Unless it's just too inconvenient
Unless it's just too inconvenient
35 comments
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Wesley: Sentenced to death for violating law on foreign planet.
Picard: "We cannot violate the prime directive."
Beverly: "You're not seriously going to let them kill my son..."
Picard: "To hell with the prime directive."
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Sure, we never follow it--but without the Prime Directive, messing with pre-warp civilizations wouldn't be half as much fun!
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The prime guideline
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been trying to come up with a "more like the _ directive" joke but the best i have is the slime directive sorry gang
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Best I could come up with. shrugs
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Hot take: The prime directive is a paternalistic concept
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Paternalistic implies the benefit to be on the recipient, but I see it more as self defense (for the benefit of both, but primarily the offerer), based on the premise that "nice" civilizations grow up to eventually gain technology, and they need the tempering of pain to help get them there. i.e. they need to lose their dependency upon magical thinking before they can be considered cultural equals.
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Dead children cry out from a thousand worlds.
The prime directive is the most amoral thing in all of Star Trek.
If there are space faring aliens out there who have solved scarcity and they're just watching the suffering that unfolds daily on this world - they better indeed hope we don't figure out space travel because I will have serious unanswered questions.
(This same shit applies to all-powerful deities.)
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That's an interesting theory, and it has been explored in science-fiction before. It's basically the explanation for why the uplifting of the Krogan in Mass Effect was not normal and was in hindsight regarded as a bad idea.
But I feel like Star Trek's messaging has been pretty consistent and clear on this. The Prime Directive exists because the Federation regards cultures' ability to evolve on their own terms as sacrosanct.
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Thanks for proving my point by using paternalistic language. So we have no moral obligations to civilizations with magical thinking because they aren't our cultural equals but inferior? We can just watch them die and do nothing because they believe in zodiacs?
Besides: magical thinking isn't even the criterion of the prime directive. It's about warp technology. If it was about the scientific method, it would make a little more sense but even that's independent of morality.
And what do you even mean with ""nice" civilizations"? So primitive/naive civilizations have to learn the hard way what technology can do to finally use the technology for good? We can't give them vaccines before they had a world war? What has the one thing to do with the other? And how do you use words like "grow up" and claim it's not paternalistic?
Paternalistic implies the benefit to be on the recipient
What does that even mean? I can paternalistically talk down to someone with no benefit or malefic to anyone except maybe an insult. I can control people paternalistically to my benefit and I can help and guide them for their benefit. Paternalistic doesn't imply any benefit on any side. It's about hierarchy, about feeling superior to people you don't deem worthy to make decisions on their own or rather take their view serious and if anything, you confirmed my view that the prime directive is paternalistic.
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My sort of writer's room motivation head canon is that the Prime Directive was a symbolic politically motivated response to the irresponsible "uplifting of primitive civilizations" by major world powers that resulted in cargo cults and widespread death from disease and nuclear weapons testing throughout the cold war, the manifest destiny to expand ever westward and drive native populations from their lands, the concerted effort to deprive native populations of their food by hunting the buffalo of the Great plains to extinction. It's also unfair to leave Hyper advanced technology in the hands of civilizations incapable of maintaining and repairing that technology.
Think if you brought a modern cell phone back in time even just 50 years, would someone from that time period would have the tools, supporting technology or the skills to make any repairs to that phone? I'm highly doubtful they could and that's ignoring that there are so many other interlinking technologies that that cell phone is reliant on to function.
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This leans into a critic, Picard Season 1 and Lower Decks tries to address: TOS and TNG have this Alien of the Week, First Contact attitude: I came, messed around, and left. Sure, given that "I don't care about consequences" attitude, not messing too much is a good idea. But maybe the given is the problem and eye level relationship just works differently.
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They're more like guidelines than rules
35 comments