reforms to make them even close to the capitalist competition of Singapore and Taiwan, despite having a massive advantage in population.
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That doesn't sound Roman. That sounds Greek, particularly Athenian or Macedonian(Sparta preferred foreign bribes over directly extracting tribute).
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That doesn't sound particularly Roman. More Roman would be offering citizenship to any migrants who joined the army to conquer Cuba or Greenland, on the condition that they remain there afterwards and helped develop the new territories.
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I agree that "the Franchise" is too important to to entrust to accidents of birth which is why, if we are going to openly embrace empire, I would say that we ought borrow a page from the late-Republic / early-Empire and go full Heinlein. Tie citizenship and voting rights to military service or at least being a revenue-producing taxpayer. We want voters who feel invested, and granting citizenship at birth, be it by blood or by soil, has the opposite effect.
As for the rest, I have the same questions for you as @sun_the_second.
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Starship Troopers explored this concept seriously as well (disregard the movie, which may be fun but has little to do with the book). In the book, the franchise is only extended to people who undertake hazardous and/or unpleasant duty on behalf of the human federation. A right to be able to do this is guaranteed, and they will even invent difficult tasks for someone with disabilities, but the point is to ensure real skin in the game for the franchise-holders. The book also discusses the concept of human expansion as a sort of evolutionary force.
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Oh, Enterprise burned me so badly. I was delighted to hear Scott Bakula was cast as Archer. Then they gave me "a well-balanced captain, he has a chip on both shoulders", turned the Vulcans into racist xenophobe ableists and I don't know what-all else, that goddamn dog, and Trip Tucker.
No thank you!
Then they seemed to go on a spiral of "you thought the last re-imagining was bad? Hold my Romulan ale" and we got Disco Trek with mushroom-powered space ships and the biggest Mary Sue of Mary Sues, Michael (I'm a gal but I got a guy's name, ain't I daring?) Burnham.
Making "Spock's Brain" not the worst ever Trek episode produced for twenty years now.
I recently rewatched a bunch of Berman-era Trek including a good chunk of Season 1 Enterprise in part because I needed a pallet cleanser from the latest Kurtzman nonsense, and pop-song aside I feel that it is unfairly maligned. See the various re-dubbs of the Enterprise opening using other series' scores
TNG was "my Trek" but even I have to admit that the first season was pretty rough, if we compare season 1 of Enterprise to season 1 of TNG I'd argue that the former acquits itself well.
Season one of TNG was trying a little too hard to copy original TOS, to the point of remaking some episodes from the parent show. Once they got their own cast and setting established, and ventured out to do original stories, it was way better.
I really, really wanted Enterprise to work because I thought going back to the early days of the Federation and how it was built up was a great idea. The struggles, the coming together of the different founding members we knew from later series, the history behind it all. Instead we got decontamination gel rubdowns where any alien microbes presumably died of second-hand embarrassment.
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I wanted to give Enterprise a chance. The soft rock-jazz AOR fusion warbling of the theme song took me aback a bit, but I soldiered on.
Then we got "the fucking idiot* showrunners made it canon that this is not a bad shitty joke, it is now established in the Trekverse that Humans literally smell, so far as Vulcans are concerned, and they have to wear nasal filters to be around us".
I could not believe, over several episodes, that no this was not a shitty joke some dumb Human (Tucker) was trying to make a running joke, it was to be taken as real true fact of the setting.
Then we had Archer going to go to war (or a diplomatic incident) over his dumb dog where a bunch of aliens who had never seen a dog before and had no idea what kind of animal it was neglected to warn him that some plant on their world would give poor doggy-dums the equivalent of an allergic reaction.
The stupid, stupid, stupid attempts at fanservice sexiness (but not too sexy, and let's pretend that you treat radiation by rubbing gel on your half-naked partner. Yeah, hard science for the win!)
