VOY - Natural Law

[CrypticMirror]

Sisko was wrong. Both in his own position, and theologically. It is not easy to be a saint in paradise. It is impossible to be a saint in paradise, because paradise is the absence of temptation. You can only be a saint in the face of temptation, and by demonstrating resistance to it or in penitence for failing to do so. That line always bugged me, it was glib empty rhetoric.

[Fianna]

I mean, not to get into semantics, but in traditional theology, living in Paradise is the defining characteristic of sainthood. Per the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and those other super-old churches, the definition of "saint" is "any person who's made it into Heaven". That's why people are only declared saints after they've died, because a living person, not currently in Paradise, cannot, by definition, be a saint.

[clearspira]

Sisko was wrong. Both in his own position, and theologically. It is not easy to be a saint in paradise. It is impossible to be a saint in paradise, because paradise is the absence of temptation. You can only be a saint in the face of temptation, and by demonstrating resistance to it or in penitence for failing to do so. That line always bugged me, it was glib empty rhetoric.

It is pretty obvious what Sisko is trying to get at though. Being a good man in a world without war, famine, disease, poverty, scarcity and even bad weather is trivially easy because there is nothing to tempt you from the course of being a good man and thus you are never truly tested.

You put that same man into a ghetto with a heroin addict for a mum and an alcoholic for a dad, no health insurance, no money to put food on your table let alone go off to college, and suddenly you have on your hands someone who has to try every moment of every day to be good.

Shall I let Quark take it from here?

''Let me tell you something about hu-mons, nephew. They're a wonderful, friendly people as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working, but take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those same, friendly, intelligent, wonderful people will become as nasty and as violent as the most bloodthirsty Klingon. You don't believe me? Look at those faces. Look in their eyes.''

[Al-1701]

But it's also easy to become more concerned with your squeaky clean image than doing actual good. Which the Federation seemed more concerned with prior to the Dominion War.

They wanted to be seen as having the moral high ground with regards to the DMZ, so they would rather sweep the colonists and Maquis under the rug rather than addressing their grievances of people who had never been within a parsec of their homes giving them away to a recent enemy.

And it's the same with how they applied the Prime Directive. Taking action could blow up in their face. So, they figured they just do nothing and claim there's nothing they could do. They are more fearful of failure than they are driven towards success. Picard learned this lesson on a personal leave in Tapestry, but didn't scale it up for the Federation.

Too bad when he finally did apply it at scale, it did (literally) blow up in his face and lead to a decade and a half of isolationist policies out of the Federation.

[Frustration]

The last and hardest lesson about wielding power is when not to do so. The Federation as a civilization has extraordinary power, including the ability to destroy worlds, and they have strict rules about how that power can be used.

It's very easy to imagine power being wielded in precisely the way you prefer... but imagine someone else with different standards wielding that power, and it becomes obvious why there have to be consensus rules that don't necessarily permit you to do anything you'd want to.

[McAvoy]

The last and hardest lesson about wielding power is when not to do so. The Federation as a civilization has extraordinary power, including the ability to destroy worlds, and they have strict rules about how that power can be used.

It's very easy to imagine power being wielded in precisely the way you prefer... but imagine someone else with different standards wielding that power, and it becomes obvious why there have to be consensus rules that don't necessarily permit you to do anything you'd want to.

Well we can look no further away from the Federation than their enemies and/or rivals. Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, Dominion etc. They all have the technology, better or worse than the Federation.

What have they done differently than the Federation?

[Frustration]

The Cardassians enslaved entire worlds. The Klingons are known for being willing to destroy the ecologies of planets if they find them inconvenient. The Tribble homeworld was obliterated completely, but not before people smuggled samples off-planet.

[Al-1701]

And the Federation sits back, watches entire civilizations die to natural disasters they could mitigate or evacuate the population from, and then pat themselves on the back for how enlightened they are for doing it. There's a lot of real estate between unchecked expansionism and apathy as policy.

[animalia]

As someone who is also an Animorphs fan I have to ask who is familiar with that series riff on the ol PD.

aka The Law Of Serrow’s Kindness.

For those of you not familiar with the series I will sum it up in three words.

“It’s about shame.”

[Megabob452]

As someone who is also an Animorphs fan I have to ask who is familiar with that series riff on the ol PD.

aka The Law Of Serrow’s Kindness.

For those of you not familiar with the series I will sum it up in three words.

“It’s about shame.”

Animorphs also made it clear that said law was an overreaction to a specific event that started decades of war. That same war is only ended when a faction of good yeerks are given a technology that renders their species' need to enslave other races obsolete. After the war, andalites share tech with humans at a gradual pace, having realized that an absolutist ban was not the correct solution.