 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Powell. And I'm Trevor Burrus. And joining us today is Tim Sandofer. He's a principal attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation and heads the Foundation's Economic Liberty Project which protects entrepreneurs against intrusive government regulation. He's also a Cato Institute ad junk scholar. Today though we're going to be talking about the politics of America's second best sci-fi media franchise namely Star Trek. In a recent article on this topic that you wrote in the Claremount Review of Books you make the provocative claim that, quote, the development of Star Trek's moral and political tone over 50 years traces the strange decline of American liberalism since the Kennedy era. So I guess let's begin at the beginning. The original Star Trek was a product of Cold War America. So did that or how did that influence its political outlook? Well, I think it wasn't just a product of Cold War America, it was also the product of World War II. World War II obviously was the worst catastrophe that the human race has ever experienced and it dramatically affected the way that people thought about politics and about justice. And that those thoughts I think are found throughout Star Trek the original series which of course began in 1966. The brainchild of a World War II veteran, Gene Roddenberry, and many of the stars themselves and the writers were veterans. Jimmy Duhan who played Scotty was himself a decorated war veteran. So what you see throughout the show are discussions of ideas about human liberty, about justice and freedom that are rooted in what I think the liberal west thought was the post-war consensus about justice, about human rights, about the role of the state, about technological progress and reason. And I think what you see during the three years of the show, the rise of the new left that rejected that consensus in large part and you can see that permeating some of the episodes. For example, I give in my article is in the episode The Way to Eden which is an episode in which the Starship Enterprise encounters a group of space-age hippies who are looking for some paradise planet of their own without any technology. And it's obviously a satire of the hippie phenomenon that was going on at the time the episode aired. And you can see the writers and the producers of the show who are from that World War II generation really struggling with how to deal with this new wave of thought that rejected the idea of technological progress, universal human rights of basic liberalism that the older generation thought was well founded at the end of World War II. I mean, here's the end of this war. They thought that the idea that all human beings have rights that no government may justly interfere with, the United Nations was going to lead to a worldwide liberalism rooted in technology and humanist values. And here comes this wave of opponents and they really didn't know how to deal with that I think. So is it accurate to say sort of to boil it down to say that absolutism was something that kind of animated earlier Star Trek that there were principles about freedom and rights that after confronting the Nazis who had been very bad that these were principles that were not relative and so they were fighting for something in a way that was somewhat influenced by World War II? Yes, that's right. I think a good example of that is one of the better episodes, The Conscience of the King, which is an episode that's sort of a play on Nazi hunting because throughout the 1960s you saw these prosecutions of former Nazi war criminals, most notably Adolf Eichmann but actually quite a few. Some of them were going on while this series was on the air and this is an episode in which Captain Kirk encounters a character who's basically like a Nazi war criminal and he's asked to track him down and punish him for his crimes. And the whole point of this episode is who are you to judge and which a character actually asks Captain Kirk, who are you to judge and Kirk responds, who do I have to be? And that's the theme of the episode is that everybody is subject to judgment, nobody can escape by saying, well it's just my culture, it's my society, it's a different time, it's a different place, you can't judge me. And I think the post-World War II generation that had seen the Nuremberg trials and so forth were very committed to the idea that all human beings have an alienable rights and that no power, including religion, has any legitimate basis for trampling those rights or ignoring them. That idea permeates the original Star Trek. Was that idea at the time unique to Star Trek and science fiction or was this something that was just generally going on in the genre? I think it was going on throughout television at the time. You see it in more sometimes cloying ways in some of the more tedious television shows of the time. Like Leave it to Beaver. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking, shows like Mayberry and so forth, they all had these very obvious morals, but the morals to them were things like everybody deserves a fair trial when they're accused of wrongdoing and that's sort of very ordinary by our standards principles, but nevertheless, they were very committed to them. Star Trek tried to take those principles and twist them a little bit and Gene Roddenberry actually consciously modeled Star Trek on Gulliver's Travels, which obviously was written as a way of talking about contemporary society and satirizing it or inditing it in different guises and Star Trek did the same thing. And the hopefulness too, that's another big element that Star Trek sort of, that permeates Star Trek I would say even currently that there's a lot of hope in the future and possibly in that post-war period, the hope as opposed to any sort of dystopian type of future, like the idea that a bunch of people working together can fight for what's right and win. That's right, it was very much an optimistic sort of welfare status, humanist, broadly speaking liberal perspective. My favorite Gene Roddenberry quote, I remember he said in an interview once, aliens in space didn't build the pyramids, human beings built the pyramids because they're smart and they work hard and that was his perspective. He thought human beings really could get past all the bad things in the world and could accomplish great things. Now sometimes I think that sabotaged some of the dramatic possibilities of Star Trek. The writers of the next generation often found themselves having a lot of difficulty coming up with good scripts because Roddenberry kept vetoing ideas saying no, no, human beings won't have conflicts among themselves in the future utopia and that made it very hard to come up with good stories for television. So Roddenberry at times went too far in his utopianism, but when it was sprinkled in there, it gave it a real positive cast that I think contemporary Star Trek and a lot of contemporary science fiction is lacking. Now there's an episode that you talk about in your essay called The Apple, which you think is the quintessential episode of the original Star Trek. Can you tell us about that episode and why it is quintessential? Yeah, so the episode concerns the Enterprise crew encounters a planet in which the people on this planet live in a sort of tropical paradise, but they're also deeply ignorant. They've never heard of farming, they don't know anything about technology, they don't even have sex because it turns out that the planet is ruled over by this god called Val, who controls everything that the people do through a sort of totalitarian mind control system. And he requires every day to be fed and the people of Val have to gather food and bring it to him. And he controls all of their thoughts and has reduced them to a complete lack of individual initiative. And the idea was, well, they don't have any kind of conflicts among themselves. Everybody gets along, everybody's placid and peaceful, so isn't this a good thing? And Captain Kirk says, no, this is a bad thing because it deprives the people of the capacity for thinking for themselves, living for their own ideals. And yeah, the idea of freedom leads to conflict. You aren't going to have that placid quality of peace as a result of freedom. You're going to have bustling conflict, disagreement, dynamism, creative destruction. That's going to be what freedom is like. But that is what every sentient being in the universe deserves, is the right to try their hands at freedom. And so he orders the Enterprise to destroy Val, which is in fact a sort of supercomputer that has been controlling all these people. And he leaves them to their freedom. Now, this episode seems to me the quintessential episode of Star Trek because the whole point of the series was about freedom and individualism and liberating ourselves from the dead traditions of the past. And recognizing that that means we will have, there's a downside to that. We will have conflict. We will have trouble and strife amongst us. But the rewards of that freedom are worth the struggle. And I think a lot of people criticize that episode because Kirk blatantly violates what the so-called prime directive, which is the rule that in Star Trek, the Enterprise crew is never supposed to interfere with the native culture. But in fact, the point of Star Trek is that the prime directive is wrong. And that a native culture that oppresses its own people has no rights to do so. And that that liberty takes precedence over these antique traditions. So does that set up then? If the prime directive is, call it the core values of Starfleet. The prime, we might actually call it the prime. Yes, and it's wrong. Does that make Starfleet the kind of organization that Star Trek the show is antagonistic towards? Well, no, I think what happened is if you watch the original series episodes in order, you see that the prime directive was kind of introduced subtly in a couple episodes and it was introduced as a foil. It's introduced for the dramatic purpose of breaking it in these original screenplays. The idea being that to sort of satirize or criticize the idea of cultural relativism or the hands-off who are we to judge kind of attitude. That is introduced purely for the purpose of criticizing it in the original Star Trek. Now, it grows in importance as the franchise continued its life in the 80s and the 90s. It grew in importance in the episodes until the point where in the next generation comes this mindless dogma where we're never supposed to interfere. In a section of my essay that was actually cut out before it was published, I criticize an episode of the next generation in which Captain Picard encounters a race of aliens who have been kept in a drug-induced stupor