I liked Reed. I liked Hoshi. I was willing to give T'Pol a go, even though they plainly had her in the Seven of Nine catsuit and heels role, until they infected her with the mind-controlling Ceti eel and diverted what little character she had apart from being the sexpot to "Imma rebel against everything Vulcan and be 200% pro-Archer, pro-Humans and pro-romance with stinky Human Tucker".
It's a toss-up whom I loathe more, Tucker or Phlox, but given that Phlox is such an insufferable pain in the backside I'd be happy with an episode where they blew up Denobula (they blew up Vulcan, damn them, in the franchise but they couldn't destroy this lair of prats?)
My viewing dropped from "it's new Trek, that's every week sorted!" to "occasional if I remember" and ended with the first whispers of the Time war or whatever that plot was, when they decided they'd re-do Voyager's Year of Hell (the most popular season for that show) and re-cast Archer in the Janeway Action Hero mould. At this period, the Federation doesn't even have working transporters for people, but they're going up against a civilisation that can manipulate time? That's bows and arrows against nuclear missiles. I noped out because Braga and Berman and their bloody love of convoluted time travel episodes, plus some things are just beyond suspension of disbelief, and I didn't like any of the characters or setting enough to stick with the show.
*Yes, I am salty about this. It's reducing Trek to the level of "jokes twelve year old boys would think funny".
The thing that always really annoyed me about Enterprise was the decision to come up with a canon explanation for why the Klingon look changed. Just no. It was done for real world reasons, the audience is capable of rolling with it, move on. There's no need for a convoluted explanation, or indeed to acknowledge the change at all (unless it's to wink at the audience like in Trials And Tribble-ations).
I think the funniest meta-solution would have been to have Micheal Dorn spend the episode in ToS-style makeup.
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From the Wiki link:
Yeah, if we're doing 60s Cold War analogies, the Klingons were the Russians and the Romulans were the Chinese.
This really depends on which era and episode you're talking about. They did say that the Romulans were distantly related to the Vulcans but less friendly, so some people made a vague analogy to that with Vulcans=Japanese and Romulans=Chinese... but then the crew meets the Romulans and they're just space Romans, with all sorts of references to the ancient Romans. After that they only showed up a few times in later TOS episodes, mostly sidelined behind the Klingons. Meanwhile there's Sulu and Chekov on the bridge, as an actual, literal Japanese/Russian man, showing how the humans in the future had overcome these sort of petty national conflicts.
Later, the movie Star Trek 6 made the Klingons a heavy-handed metaphor for the USSR and the end of the cold war, revolving around a complicated spy plot. But after that, TNG made them more like space Vikings who looked down on any sort of treachery, while the Romulans became the sneaky spy enemy. So I think the analogy is pretty garbled and there's room for the writers to do whatever they want.
It was never solidly "X is a metaphor for Y in our world" (except for the few Very Special Episodes about race or whatever) so there is always room for interpretation. Definitely the movies made the Klingons more villainous ("you killed my son!") than the show had done, so TNG with Worf was a correction to that.
Currently, what with the conflicting explanations for why TOS Klingons and modern Klingons look different, and now with this mess that I refuse to recognise as genuine Trek, they're all over the place. I go to my happy place and imagine that Disco Trek onwards are all happening in the Reboot AU timeline and not in Prime timeline so Vulcan still exists, Vulcans are not raging racists, and Starfleet is not full of narcissists and failures for whom every day is Pride Day or else they are being oppressed by being required to act like professionals.
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And Roddenberry was definitely doing '60s Cold War analogies.
Oh, yeah. But he also wanted that balance between "human nature has done terrible things" and "but we can change, here's a vision for the future of optimism and hope". The Federation works for its happy ending, which is why the puerile easy nihilism of over-using the Mirror Universe and Section 31 annoys me. "Guess what, suckers, your shiny future is built on grubby spy manipulation!" and then we get Picard etc. which are then "guess what, suckers, your shiny future is obsessed with late 20th century/mid 21st century SJW tropes as expressed in terms college student Marxists can understand!"
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What happens when you run out of inferior people to pillage and loot?
Also, who exactly provides the "services" won in war if not the underclass that you defeated?
