If American propaganda owes so much to Scifi, I wonder why optimistic visions of the future have gone out of vogue to such a great degree. Endemic conservatism in the military arm of the deep state?
The series definetly portrayed an interesting future be it slightly simplistic. Is there anything else that isnt dystopia?
What harm is there if we turn the only non dystopian sf series into more piew piew? I dunno, but it seems it could turn out very expensive.
It isn't a paradox. Star Trek is entertainment, first and foremost, and conflict is entertaining. Gene Roddenberry may have wanted to portray a post-human utopia of luxury space communism, as it were, where humans all evolved beyond their base desires and vices and everyone was a paragon of superior intellect and virtue, but no one wants to watch that all the time. His ideal of the perfect Federation human was Wesley Crusher, the most hated character in Star Trek history (long before the identity politics around hating the new Star Trek series came about.) People want dogfights in space and snarling Klingons and scheming Romulans. Drama and violence. Sturm und Drang.
>Is there anything else that isnt dystopia?
There is no utopia or dystopia. Star Trek was never very utopian, except maybe on paper. Idealistic and hopeful, sure, but the struggle for liberation from an oppressive order is by definition idealistic and hopeful. Star Trek doesn't become dystopian when it bothers to examine its own ideals, or acknowledge the flaws in human nature, nor is it utopian when it pretends they don't exist. I think that looking at science fiction in terms of utopia and dystopia is missing the forest for the trees. These are two opposing and impossible ideals, while most stories (excepting purposely grimdark stuff like 40K) take place in the middle.
And that's fine. Humans can't aspire to perfection, but we can be inspired by the struggle to be better than we are.
> Gene Roddenberry may have wanted to portray a post-human utopia of luxury space communism
He went a bit further than wanting. If the goal was communist propaganda he couldn't have done a better job.
From a reddit post:
> There are a lot of mentions throughout multiple series about how the Federation civilization is post scarcity and doesn't internally use currency. It is stated that they work for personal fulfillment, almost as volunteers in a fashion.
> The series also has a number of time travel related episodes that venture back to near the end of the capitalism system and describes in detail an America that's suffering from massive income inequality and collapsing. Generally that period isn't painted in a favourable light by any of the characters often being referred to as a period of unchecked greed and ignorance
And then there were the ferengi? Lmao
Kind of a neat example of a religion outgrowing the pressures that created it but still being a source of meaning to the believers.
While I find communists the most annoying ideologues I've ever met, I'm fine with communist propaganda if it assumes postscarcity as a necessary precursor for communism. It's people's tendency to handwave the getting to postscarcity that makes my eyelid twitch.
Earth didn't reach post scarcity by seizing the means of production through class warfare, but scientific and technological advancement and culture shock from first contact with the Vulcans. The Bell Riots you're talking about in the time travel episodes are probably the strongest explicitly socialist part of recent canon, but within that canon they still didn't result in an anti-capitalist revolution since the themes the writers wanted to touch on were homelessness and sociopolitics from the 1960s and 1970s (Attica, Kent State, etc.) The Federation doesn't require its member worlds to be communist nor does it foment revolution in potential member worlds. As portrayed, most Federation worlds appear capitalist in some form.
People have jobs with clear non-collectivist hierarchies (see Sisko's restaurant.) We're just supposed to accept that this is entirely voluntarist, but the whole issue of how labor in this post-scarcity society actually works is swept under the rug because no one writing the show actually cares. The pacifist Federation flagship whose only purpose is exploration and diplomacy carries enough firepower to glass a planet, and it uses that firepower often. "God" is an alien and a jackass but also somehow working in humanity's benefit, and as often as Trek espouses atheism, it does a wink and a nod to theism. Even the relatively low bar of gender and sexual equality was often undermined by producer Rick Berman's homophobia.
The Ferengi (ignoring the first few appearances) are explicit parodies of American capitalism, but they are also portrayed sympathetically and heroically, and often used to criticize the Federation's own ideals and human nature (see Quark and Garak's famous "root beer" scene in DS9[0].) This is obviously a criticism of American cultural propaganda but is also slyly pro-American imperialism, since of course the (deeply America-coded) Federation will sweep in, guns blazing, kill the (asexual and trans-coded) evildoers and save everyone.
So I have to disagree. If the goal was communist propaganda, they could have done a lot better.
Mostly not. Sure, the Klingon and Romulan episodes have something of a Cold War in them (but that’s a total of 10 out of 79 TOS episodes.)
Or am I reading too much history to be taken seriously in this myopic place?
