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April 27, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
22:56
213 Star Trek and Statism
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Good afternoon everybody, it's Steph.
It is 5 o'clock on Thursday the 27th of April 2006 and I actually bored myself to tears with my first podcast.
I started talking about my entrepreneurial experience for Management Part 2, but Management Part 2 will have to wait until Management Part 1 gets the feedback, just to see if this is of interest to people and so on.
So I actually turned it off and I was just hum-dee-dum-dee driving along and so on.
Then I was thinking, oh, you know, a podcast topic.
And I thought, you know, one of the things I wrote an article about years ago that I can't find anymore that I thought was kind of interesting was a sort of analysis of Star Trek.
So, we're not going to do anything non-geeky this afternoon.
I don't know if you've watched Star Trek or not, but I thought it was an interesting enough topic or an interesting enough subject to write an article about, which I've since lost.
So I thought I'd mention some of the major things about that.
And halfway through my drive, because I turned my podcasting equipment off and traffic slowed down, so I started it up again.
And I figured I'd just have a little shot.
I'm going to hit the gym before...
I'm going home, and Christina's seeing some patients this afternoon, so before we get there, I thought I would take you on a quick tour through Star Trek, at least things that I think are important about it, because it's not an unimportant cultural phenomenon.
And I actually did a debate on television with some Trekkies in this area as well, talking about this, so I've had an embarrassing amount of experience with this, so...
I thought I would talk about the universe that Star Trek is set in and what I think it means.
I guess the major issue that I have with the Star Trek universe as a whole, and I'm really an expert only on the old one, the original one, the Shatner one, and the problem that I have in general is that it's completely statist.
It is... I don't sound like, ah, they're statist crawling up my legs.
They're in my jam. But there's no free market in...
Star Trek at all.
Everything is military.
Everything is fascistic. Everything is hierarchical.
There's no democracy.
There's no trade.
There's no market.
There's no private property, it would seem.
And it is really a war vessel.
Now, admittedly, the Enterprise is one of the worst war vessels in the history of the universe because every time she gets into any kind of scrap, she's always disabled and spins off into space and Scotty screams and...
Spock raises an eyebrow and Kirk screams back and beds an alien wench or something.
But it is ostensibly a sort of state-funded, state-sponsored government type of vessel that is out there.
And what is it doing?
Well, it's basically the moon mission, right?
It's going to go and explore for no purpose, right?
It's not bringing back any kind of...
It's not bringing back any kind of new market materials.
It's not bringing back... Nobody ever lands on a planet and says, you know, this stuff could be used to make whatever.
This sort of rampaging alien bauxite could be used in some sort of fantastical manner to create great wealth or whatever, right?
And so this is an entirely...
Obviously sort of naval-based, but an entirely state-driven, state-ridden hierarchy.
And so fundamentally, the falsehood that is in Star Trek is that any of this technology can be developed in the absence of a free market, in the absence of any kind of market economy.
And so, you know, things like this facet and light, there's a warp drive, this facet and light travel.
I guess in the later shows, I mean, they have the teleporters, right?
And in the later shows, they have that thing that makes tea for the bald guy, Patrick Stewart.
And the transmogra, I can't remember what it's called.
But this stuff, I mean, the idea that there are government scientists out there creating all of this incredibly useful stuff is nonsense.
The only thing the government is good at making at is weapons, and it gets most of that technology from the private sector.
And so that idea that this economy, this vessel can be funded and have all this cool technology and yet make no mention of the free market whatsoever is really counter-believable, I guess you could say, and counter-productive.
And I find that to be just kind of silly.
The other thing is that these are military men, obviously, and what I find interesting about their depiction of military men is that they seem to be kind of friendly, like kind of, you know, they'll josh, they'll rib each other, and so on, and yeah, you know, I guess bones can get a little bit snarly from time to time.
I'm a doctor, not a chiropodist.
But they're not sociopaths, right?
I mean, that's one of the things that's also not particularly believable.
In my current position, I've had some exposure to some real military men, and they're not very mentally healthy.
They're really not. And they don't have strong bonds with people, and they don't have good ways of relating to people, and they tend to be very vain, and they tend to be very...
they hate any kind of subjugation.
And so they don't tend to be very customer-focused, and their lack of customer focus sort of infects the entire way that people view customers, at least within this organization.
And so that comfort level with authority that is always co-joined with a hatred of voluntary dependence, I mean, these things psychologically are sort of intertwined for reasons we could talk about another time, But they're not going to be chatty, friendly, happy, jokey people.
See, actors who are a bit more friendly and chatty and jokey, actors can play military men.
But if you actually had military men in that role, they'd be an entirely different kind of human being.