by another group of aliens. They've actually kept this one race addicted to a drug in order to keep them as servants, as slaves. When the doctor on the ship, Dr. Crusher, when she discovers this, she's horrified by it and says, well, surely you're going to do something to put a stop to it. In one of the low points of the entire show, Captain Picard refuses to do so. He says, no, who are we to judge? It's the prime directive. I have no right to interfere. He gives this ridiculous speech in which he says that in the past, any time that we've interfered with an alien culture, it's ended up badly for everybody. Well, that's completely false. In fact, it's contrary to the entire basis of the original series, which was rooted, again, in this United Nations effort to bring freedom and modernism and liberalism and technological advancement to the peoples of the world. And now here's Picard saying, no, no, if one man wishes to enslave another, no third man should object to, quote, Lincoln. That's Picard's attitude. Hands off. How does that play in? I'm curious in that the original Star Trek is exceedingly episodic. There's not a lot of these – so one of the things that tends to turn me off a bit about Star Trek in terms of the world-building aspect of it is that it doesn't feel to me like a universe that people live in and has a continuity. Instead, each episode is we're going to visit this thought experiment and then the next week we're going to go to another thought experiment. And so do we have evidence that the interventions that say Kirk did turned out well? Or does he intervene, smash the computer, and then we never go back to that planet again? Well, you're right. It's that way. And remember, Star Trek was the first science fiction series that was not an anthology. That's one of the reasons why it was such a world-changing thing when it comes to television drama. It was the first time that a science fiction show had ever been put on television that was not, and every episode is different. But it did still have, because it was the first one, it still had a lot of the qualities of the Twilight Zone or X-1 about it because that was what the writers were familiar with from their past. And so each episode does have this standalone quality. But again, I think that the show was consciously trying to be like Gulliver's Travels or something where every episode was making a statement more than trying to create an alternative world. And so they weren't really particularly concerned with that. Now, as the show went on, of course it developed certain backstory and certain story arcs. But that's true even of a show like I Love Lucy has story arcs to it. We don't remember that now, but it does. And so they introduce Spock's father and we get this idea that he's half-human, half-vulcan. And yeah, that stuff is there. But really, the writers were more interested in every episode standing on its own. It's Next Generation and that series and the shows that followed it that try to get into universe building. I would actually argue that that was one of the things that ruined Star Trek was that it lost that surrealist quality that was key to the original show's longevity. The reason that people still watch and enjoy the original series and don't so much see the Next Generation as iconic in the same way that it's familiar to them because they grew up with it. But it doesn't stand out 50 years from now the way the original Star Trek does. The reason why is because Next Generation was more interested in its own authenticity whereas the original series was more interested in discussing important timeless questions of philosophy. I'm not sure I'll grant you your premise that as I mentioned before, we started recording that your preference for the old Star Trek is merely a product of when you grew up with that and I grew up more with Next Generation and I think that that's pretty timeless too. But I want to get back to you as opposed to the world building aspects and that kind of thing that the problem with Next Generation is the relativism of the prime directive, the kind of relativism that that engenders. Is that basically what the prime directive is? It's a sort of a statement of relativism? Definitely. I think what happened was by the time the 80s and 90s came along, we had gone through the Vietnam experience and Vietnam in many ways was the direct opposite of World War II. In World War II, we went out and literally saved the world. And in Vietnam, there was a lot more self-criticism going along and it ended up with ignominy instead of America setting the terms for a new wave of worldwide liberal freedom and human rights, the way that World War II had. And so even though Next Generation was still overseen by Gene Roddenberry in its initial stages, it was a lot more of the relativist style of liberalism, particularly post-1968 liberalism. To me, this all symbolizes very well by the 1968 Democratic Convention. You had Lyndon Johnson, Generation of Democrats, who were this Gene Roddenberry post-World War II anti-totalitarian liberalism. And on the other hand, you had this rising generation, the New Left, that was fundamentally anti-technology, fundamentally anti-capitalist, deeply relativist. Tune in, tune out, turn on tune out liberalism. And the clash between those two occurred during the hiatus after the original show and before the Next Generation came