I similarly dislike the idea that someone else could, in any capacity, have the power to decide for me how I am going to live my life, even if their decisions are "morally correct" for some values of moral and correct.
Besides the issue of being theatrically-fulfilling, the nature of something like Starfleet would tend to select against having truly stupid/lazy people there. Even the modern (and for that matter, WWII) U.S. submarine fleets are not cross sections of society, and the technical and training requirements would only seem to have gone up for Starfleet.
I'm presuming the "bred out" thing didn't happen, since the Star Trek canon (and a few episodes, e.g. of DS9) speaks of eugenics as a practice becoming highly disfavored hundreds of years before the events of the various TV shows and movies.
With all that said it is definitely implied that life in the Federation is essential utopian, without lazy/stupid people. Maybe a more knowledgeable Star Trek geek can explain how the show explains it but AFAIK the disparity is never explained by anything more substantial than improved social policies after First Contact.
This alone would pretty much ensure there are no lazy/stupid people. Stupidity is largely a factor of health and education, laziness mostly a factor of social norms (encouragement, expecting success, role models etc.)
What I'm saying is that on average people behave the way you expect them to as long as they know what's expected.
<quote> Various studies have found the heritability of IQ to be between 0.7 and 0.8 in adults and 0.45 in childhood in the United States.[4][7][15] It may seem reasonable to expect that genetic influences on traits like IQ should become less important as one gains experiences with age. However, that the opposite occurs is well documented. </quote>
Honestly the takeaway of this is that questions like "do you want to live in Blade Runner or do you want to live in Star Trek" don't work because Star Trek is more fantasy than science-fiction when it comes to how some of that stuff works.
As others have mentioned, it's just fiction. It's not a roadmap to a destination; it's encouragement to build that destination ourselves.
Most stupidity is a result of poor education, nutrition, pollution, and disease.
It has been estimated that the average person taking an IQ test in 1932 would score 80points using the a 1997 IQ test. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
Ie every society will have 50% of the population that is below the average intelligence. And the lower quartile be considered outright stupid - because the rest of society is not tailored to their needs.
Yeah if you buy what the Minds are selling. (I agree with you and would absolutely live in The Culture, I just felt like playing devil's advocate/discussing the Culture novels).
Except that your decisions about how to live your life are integrally bound up with the infrastructure provided by society as a whole. Individualism isn't exactly what it's cracked up to be.
Capitalism is the only thing that's really capable of lifting people out of poverty. We need to work with people's selfish desires, not against them.
You left off the part where de facto government granted monopolies helped build the capital base and in many cases directly funded infrastructure investments.
Being told "no" by society doesn't imply any status of rightness or wrongness, nor is it a reason to get all petulant and start asking "illogically-extending-the-argument" questions.
Go up one or two levels on the scale of life, and we call that cellular freedom "cancer."