The justifications to project power changed greatly over time and vary between the set of political ideologies in charge at any given time, but US and western foreign policy was always rooted in unspoken, consistent motivations.
That's why the transition between pre- and post- cold war foreign policy was so seamless. The covert action, coups, interventions, military support, economic warfare didn't change at all. Afganistan 1 was about the "red scare", 2 was about "international terrorism". Iraq, Syria and Libya was about "tyrannical despotic regimes". etc.
I could cite the revealed preferences of many prominent figures in the military and state policy world: Rice, Power, Rumsfeld, Kissinger, Bolton, Nuland, etc. And those are just the people at the top; the hierarchy is stocked with true believers.
Yes, the belief in the empire, it was always about (neo)colonialism/imperialism, I think even neoliberalism and LIO is just justification rather than a true belief of the people that drive foreign policy of western nations.
> They reflect persuasive arguments (aka propaganda), not true beliefs and actions.
People have been so infantilized by this propaganda, its really frustrating to talk with most people about it.
Never underestimate how stupid an aristocracy can become. Some portion will always be true believers. The idea that it is all Machiavellians is a probabilistic impossibility, and revealed preferences (interviews, slips of the mic, secret conversations, whistleblowers, etc.) have shone sunlight on them in the past. There are genuine ideologues in the US military and state department. Calling them "conservative" or "neoliberal" is a useless simplification that does not adequately describe how deranged their beliefs are.
I also think it's why most contemporary sci-fi isn't resonating, but that's just my own opinion based on speculation. I have a suspicion that contemporary sci-fi doesn't sell well. They all present societies which have solved social and material problems through progress, or which are still solving them, critiquing an image of the Western world in the 20th century. None of them nab at any kind of biting truth relevant to young readers today.
Short story "Best Of" omnibuses are especially depressing for me personally. This is where I found some of the most mindblowing stories and concepts I had encountered when I was younger, and now they're essentially no better than tinder for firestarting. The people running the Nebula or other awards have astoundingly safe and poor taste.
What are some examples of scifi you're referring to there? Because the noteworthy scifi stories I can think of, ones which drew enough attention to be televised at least, are stories like the hunger games (dystopian), divergent (dystopian), the new star trek series (which I haven't seen but I understand shoehorned scarcity back into the startrekverse), Foundation (fall of a golden age), The Expanse (dystopian) etc. I think the only optimistic scifi I've read in the last twenty years or so was Anathem, and there's no way that's getting a miniseries.
Maybe it's a function of the authors I follow, but I just don't see this optimistic contemporary scifi you speak of, naive or otherwise.
The maximally unequal society of Hunger Games is resolved via a violent revolution in favor of more egalitarian values. Same with Divergent. Star Trek Discovery is about a sexually and ethnically diverse crew somehow (in a future that was supposed to have solved these things) facing bigotry and solving it by simply applying or arguing for the "morally correct" values they already have. In Foundation, enlightened technocrats shorten a regressive civilizational collapse and return to "upward" progress by literally tricking the surrounding cultures into the Foundation's value judgment of the "correct" path (very VERY State Department of them). The Expanse is a TTRPG novelization and subsequent TV adaptation where a near-literal paladin (Holden) applies enlightened egalitarianism, diplomacy, and pacifism to stop an interplanetary faction war.
ALL of the specific stories you mention feature extremely strong Whiggist storytelling, and further than that, Isaac Asiimov (author of Foundation) was a famously outspoken activist for enlightened, Whiggist, progressive, technocratic ideals. Many peoples' first introduction to these ideas was Star Trek, though modern Trek handles its themes with all the subtlety of a mace.
I suppose I might have been imprecise in my speech by conflating optimism with utopianism, but 'depiction of future I'd like to live in' and 'optimistic scifi' are close enough concepts to those of us untouched by modern English departments that those of you who are could just disambiguate and move on when you encounter it.
Incidentally, I think a lot of insights can be gotten into psychological warfare if one likens it to cellular biology and the games viruses and engineers play to get a cell to accept foreign code. What we're seeing here is an excellent example of an immune response that looks for 'tells' of hostile activity causing an allergic reaction.
I doubt I'd have had the same response if you'd used any kind of phrasing that demonstrated the most basic level of competence in the subject matter. Talking about "the military arm of the deep state" is like claiming to understand aerospace engineering and then talking unironically with a straight face about "the spinny thing on the front of the plane."
"anyone who uses xyz" is such a unsubtle poisoning the well strategy, it surprises me that the [Enter] key was still struck.