on. And so then when by the time Next Generation comes up, you have this more relativist version of liberalism. But does this start showing up in the Star Trek movies before Next Generation comes on the air, right? Yeah, I guess a little bit. The Star Trek movies are very... In one way, they're fundamentally different from the original series in that the original series was always about going out there and discovering. And the movies are much less about that, especially the trilogy two, three, and four, are really centered about these main characters. It still has the same spirit of the original Star Trek, I think, but there's a lot less of the inquiry into universal morality than you see in the original series. But there is a... On that point, I will say another deeply important point of Star Trek. One of the crucially important points of Star Trek that everybody seems to miss is that the point of Star Trek is that Spock is wrong. Spock is wrong. He's always wrong. And the reason is because Roddenberry introduced Spock as sort of a foil to humans. He was supposed to be standing outside of humanity, sort of criticizing humanity, trying to understand humanity. He was this other character who was pointing fingers at humanity and commenting on humanity. And Roddenberry loved humanity. He didn't love the Vulcans. He was interested in talking about why human beings are special. So throughout the original series, the Vulcans are very admirable for all sorts of reasons, but basically the humans are the good guys. And the reason why is because they have this special quality of curiosity and innovation and commitment that Vulcans don't really have. Spock shows up in the episode of the Apple when Spock is perfectly willing to let the people of all remain enslaved on the planet. Whereas Kirk says, no, these human values are universal of the ability to think for yourself and so forth. And when you get to Star Trek II, Spock's sacrificing his life for the ship because the needs of the many outweigh the good of the few. Everybody thinks that line is so noble and great, but the point of that line is that Spock is wrong. That's why in Star Trek III he gets corrected. And when he asks at the end, why did you give up everything to come rescue me? Kirk answers because the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many. And the climax, I think, of all of Star Trek is actually in Star Trek IV. The one with the whales. When Spock says they have to go rescue Chekhov, Chekhov has been injured in his effort to restore the power to the spaceship so that they can escape Earth. He's now in a hospital in San Francisco and they have to go liberate him and Kirk turns to him and says, is that the logical thing to do? And Spock says, no, but it is the human thing to do. At that moment, Spock becomes human. And really the curtain on Star Trek, I think the original vision of Star Trek, the curtain falls there because that is when we see the culmination of everything Spock has learned up to this point. He's died and been reborn and discovers human values are his values. Now, I would say that a lot of people would think that you mentioned something about the morality of the next generation, but it strikes us as a deeply moral show for most people. It's almost proselytizing to the point of Picard's nobility and you do have things like there's an episode in the next generation whose name escapes me, something about drum. It's about criminal procedure, basically. They accuse this guy of a crime of being a terrorist and we're going to get a bunch of tweets telling me what the name of it is, I'm sure, but they accuse him of being a terrorist and they want to torture him and give him guilt by association and Picard gives a speech about how this is not what we do or better than this. I mean, that's pretty common. It's definitely not an amoral show. That's right. And the evolution of Star Trek is very gradual. The first seasons of the next generation, many of the episodes actually were written for the original Star Trek crew and were kept on hand for many years and then recycled into next generation episodes. So the evolution of the show is very gradual. Roddenberry, you know, oversaw it and he got older and he died while the show was on the air and his successors very gradually, I think, moved away from what he was trying to do until you have shows like Deep Space Nine that are really not the original Star Trek. Now, some of them are great. I think Deep Space Nine has some of the best episodes in the history of Star Trek and next generation has some great episodes. I mean, oh gosh, the episode, the nth degree, for instance, is one of my favorites or what's the episode where Worf kills Duras, an excellent episode directed by Jonathan Frank. So there's some really good shows there but I think what you see is next generation actually turns away from commentary on universal themes and becomes much more distinctly political. A lot of the episodes are centered on specific issues, specific political issues of the day and, you know, they have to send a message about environmentalism or send a message about some other current controversy and gets a lot less literary and a lot more propagandistic and I think that the growth of relativism is gradual also until the show really ends on relativistic notes where it did not start out that way. Remember, one of the first