Davis Aurini - Why Do People Love Star Trek?

March 16, 2013 - Davis Aurini

15:47

Why Do People Love Star Trek?

My novel: http://www.amazon.com/Walk-These-Broken-Roads-ebook/dp/B009RZYO2O/ My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/ My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini Glorious Hat! http://www.commieobama.com/pages/hat_info.html Mencius Moldbug: unqualified-reservations.blogspot.ca/2013/03/sam-altman-is-not-blithering-idiot.html

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	You know Star Trek, if you want to be cynical, really isn't that good of a show.
	The science fiction is derivative, inconsistent, the philosophy in moralizing is fairly childish.
	And yet it's gained an immense popularity, hasn't it?
	This is a question worth examining.
	Why is it so popular, despite being such bad science fiction?
	The thing is, Trekkies, on average, Trekkies are a few IQ points above the general population, and they've probably read a lot of other sci-fi.
	They've probably read the stuff that inspired the Star Trek episodes.
	Some of them riffing off of Better Sci-Fi, other episodes outright stealing the ideas from Better Sci-Fi, and yet these people remain Trekkies.
	why you know a while back i said that there's certain people and like the you guys out there listening to my videos i can tell just by reading the comments are clearly amongst this group They're the sort of people that if any of us won the lottery, we wouldn't spend it on hookers and blow.
	We wouldn't waste it all in one year.
	We wouldn't build a giant monster truck stadium and destroy cars that people better than us built.
	It's not what we're interested in.
	We'd keep doing what we're doing.
	Except that we'd be able to quit our jobs and do what we really want to do full-time to the fullest extent of our ability.
	Without buying a brand new car or a thousand shiny toys, we'd go out and become that 18th century intellectual back in the heyday of science and mathematics and culture.
	The natural aristocracy.
	Those people who aren't just interested in some economic benefit, in the rat race, in obsessing over these petty little details.
	But the people that actually want to better themselves, that want to culture themselves, that want to study science, that want to go and make a difference in the world.
	It just comes naturally to us.
	And who do you think makes up Starfleet?
	The natural aristocracy.
	See, the thing about Star Trek, two important things to notice is first of all, it's post-scarcity.
	That they've got the technology in the Star Trek universe that they can have anything they want.
	They can live in a big bubble of orgasmium.
	They don't need to work.
	They don't need to risk their lives out exploring space and fighting aliens.
	And yet they do anyway.
	It's what they want to do.
	Their highest calling in life is to study quasars or learn alien languages or study archaeology or learn an archaic instrument even though right in their quarters they have a computer with every mp3 of every song performed better than they could ever do right there to listen to except these Star Trek people They'd actually rather put on their own play with members of the crew.
	They'd actually rather play their own instruments and tend forward.
	And I'll bet you they also play a lot of Dungeons and Dragons, coming up with brilliant, very, very heart-wrenching scenarios.
	There's very little mass media on the holodeck.
	Most of it seems to be amateur.
	And as for glory, they do occasionally seek glory in combat, but they don't seek glory the same way somebody that wants to be a football player or a basketball star.
	They don't seek the empty glory of accomplishments in sports, but rather the personal and transcendent glory of being amazing at what they've practiced at for years.
	Post-scarcity, yet they choose to work.
	Natural aristocracy.
	The second big thing to notice about Star Trek, we never see what Earth looks like.
	Moltbuck posted an article recently, a re-examination of economics.
	The link is down below.
	It's a very long article, but read the whole thing.
	It's brilliant.
	One of the things he points out is that an aspect of modernity, one aspect, is that we measure everything in dollars.
	It's all money at the end of the day.
	Eudilons, utilitarianism, hedons, the hedonic treadmill.
	You know, like a faster, better, higher resolution iPod.
	More porn for everybody.
	Like this is the measurement of the modern man.
	His product as an economic worker.
	And whether you're talking about capitalism or communism, this is the measure of a man.
	That's all they care about.
	Second aspect is the negative utility worker.
	Again, this is a product of modernity.
	In historical times, for most of human history, there were very, very few negative economic workers.
	Oh, there's the occasional cattle thief or rapist.
	You hang those ones.
	They're negative utility.
	You hang them.
	But ever since the introduction of the factory method, we are becoming increasingly overwhelmed with negative utility workers.
	And what the hell do we do with these people?
	These people that you would actively pay not to have their diversity quotient on your job site.
	What do we do with these people?
	Moltbuck points out that he's a little bit more liberal than most, that he'd be okay with a king, but that not even he would be okay with a computer king who only measured people as economic units.
	Take these negative economic workers.
	They're the ones currently that we either lock up in prison or or keep in the ghetto.
	Take these people and said make them productive.
	Chop them up, sell their organs, grind the rest up for cat food.
	Menchius is pretty liberal, but he's not that liberal.
	That's not really a viable future.
	And the current status quo is not particularly viable either.