I mean, I don't know if you know this or not, but in the movie Full Metal Jacket, they have this terrifying portrayal of a marine instructor.
What is your major malfunction, son?
I mean, I'm going to rip off your head and piss down your neck.
I mean, this kind of guy, right?
And they actually had an actor who came in to play this role, and the guy who ended up playing the role in the movie was actually a consultant.
And the actor just couldn't get that level of violence, emotional, destructive violence.
And so they basically ended up putting the guy who was the consultant, who was the real Marine, I guess, boot camp instructor guy, Thank you.
He ended up playing this terrifying role of this complete sociopath who is pretty honest, who talks about a lot of the major assassins in U.S. history were military-trained men.
Lee Harvey Oswald was an expert marksman, and there were some other examples in the movie I can't remember.
But that's how military men are.
You can have actors play them, but actors are going to bring a depth of humanity to the military personality that the military personality just doesn't have.
Maybe at the beginning and so on.
But the people who get into the military and so on, I mean, they're...
Kind of sociopaths, right?
I mean, anybody who doesn't notice the fact that you're supposed to kill people and risk being killed for a relative pittance of money is not somebody who has a great deal of empathy either for themselves or for others.
And so the idea that in these movies or these situations like Star Trek, that you're going to have all of these sort of nice, jokey, joshy characters is complete nonsense.
I'm only going to spend some real time around military people to just see how completely nonsensical that idea is.
And that will help you understand just what a complete fantasy it is, right?
I mean, the real fantasy, the whole idea behind...
And behind Star Trek is the idea that thinking is more important than force, right?
And so they have to constantly get into these situations where they have to puzzle out and reason out what's going on.
And that is what generally happens, that they have to sort of figure something out rather than use force, because although they're a military vessel, they're pathetic at the military and everything.
Everything takes them over all the time.
So it's like a science lab writ large, right?
But with the additional drama of sort of flying around and space wenches and Romulans and photon torpedoes and things like that.
And so the idea that in situations you should reason things out rather than violence never works and so on, it's a pretty strange way of putting it.
I can understand the drama and the need to do it in that kind of dramatic way, but it is sort of like a science class writ large, you know?
And yet with the science guys being kind of cool, right?
Being kind of Hip and sexy and, you know, I guess, Jim Jim was that way when he was younger, before the toupee and the potbelly.
But the idea that this sort of hierarchical, fascistic, military-style organization can somehow be conjoined with no free market whatsoever.
I mean, you never see any kind of structure other than the state structure.
It's either the Federation structure, And diplomats are always kind of weaselly and so on.
It's a traditional military view of diplomats, that they're sort of cowards and this and that.
And so this idea that...
You can have these kinds of kindly, joshy personalities that are basically dedicated to murder, and that they're going to be real keen on exploring.
The military doesn't really explore.
Our five-year mission to discover new worlds, new civilizations, and so on.
Well, it's all nonsense. I mean, it's not what the military does.
Our five-year mission to fly to some resource-rich place, murder all the inhabitants, and steal all the resources would be a much more accurate example of a five-year mission.
Because it, you know, conceivably could be, I guess, you know, like the guys who went to the North Pole or the South Pole or whatever.
Those could be sort of funded by the government and so on.
But those aren't military guys, right?
These are military guys. And the military doesn't send people off into space to just kind of fly around and have cool adventures.
I mean, the military sends people off on wild adventures to kill people.
And specifically, this is an investment.
So the cost of the enterprise and the cost of all of it, this is all an investment.
And the only way you're going to pay that investment off is to use the military to stir up conflict, to rip off the taxpayers, or to steal resources from people that you're sort of slaughtering.
And the fact that this just seems to be like a fascinating scientific mission with interesting adventures that really involve violence, or if they do that, violence doesn't work.
Well, I mean, if this was the situation, I mean, if they sent this ship out and it kept getting beaten up and blown up and spun off in time and people kept getting killed, right?
Like as they point out in Galaxy Quest, I think it is.
It's like, I don't have a name.
I'm not going to live.
Yeah. The guys in red who are the security guards, right?
It's the worst job in the world. 12 minutes to live.
And, you know, the entire course is go down and get shot by a very fake-looking laser beam behind a boulder obviously made out of papier-mâché and fall over and say to people later on, yeah, I was on a Star Trek episode.
But, um... The idea that these guys could go sort of flow out, have cool adventures and so on, and not kill anyone and not make resources and so on, as soon as they went out and twice got beaten up, the military would just pull them back and send them against disarmed people.
I mean, that's what the military does, right?
They don't like fighting anyone who's got a chance.
They really just want to go up against disarmed people, and that's their modus operandi, right?
Fight the disarmed people, right?
They're comfortable. I guess Native Americans in the 16th and 17th centuries.