Capitalism's greatest virtue was enabling continuous growth through continuous competition. Making competition physical either creates a real risk of winning and stagnating, lacking enemies, or you have to make the entire war a 1984-esque sham.
Also also, war isn't even fucking fun in a rah rah primal kind of way anymore. You don't get to see the whites of the enemy's eyes. Unless you're stomping primitives through vastly superior firepower in a way that can hardly be called war and certainly isn't edifying, all you get is cowering in a foxhole, waiting for a drone to pinpoint your location and either get you shelled or drop a grenade on you.
Well you don't kill them all. Don't commit mass genocide, that's barbaric and wasteful.
(@JeSuisCharlie this is also my reply to you)
Three models I can think of in (relatively) modern times are the late Victorian British empire, the Antebellum American South, and the post-Stalin USSR.
(I feel compelled to mention at this point that I'm just offering this as a thought experiment, using all three of those plus the Klingons from Star Trek as a very loose example. All three of those have some obvious horrifying parts, and I particularly despise slavery)
The thing that all three had in common was that, although they were a heavily militarized society with many of their upper class men serving in the military, they weren't particularly interested in expanding their territory. They already had all the territory they could possibly use—arguably too much. Of course, to some extent they did go to war with other nations, but most of their normal military action was either:
(a) preparing ever greater amounts of force to make sure they never had to go to war (the best weapon is one that never has to be used) or (b) internal force against the tribute states of their empire (Czech or Afghanistan for the Soviets, India for the British, Blacks and American Indians for the Antebellum South)
Of course, the most obvious benefit of such an empire is the resourcees it provides. Natural resources like oil and minerals, but also humans to do all the work that no one else wants to do: work the farmland in harsh rural areas for example, or low-wage service work in the cities. In our capitalistic meritocracy, this leads to an endless dog-eat-dog struggle as everyone is in competition for the "good jobs," leading everyone in fear that they'll be stuck with one of those lesser jobs, and no one will offer them any sympathy—it's their fault for not doing better in school, or hustling harder, or something like that. With the empire model, things are much more clear—you're born into the lower caste, and you stay there, so there's a little more stability to build a culture there and offer some stability.
In our society, military service is usually offered as a path out of poverty for the lower class, while those in the upper class either making a token gesture of it (like the royal family in England) or skip it entirely (like Trump). In the "empire" model, it instead acts as a test of merit and one of the most respected careers, with many of the upper class choosing to make their career there. After leaving the military, they then get a huge advantage for later careers in things like law and politics, which seems a lot more fair and just than offering them to kids who got a high LSAT score and went to top law schools with no prior career experience. Or they can simply retire and live the rest of their life as a gentleman of leisure, with their military pension and discipline keeping them on a respectable path, which is much better than the aimless NEETS of today who have ample leisure time but nothing to show for it.
I would certainly not expect it to be "fun," and I'm aware there would be a heavy price paid in blood for all of this. But it might lead us back to an actually "great" society, where people have a sense that they are part of something truly grand and have an important role to play. The current vision of "you are all residents of an economic zone, go forth and maximize GDP" is somewhat... lacking in its appeal to our nobler spirits.
The South actually was pretty interested in expanding its territory. I think in a scenario where they successfully separate from the United States they probably end up with Cuba and possibly large parts of Mexico and South America.
As I understand it, that was mostly for political reasons. They felt outnumbered and wanted more congressional votes to survive.
Political power of the slave states was a major consideration, but they also contended (I think sincerely) that if slavery was not permitted to expand, the system would collapse.
http://civilwarcauses.org/al-nc.htm
Hmm, that's interesting. It seems like they were afraid of runaway population growth in their slaves, to the point where the entire south would just be overpopulated with slaves if they weren't allowed to expand territory. Suffice to say that kind of population growth is no longer a concern these days.
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…this is TND with extra steps. I mean, you’re totally allowed to argue for the total dispossession of and presumed eventual extinction of the non-white/east asian peoples of the earth, but that is indeed the proximate outcome of such a Darwinian process.
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