The proper reply to the parent of your comment IMHO is that Star Trek is evil propaganda, not that the vision of society depicted in the propaganda is not socialist.
The proper reply to the parent of your comment IMHO is that Star Trek is evil propaganda, not that the vision of society depicted in the propaganda is not socialist.
But I really do believe that Star Trek, specifically the parts that Roddenberry personally oversaw (namely the original series and the first four seasons of The Next Generation) had a very negative effect on the world.
In addition to making some viewers more committed to socialist ideology[1] Roddenberry's Star Trek made many committed to the ideology of technological progress.
Although it can have a beneficial effect on a person, a commitment to an ideology tends to have a deleterious effect on the world when many share a commitment to the same ideology.
[1] In a (private) debate with me, a committed socialist asserted that a successful transition to socialism would result in a society much like the one depicted in Star Trek. Since it is very unlikely that he engaged in many debates about socialism before his debate with me, the reason he believed that that assertion might make me warm to socialism is probably because it had contributed to his own warming to socialism.
I think you may have fallen victim to a common misconception of how ideology actually functions.
The most affected by ideology aren't the ones consciously committing to a cause. Ideology is strongest precisely when you think you're outside of it - when your ideological commitments have become so normalized that they are completely invisible to you.
There is no such thing as being unideological, whatever you perceive as such is just a reflection of your own ideology.
If you'd like to delve deeper into the theory of ideology and how it functions, I'd recommend the works of philosophy legend and ideology expert Slavoj Zizek.
There's his seminal work, The Sublime Object of Ideology, which goes into this at depth, but is a very dry and academic read. If you'd like something a bit more digestible, I would recommend the movie The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, which uses a more pop-sci approach of dissecting popular movies to demonstrate their ideological function.
One reason I know they're different is that the thing I'm pointing at is vastly less influential in some people than other, so much so that it clearly makes sense to call some people "unideological" or if one is being tediously precise "almost completely unideological".
Everyone is strongly influenced by their language, their culture and the family they grew up in. Not everyone has even a weak commitment to an ideology.
I'm willing to switch to a different term for the thing I'm interested in, but I haven't been able to come up with one.
In other words, I sacrificed the quality of the conversation (namely, I introduced not only a tangent, but also a tangent rooted in a confusion) so that I could express some thought that had risen to salience in my solitary mind. My doing that made the conversation worse, and the conversation is what matters, not whether I got to express myself in a way that is quick and easy for me.