Socialism for me but not for thee. The Elite Panic of Star Trek's Prime Directive.
The arc of the universe bends toward corporate welfare for the well off and bootstrap gaslighting for ordinary people. But resistance is NOT futile.
A few months ago I was in a groupwatch of a Star Trek original series episode. The Prime Directive had become a heated discussion afterward. Someone was defending Starfleet’s “General Order 1” of non-interference with less advanced, developing alien planets as being needed to spare the people on those developing planets from sudden change. I pointed out that all of life is full of sudden changes everywhere, often unwanted, sometimes horrifying, and assuming people can’t handle the truth during a sudden change is an elite panic position.
Commentary: Elite Panic vs. the Resilient Populace by James B. Meigs, MAY 2020
Disaster researchers call this phenomenon “elite panic.” When authorities believe their own citizens will become dangerous, they begin to focus on controlling the public, rather than on addressing the disaster itself. They clamp down on information, restrict freedom of movement, and devote unnecessary energy to enforcing laws they assume are about to be broken.
Some others at this groupwatch called it all colonialism or imperialism. It sure does sound that way. This is an uncomfortable realization for Star Trek fans, like myself, but the Prime Directive in Star Trek is undeniably paternalistic. “Natural development” is just another way of saying those people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
I was asked (as seemingly a gotcha), if I thought that a planet shouldn’t be allowed to decline contact. Would it be the planet declining contact though, I asked? Would it be decided democratically taking into account the most marginalized of that planet’s society? I know the answer to the question was no because in that discussion the example floated was the First Contact episode from Star Trek The Next Generation where the planet’s leadership elites decide to decline contact and lie to their citizenry. They declined even the knowledge of first contact, not just diplomatic relations, without consent or knowledge by the ordinary people on the planet. Then they warn one of the dissenters basically that she’d be smeared as crazy if she blabbed about it! That episode’s scenario wasn’t a very compelling argument for the Prime Directive unless you like the idea of wrecked lives of dissenters and high level people making secret deals with space aliens, such as Xi Jinping, Joe Biden, Vladimir Putin, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, and whoever is the prime minister of the UK these days.
Here on Earth, rich dudes aren’t even sharing vaccine technology during a pandemic, when doing so would actually benefit everybody. Why would we trust leadership? You can’t set it and forget it when it comes to representative democracy, let alone any other form of aristocracy.
"All forms of expertise which could be the basis of arbitrary power need to be disseminated as broadly as possible"
— David Graeber
I could see world leaders, aligned with capital, perhaps turning down advanced healthcare or clean energy from aliens on the grounds that it might cut into capitalist profits for fossil fuel or somehow inconvenience Elon Musk and Peter Thiel or “hurt” the false god all these political elites refer to as The Economy. And then framing it as the need to prove ourselves, individualism something something. Of course the rich and powerful would still find some way to reap secret benefits from whatever aliens had to offer either way - we know that. They’d probably use some bullshit Longtermism eugenics argument to justify it too. And then later, if those in charge were caught in the lies and cover up, they would likely use the excuse that they were just trying to prevent panic!
Commentary: Elite Panic vs. the Resilient Populace by James B. Meigs, MAY 2020
“Too often, the need to “avoid panic” serves as a retroactive justification for all manner of official missteps.”
A few months ago my spouse put on an astronomy podcast that was supposedly about gravity only to hear the guest scientist being interviewed start blathering on about the Great Barrington Declaration, a pandemic minimizing anti-vax natural herd immunity eugenics plan that morphs into ever more bizarre pretzel contortion theories as time goes on to justify putting profits over people and opposing public health. There’s big money behind Longtermism (aka Effective Altruism) and a lot of money behind anti-vax and covid eugenics so it’s perhaps not surprising right wing libertarian propaganda makes its way into a lot of science, sci-fi, and pop culture media. What’s disturbing is how easily it can sneak in — how the ground is ready for it.
Robin Hanson is the economist who came up with the Great Filter theory to explain the so-called Fermi Paradox (the curious fact that aliens have not visited Earth yet despite that they must surely be plentiful). In February 2020, Robin Hanson actually proposed infecting people with sars-cov-2 on purpose. It made me rethink his theory, and I came to see how much the Great Filter theory, which says that most civilizations will be wiped out at some point before interstellar travel, presupposes all societies will be run by elite tycoons who forever pillage and wreck a swathe through whatever exists, running unsustainably roughshod over the bulk of their fellows and any shared resources, and make self-destruction almost unavoidable. This assumption apparently settled into astronomy enthusiasts, sci-fi fans, and scientists without much resistance.
Clearly this is a longstanding systemic issue permeating our culture if the central guiding principle of one of the most lefty science fiction cult classics is, in fact, not just elitist, but a story of elites in a constant state of panic.
Luckily the story of the real world is written by real people. We can decide to resist this. Things have gone in a better direction at times, usually because of a few people willing to strategically push for the right things at the right times, like The Peanut Butter Grandma, Ruth Desmond - a very effective activist and also a 1950s housewife who never got a high school diploma, never mind a PhD in physics or economics. She was said to have “spit in the corporate eye” and is described as a “concerned citizen who changed the face of food regulation.”
Or as Captain James T Kirk once said to the bizarro world Mister Spock in the classic Star Trek episode, “Mirror, Mirror” - “But one man can change the present.”
Or one Peanut Butter Lady.
"The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently." - David Graeber