episodes is one where they have to prove that data is human? I mean, that's a classic episode. That could have been an original series episode. So I don't mean that there's a point where you can just draw a line and say, after this, everything is bad but I do think that you saw that distinct change during next generation so that by the time that show went off the air, Star Trek had become something that it was very much not at the outset. I just looked up, the name of that episode is The Drumhead. That same episode. Does that trend of relativism continue into the post-next generation series? I mean, I haven't watched Deep Space Nine since it was on the air but my recollection of it was not that it was relativistic but that it was more morally murky. Yeah, that's true. I think it gets a lot more into the gray areas and I think some of it is really good drama, very tightly written but it's a different universe, really. I think it's not the mission of the original show and honestly, I liked Deep Space Nine better when it was called Battle on Five but that show and some of the other shows I think they just had drifted so much which is fine, that's what happens over time. It's just, I think it's a different show. There's an episode, here I don't remember the title of the episode but there's an episode where Cisco explains to the camera how it was that he got the Romulans to enter the war that's going on. I mean, that's a Crackerjack episode but it's not Star Trek. So how would you describe, we've kind of touched on it a little bit but if you were to sort of overview the morality, the liberal morality and I'm not sure if you're using that entirely for the left or just general bigger liberalism but from the post-war period to now and how that morality has changed. I am using that word in the broadest sense. I mean liberal in the sense of broad liberal values because obviously Roddenberry himself was some variety of socialist and the show at many times strikes certain socialist notes which I find amusing. They were unable to sustain the idea that a world where there was no really capitalist exchange going on. By the time the Deep Space Nine comes along the writers have given up on even trying to write drama in that world because it's so absurd and they end up with an ordinary trading post started a society. But anyway, I think what you see is the show, Star Trek begins with a commitment to universal liberal values. All human beings have certain rights. All human beings should use their reason, should not be devoted to blind faith, should not be devoted to mindless tradition and the answers are out there but they will raise more questions and that's a good thing. That sort of commitment to what Virginia Postural has called dynamism over stasis, that's the core of the original show. Now the time you get to the, well the end of the first line by which I mean the next generation feature films. By the end of that what you have is a complete reversal, gradual but complete reversal of those priorities so that by the end of the next generation films Picard is content to no longer be exploring and seeks instead, he's satisfied with the idea of a rural village that lacks technology. What I mean by that is the Baku people in the Star Trek next generation film Insurrection who are presented to the audience as being this idyllic people who know about technology but have consciously rejected technology because they say technology takes something important away from them and that it's better to garden by hand and be satisfied with looking down at the dirt instead of up at the stars. Well I think Roddenberry would have been horrified by this notion but that's the Star Trek that we're left with at the end and it's really it's going gently into that good night is what that is. I was curious about that criticism because you, it's pretty clear that at least I think that you think that Star Trek Insurrection is the low point that your heaviest criticism comes for when you're discussing that movie and so tell me if I'm getting the plot points wrong but my sense from your description of it was yes these people want to farm and want to live this simple agrarian life but it's not that they lack technology entirely it's like a background thing that they have access to so they're not, it's not like they're living in poverty as we would think about it. They're not sick, they're not really wanting or destitute they're more just living say the ideal life of a Williamsburg Brooklyn resident. Yeah, well that's a good way of putting it because the film never bothers to explain to us how it is that they don't have sickness because according to the film this race of aliens knows about things like warp technology and so forth but have chosen not to take advantage of it because they prefer to live like the Amish and this is presented to us as a good thing. Now the morality, the moral liberal universal perspective of the original Star Trek was exactly the reverse of that. It was the idea that for all of its frailties and all of its sins humanity will triumph in the end by the application of reason and by discovery and by science and progress and this is a fundamentally anti-progress movie. Now it is, I do think it's the low point of Star Trek before the JJ Abrams films which are an awfulness all of their own but it's the low point in the sense that not in the sense of badly