	Pay them off, give them welfare, give them socialism, creates resentment amongst those people.
	It creates resentment amongst the non-aristocratic people.
	The people that do need jobs, do need to have some sort of meaning in life.
	They get resentful about paying all of this welfare.
	Now, the upper classes, the ideological liberals, the intelligentsia, you know, like all these lovely little leftists that have bought in hook, line, and sinker to the Blue Kool-Aid, they love this solution because it makes them feel self-righteous.
	But the problem is, there's maybe, what, 10, 15% of the population, that's the natural aristocracy.
	That percentage can't be working to support the other 85, 90% with the constant heroin drip and widescreen TVs and on-demand pornography.
	We've got a problem here.
	We can't just go and genocide these people.
	That's just not an acceptable solution.
	It's not a politically likely or possible solution.
	Not to mention that I think we all find it personally abhorrent.
	But we need to do something with them.
	Let's go back to the Star Trek universe.
	So you have the natural aristocracy.
	These geniuses and these soulful, sensitive people, and these people with curiosity and a sense of valor in their hearts out on their trek to the stars.
	What are they doing with all the people on Earth?
	Well, to a certain extent, most of them are locked up in holodecks.
	You know, like, go have your Midget Gangbang orgy on the holodeck.
	You know, go do this and don't breed.
	We don't need more genes like yours in the environment.
	But the other thing, the other thing that's telling about Earth is that Jean-Luc Picard's family runs a winery.
	Which makes me suspect that back on Earth, there's actually a lot of people doing the handicrafts.
	Again, this is something Moldbug talks about.
	Ban plastic toys.
	All of a sudden, these non-productive, useless people, most of them could whittle wood.
	Most of them can do something that's engaging, that grows the human spirit, that satisfies the soul and helps them be a real human being instead of a negative production economic consumer.
	Suspect a lot of these people on Earth are being forcibly pushed in to arts and crafts.
	Stuff that's, you know, a replicator could make a better toy, but there's a replicator ban on making toys.
	Instead, we get the incompetence.
	Instead of just locking them up in the holodeck, they're actually engaged in some sort of productive work, which they're capable of.
	Nobody's starving.
	Everybody has food.
	Because it is post-scarcity again, but they have something productive to do with their days.
	They're not wasting away smoking heroin and shooting crack.
	Or is it the other way around?
	You know, it's easy to criticize the Star Trek universe as communists, because it is a communist environment.
	The funny thing is, though, that post-scarcity, this communism...
	See, the aristocracy can actually do communism.
	You and your friends can do communism with each other.
	When one of you is laid off of work, friends can chip in to buy the beer.
	And you know that no one's going to exploit the system.
	no one's going to be destructive.
	Except when we see the underman, the underclass doing this, you get the black ghettos, you get the native reserves, where nothing ever gets built and things degrade ten times as fast as they should.
	Because whenever somebody does hit a payday, anytime they do get a refill of their EBT card, they just blow it, sharing it with neighbors irresponsibly.
	See, that's the odd thing.
	That's the really funny thing.
	The underclass is the first one to vote in communism, but they are the least capable of dealing with it.
	Meanwhile, the natural aristocracy can actually deal with communism extremely well.
	If you took Marx and Engels and, well, possibly Lenin, that guy did have BDIs, but, you know, keep Stalin out of things, you actually have a functional little hippie commune for a while there.
	It's only when you give it over to the masses that that sort of economic system really starts falling apart.
	Especially in this era of quasi-scarcity that we're still in.
	We've got this economic underclass, and we've got this aristocracy, which sadly are mostly too busy trying to work in jobs designed for the underclass, for people that can't think for themselves.
	Your modern office job, they don't want you to do efficient work.
	They don't want you to think for yourself.
	They don't want you to innovate.
	Because that will put people out of work when this is really just a giant ditch digging with shovels, even though we have a backhoe right over there.
	The problem is the transition from where we are right now to there.
	We'd be fine without the Industrial Revolution.
	Everybody has a role prior to the Industrial Revolution.
	Then you get machines.
	Machines are doing the work.
	Machines are way better than most people at doing the work.
	And so what do you do with all the people out of work?
	The people that are useless?
	You make them all shoeshiners, all Walmart greeters?
	Because there's not really any dignity in that.
	How do we get from here to that Star Trek arrangement where the underclass and the obedient are put into jobs to actually fulfill their souls, give them some dignity, some self-respect, as opposed to the ghetto?
	Well, the natural aristocracy is free to pursue their dreams rather than getting their dreams stomped on by the corporate environment.
	One of the biggest challenges with talking to people in the natural aristocracy is that they have trouble believing there are people that do need rules and jobs and something to do with themselves because otherwise they'll watch reality TV 24-7 That is why Star Trek is so popular.

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