TNG - Homeward

[Al-1701]

A world where your enlightenment has told you to let people die to forces beyond their control when you have the ability to save them is no utopia. It's a dystopia with a utopian coating.

[Frustration]

So you're opposed to non-intervention principles in the real world as well, hmm?

The Federation could save billions of lives, at the cost of forcibly destroying their societies and cultures. They'd be no different than the Borg.

[Fianna]

For the third or fourth time, no one has said anything about forcibly destroying their cultures. I think most everyone here is in agreement that if people refuse the Federation's aid, then that choice should be respected. All we're arguing is that they should be given the option of accepting the Federation's aid, and deciding for themselves whether it's something they want.

[CharlesPhipps]

I feel like the locals were infantalized by the narrative, though.

[Frustration]

For the third or fourth time, no one has said anything about forcibly destroying their cultures.

For the umpteenth time, the Federation doesn't need to forcibly destroy their cultures. They can merely make contact; the native culture won't survive.

Furthermore, the standards by which some of you are judging the behavior of the Federation would indeed require you to forcibly intervene in every less-developed alien society, if you were in that situation and actually following that code.

You seem to have the idea that a utopia means everything is the way you'd like it to be. The Federation is about as utopian as any fictional society can be and still be plausibly populated by entities recognizable as human beings. Which is why their codes of conduct are utterly incompatible with your standards of behavior.

[Al-1701]

So you're opposed to non-intervention principles in the real world as well, hmm?

The Federation could save billions of lives, at the cost of forcibly destroying their societies and cultures. They'd be no different than the Borg.

If it's acts of God? Yes. If an isolated population is suffering a treatable disease, we should offer doctors and medicine to help save them. If people on an island without the means to travel much beyond it are about to be struck by a Category 5 Hurricane, we should offer to evacuate them. Because the possibility of their society and culture being subsumed by interaction with the outside world is preferable to the certain destruction of them by their extinction.

And if utopia isn't everything the way I want it to be, it's not a utopia. And if the Federation is so terrified of the future it allows itself to be paralyzed in the face of global suffering, then it's nowhere close to being a utopia. It's a collection of cowards.

And plenty of native cultures have survived contact with more advanced ones. They've been changed, but cultures change over time as things happen. The actual destruction of cultures has been the result of active campaigns of assimilation, displacement, exploitation, and genocide. Since the Federation is not going to take part in these things, the culture will survive just changing because of a watershed moment in its history.

[pilight]

For the third or fourth time, no one has said anything about forcibly destroying their cultures.

For the umpteenth time, the Federation doesn't need to forcibly destroy their cultures. They can merely make contact; the native culture won't survive.

Yes, but in this case the native culture won't survive either way so that doesn't really matter. The question then becomes one of saving individuals or not.

Hiding behind "the law is the law" isn't a real answer. That's just cowardice. It's an easy way to avoid making a hard decision. If you truly want to make a case that Nikolai's decision was wrong you'll have to do better than "because Federation dogma says so".

[Makeitstop]

And plenty of native cultures have survived contact with more advanced ones. They've been changed, but cultures change over time as things happen. The actual destruction of cultures has been the result of active campaigns of assimilation, displacement, exploitation, and genocide. Since the Federation is not going to take part in these things, the culture will survive just changing because of a watershed moment in its history.

This right here. Even if we accept that contact would change their culture to the point that it is "destroyed" and also ignore the fact that cultures are destroyed far more completely by extinction on a planetary scale, the fact is that the culture was always going to be "destroyed" over time anyway. Cultures are always changing, and there are always external factors which will help shape them. Encountering another culture is just another event in the history of the culture.

And why should that necessarily be a fate worse than death? Once again, the premise of Star Trek is that the arrival of Vulcans helped humans turn their shitty, broken civilization into a paradise where virtually all of the problems in society have been solved. Yes, empires conquering other civilizations is bad, but isolationism doesn't have a great track record either. Cultural exchange is largely a good thing, and there's no reason why the federation couldn't help preserve the art, music, literature, stories, beliefs and traditions of the peoples they encounter, and for the same to be shared in turn with anyone who is interested. In real life, this happens all the time, and somehow we manage to survive.

But again, let's ignore the rational, sensible positions and go back to the idiotic extremes for a moment. The fact is, even accepting the false dichotomy between cultural destruction and preventable extinction, if we have to choose between the imperialistic strawman and the genocidal apathy of non-intervention at all costs, the strawman is still preferable.

Both are bad of course, the reasonable solution is to allow the people to make their own choices and treat them like actual thinking beings instead of rats in a maze. But given some absurdly contrived scenario where there can be no reasonable compromise, no individual choice and no agency on behalf of the people who must live (or die) with the outcome, where for some reason we must choose between completely stripping them of their culture or allowing the sudden extinction of their entire species, it is still more harmful to choose to force them to die with their culture than to force them to live without it. Both rob them of their freedom to choose for themselves, both eliminate their culture, but one allows the people to survive and have some kind of future, while the other does not. Maybe they'd disagree, but they might also disagree with being dead for the sake of cultural purity, and since the false dichotomy is based on not bothering to give a shit what they think, it doesn't really matter.

[MightyDavidson]

So you're opposed to non-intervention principles in the real world as well, hmm?

The Federation could save billions of lives, at the cost of forcibly destroying their societies and cultures. They'd be no different than the Borg.

The problem with that argument is, that buy NOT saving those billions of lives their societies and cultures would be destroyed. By not saving them they're not doing good, they're committing genocide through inaction and having the gall to be proud of themselves for it.

[clearspira]

A world where your enlightenment has told you to let people die to forces beyond their control when you have the ability to save them is no utopia. It's a dystopia with a utopian coating.

This is of course why utopias are functionally impossible. A utopia is reliant on the ''Emperors New Clothes'' philosophy. It only is as long as everyone agrees it is. That is why the suppression of ''undesirables'' who do not toe the party line is so important.
That is kind of what it comes down to really. The PD is all-knowing and perfect because paradise has deemed it to be.