written or anything I mean there are some really lousy just in terms of production moments in Star Trek I mean Spock's brain of the original series is typically pointed to as one of the worst episodes of all time and I don't disagree with that. What's the green guy that Kirk fights in the very famous The Gorn? Yeah in the episode Arena and see the episode Arena is a good example of sort of the pattern of Star Trek it's not a particularly good episode but it's a good illustration of what Star Trek does a lot of the time. Kirk is kidnapped and put on this planet with this hostile alien creature and is forced to fight against him against his will by some alien beings and Kirk using his reason puts together a canon he finds Sulfur and Saltpeter and he makes gunpowder and builds a canon with which he defeats The Gorn but he chooses not to kill The Gorn he refuses to kill The Gorn when he can and the reason is because that's not what humanity stands for and when he makes that choice the alien beings reveal themselves and say surprise it was all just a test we were just doing all this to determine whether you people are worthy of surviving and prevailing in the universe of these commitments to these liberal values you are worthy of surviving now it's a silly episode but the moral themes are quintessentially the original series Star Trek now an interesting contrast to that is the second generation version of Battlestar Galactica the revived Battlestar Galactica was put together by a former Star Trek writer who consciously sought a way of creating an anti-Star Trek the original the next second version of Battlestar Galactica was created purposely as an anti-Star Trek and the first episode of it Adama is confronted with this question he says at the memorial service he says are human beings worthy of surviving against the Cylon onslaught and that's the theme of the series the theme of the second generation Battlestar Galactica is humanity worthy of survival to which this series answers a resounding no humanity is so awful for so many reasons that the Cylons are actually the good guys and humanity deserves to suffer and die and the series is extremely dark for that reason it gets most of the questions wrong that it presents to the audience and it's relentlessly naturalistic so it's sort of a complete opposite of the original Star Trek series now I derailed you for a second because you're talking about insurrection as being the low point I thought we talked about the Gorn and this idea of these people these you said naturalistic on that point I mean you mentioned the Amish do you think that we should be really critical of the Amish as being anti-progress and they shouldn't be living the lives the way they should and we should violate our version of a prime directive and go into Amish villages and teach them the ways of liberal values and rights and rationality and Snapchat and Instagram yeah to some degree my answer is yes as a libertarian of course I believe they have the right to make whatever conscious decision they choose about how they live their lives and if they do choose to live a primitive existence then that's their choice and they have that right but I think it's immoral and wrong and I think incidentally that Americans have this sense of the Amish as being a quaint harmless little people who are cute and wonderful tourist attractions when in fact they are a radical cult that is devoted to the opposite of technological progress and devoted to conscious ignorance and there's no surprise that if you scan the newspapers you find lots of incidents of horrific exploitation sexual exploitation and so forth that goes on in the Amish community but a lot of people don't pay much attention to because they think of the Amish as being cute when in fact as I said they're a radical religious cult but we have on some level we have a prime directive in this I mean there are some sort of non-interference that we practice that's right but that non-interference that non-interference is still cabined by universal liberal values so that if an Amish person is discovered sexually exploiting a child for example that they are brought up on charges in an ordinary civil criminal court and tried for violations of laws that are rooted in every human being's right to be free from those kinds of violations and that's rightly so so I think a captain Kirk in today's society would say yes the Amish of course they have the right to live their lives as they please within the limits of the rights that universal liberalism recognizes on behalf of every other individual. I'm curious about where we draw lines specifically in your criticism of Star Trek insurrection it seemed that so let's accept that like they didn't have sickness however they managed to not have sickness and they weren't they didn't appear to be exploiting the rights of their fellow members this was simply a choice that they made to not embrace certain levels of technology to not you know fly off to the stars or have computers or whatever else and it seemed it wasn't you know they were capable of thinking about the alternative they rejected it for their way of life and you were extremely critical of that on principle you call that that lifestyle immoral and I'm wondering how we decide where that line is so you know we talk about we kind of make fun of wealthy people today who are wealthy enough to