They're comfortable shooting the disarmed Iraqis, not so comfortable with really any other kind of particular one-on-one, at least the military with that kind of power, one-on-one sort of regular fighting kind of thing.
Unless they get to have a real fight and destroy the taxpayers and all that kind of stuff.
That's another possibility for them, but that to me is a complete fantasy that makes Fast and Light Travel and so on all seem kind of innocuous fantasy by comparison.
Now, another thing that's interesting is what sort of society is the Enterprise crew, this sort of Star Trek universe, what sort of society is this part of?
Well, this is either an empire at the height of its powers, or it's an empire that's sort of in the real crumbling phase of it.
And the reason that I say that...
If this is an empire that is at the beginning of its powers, then it's not going to have the kind of resources to throw around in frivolous five-year missions to go and explore and this and that and the other.
It's going to say, look, we've got serious competitors who've got to get some resources and so on.
So they're not going to be at the state where they're just sending out missions in order to pillage the taxpayers and so on.
What is going to be the case, I think, is that it's either an empire at the height of its power, so they say, yeah, we've got all these missions going on, and so we've got to tax you guys like crazy to pay for all these missions and all this.
It's hard to sort of say what the justification for those missions are.
Like, how would you sell, if you're a politician or whatever, how would you sell the voyages of the Star Trek Enterprise to the general taxpaying population that's actually footing the bill?
And... You would have a tough time sort of subsidizing that, right?
So you, who are working 9 to 5 in some, I don't know, spice mine of Kessel or something, I know that's a different universe, but hey, let's just say that this is all the geeky space stuff together.
You would have to say to that taxpayer who's working as a, I don't know, like a tax accountant for sort of 7 hours or 12 hours a day or whatever, you'd have to say, well, you don't so much get these alien wenches and troubles and space adventures, what you get is to pay for it all.
Well, if there's any kind of freedom, and of course there has to be freedom, if there's going to be any kind of wealth, excess wealth, which is going to fund all of this stuff, you have to have some sort of economic freedom in order to be able to fund this kind of stuff.
And so it's going to be kind of tough to say to that person who has some kind of freedom and some sort of influence on the political process, you don't get to have any space adventures, you get to be a taxpayer, and you've got to work your ass off to fund...
You know, Captain Kirk groping chicks with nine breasts or something.
And he's going to say, well, I don't know that that's a particularly good deal for me.
I see what's in it for Kirk and Spock and Bones and Scotty and all that, but I don't really see what's in it for me, so I don't really think we're going to do that.
What you have to do is, if you're in an early empire, you're just not going to have that option, because early empire is when there's a sort of free market.
And sort of America, like turn of the last century, right?
I mean, turn of the 1900s, you get the beginning of an empire, right?
First, they've got free market and political freedom, and then they use that excess wealth generated from the free market to start funding foreign adventurers, and that starts to destroy the free market over time, that kind of stuff, right?
So it's got to be really at the height of its empire.
In other words, there's so much money being generated that they can just go and do whatever the heck they want.
But even then, it's going to be tough to justify this kind of expenditure from a political perspective.
How are you going to convince taxpayers that they should fund these space adventures for everyone to go and have a great time, except for them, who have to actually have a real job rather than doing all this non-economically productive stuff like flying around the universe using up energy and resources and everything.
Not actually making any money.
There's no profit in the Star Trek Enterprise, right?
Or it's right at the end of the Empire.
But the problem with it being right at the end of the Empire is that if it is right at the end of the Empire, then they have so many problems that they're actually going to have to use a lot of their resources for quelling internal dissent.
And you don't see a whole lot of the Star Trek Enterprise going and nuking some planet because it's having trouble with the Federation, right?
The Federation is just some...
It's a wonderful UN-type happy-go-lucky organization that everyone seems to be happy to be a part of.
And of course, we never hear anything about taxpayers and merchants and so on, the people who actually fund this fantasy camp of space adventurers.
And I know that sounds a little bit quibbly, like why on earth would you have a stock market in Star Trek or anything like that?
But anything to me, and this is sort of the quibbles that I had with Beef of Vendetta, and I might do a couple of other movies and so on, but the basic issue that I have is anytime you portray something that is absolutely impossible, without any explanation, you really do harm to people's general sense of reality.
So, if you sort of have this Star Trek floating around and, you know, saving the humanity from this, that, or the other, which never happens, right?
I mean, the military guys don't float around the planet.
I mean, American troops don't float around the planet having adventures and saving America.
I mean, that's stuff for like 24, and it's all based on this kind of thing, like that the soldiers are out there.
We'll pay them. They'll do good things.
Don't worry about accountability.
Don't worry about profit.
Don't worry about anything like that.
And this is so completely not the case.
And of course, I mean, later on, you have the Ferengi, right?
Now, of course, this is exactly how the military people view the capitalists.
And sadly, as I'm sure everyone's aware, this is how a lot of cultures view Jews, right?
I mean, the sort of money-hungry and evil and conniving and liars, as opposed to the The clean, upright, stout-shouldered military men who are just out there doing good.
This is sort of the Firefly thing again.
You know, if you've seen that movie, I can't even remember what it was called.
It was fairly bad that you just have these military guys who just can do all these great things, fly around, do this, that, and the other, save the world.
I mean, this is just such a common cliché and so completely the opposite of anything that's true.
I mean, the idea that military guys go out there and save civilization...
By having no accountability and going rogue, I mean, it's just hilarious.
When military guys go rogue, you know, hundreds of thousands of people get killed, if not more.
And this is like the black ops that were going on in Vietnam and that are going on in countless countries around the world now.
They just put bounties on people.
They just go completely off book and they just go slaughterhouses of sociopaths, right?
These clubs of just psychotic killers.
I mean... They provoke danger for society.
They're not out there roaming around solving problems and preventing bad things from happening.
I just think that's such a falsehood that I just think that's kind of funny to even consider in any circumstance.
And Star Trek is probably one of the lesser offensive situations in this.
It's like the cop shows where the cops are just mindlessly dedicated to solving problems or like houseware.
These people are just mindlessly dedicated to solving problems despite any kind of economic reality.
I mean, these are just sort of fantasy camps, right?
This is the basis of socialism where people think you can get something for nothing, right?
I mean, this is all very destructive stuff in terms of having people really understand the reality of the world.
I mean, military people don't joke with each other.
I mean, their jokes, if they do, are really harsh jokes about raping prisoners.
I mean, there's not, I mean, trust me on this, there's not pretty people to be around.
And they're not out there having fun, free adventures and saving the world from humanity.
I mean, they're out there pillaging the taxpayers, murdering foreigners, stirring up resentment.
They are a black evil plague on the face of the world.
And the idea that they're out there doing some great things does come back to things like Star Trek and stuff like that, which portrays a happy-go-lucky and productive military that never seems to have any budget limitations and never seems to have any problem getting resources and never seems to face any political pressures or justifications for their missions or a need for profit or never end up which portrays a happy-go-lucky and productive military that never seems to have any and you never see the taxpayers that go to fund it and all that.
So it creates a really distorted view of the actual nature of society and I think that's sort of what I have a slight problem with with these kinds of things.
I know it sounds perhaps like I'm picking at nothing, but when we go and talk to people about no state, people really do think that without the military out there roaming around, we're going to get attacked by the Borog or Tribbles or whatever, and Those people have to be out there saving us all, and let's not question them.
They're dedicated. All this stuff comes from these military jock fantasies, and Star Trek is one of them, and there's a completely unbelievable portrayal of military people.
You can get Tom Hanks to play a military guy because Tom Hanks is an actor, not a military guy.
If Tom Hanks was the kind of guy who was going to be a military guy, he would not be portraying...
He would not be portrayable in the way that Tom Hanks portrays him.
Tom Hanks was drawn to innocuous, pleasant comedies at first.
And so he can bring adaptive humanity and compassion and kindness to a military guy.
And it's a little different in World War II because these guys were drafted.
But still, this stuff's all completely unbelievable.
This is not how war actually is.
And you want to read war people's memoirs.
You want to read Jarhead.
You want to read war people's memoirs of what war is.
And you want to read what military stuff occurs from the inside of the military.
You want to read Dallaire's Shake Hands with the Devil about his time in Rwanda.
That's the kind of stuff that you want to see.
You don't want to see Hollywood scriptwriters and producers and genial actors playing military guys.
You don't want to see a charismatic young William Shatner playing James T. Cook.
You want to really see what's going on with the actual people themselves.
And that's something that's quite different and is a bit more eye-opening than watching these sort of amiable fantasies about the role of the military and how great it is and this and that.
Yeah. I hope this is helpful for you.
I don't mean to sort of pick on Star Trek.
I'm sure it's enjoyable and I've enjoyed a couple of episodes myself.
But it's just always important to understand that this kind of nonsense is precisely the reason why when we go to people and say, you know, we really need to get rid of a state, that they recoil.
Because they just can't imagine that they've been lied to this consistently and this openly about everything.
And, of course, they have been.
So, I hope that this was enjoyable for you.
I will talk to you soon. All the best.
Oh, by the way, speaking of funding for paramilitary adventures, please drop by freedomainradio.com, click on donate, and I'm also accepting not just kidneys now, but also pints of blood O positive if possible.
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