live like they're poor you know so they you know it takes a lot of money in order to be able to just grow your own food and super reduce your carbon footprint and all of that sort of stuff but there doesn't seem to be anything if I mean if wealth and technology is there to ultimately enable us to live the kinds of lives that we want to then what's wrong with living the kind of life that we want to I mean is it bad to go camping oh yeah of course not and and of course Kirk would not have had any objection to that sort of thing but see here we to answer that question I think you have to he goes camping doesn't yeah that's right he does in Star Trek 5 I think you have to take a step back though and think in meta terms about how the show was was written to answer that question that is in the original series if wherever whenever you encounter an alien race that's anything like the Baku people in the original series there's always something wrong beneath the surface so a good episode a good illustration that is the episode Plato's stepchildren the crew encounters this race of godlike beings who live in a very sort of Greco-Roman society and they all have these super telekinetic powers and everything and it and they are all happy of course they don't suffer any illness or anything right except it turns out that they abuse and mistreat the one of the characters who's a dwarf and they and in order to demonstrate their strength they late they come to later abuse and mistreat the enterprise crew in fact the episode is most famous for having television's first interracial kiss between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Hurrah so that is a good example of how in the original series whenever you encounter an alien race that lived in what appeared to be a technology free ideal ideal in a sort of quaint village setting there's always something bad beneath the scenes behind the scenes in the next generation though the next generation writers are content to present us with this cartoonish utopia that doesn't answer questions like do these people avoid getting sick and so forth I mean that would have been the first question Captain Kirk would have asked if he had been into a planet populated by the Baku people he'd have been like how is it that you people manage to feed each other if you don't use modern feed agricultural technologies for instance and the next generation authors were content to present us with this kind of silly cartoonish situation that would not have withstood any kind of probing or anything and the reason why is because the next generation writers were themselves wedded to this notion of ideal technology free somehow or another organic tale is going to make us all healthy stuff and I mean that's the attitude behind the writing of the show so I don't think that the show can withstand the kind of question you asked precisely because it's written in a way that represents a silly commitment to an idea that you can have a society without technology and still feed everybody and still not get sick and so forth and so I think the original series was fundamentally anti-utopian and by the end of next generation it's fundamentally utopian. That's a fascinating thing because it may encounter utopias that have some sort of fatal flaw behind them in the original series but the people themselves on the enterprise are living in a pretty good utopia without capitalism and all these kind of things that Roddenberry is from a socialist sort of leanings that they themselves are living in a utopia that itself is socialist in its own way. That's a good point and I think it's a solid criticism of Star Trek that almost all of the conflict takes place outside of the bounds of the Starship Enterprise and that as I said before the next generation writers often found themselves handicapped by the fact that Roddenberry would not let them have conflict between the characters who are members of the crew of the enterprise. Roddenberry always wanted the crew of the enterprise to get along and not have conflict amongst themselves and it made it difficult to write good drama. Now for the original series I think it kind of works because if what you're trying to do is comment on issues or broad themes it's helpful for the drama that the crew all get along and that's what you mentioned now and then. I mean McCoy and Spock have this sort of funny relationship where they tease each other a lot but sometimes it's not funny sometimes McCoy really appears not to like Spock and Spock appears really not to like McCoy. Are you out of your Vulcan mind? Yeah exactly. So the prime directive though it's interesting I'm still not sure I'm totally on with your thesis to some extent but I also think that some of that relativism what we're kind of calling relativism that the next generation kind of exhibits some of it would be a backlash to I think let's say 19th century anthropology kind of thing of the sort of well we met some savage races out there and the boondocks and so very very paternalistic without any sort of understanding of different ways people can do things that are still acceptable under certain circumstances but also the prime directive seems pretty useful for non-interference as a principle is something I might prefer because I don't know if I can endorse that as a principle of power because there might be people who want to interfere with me or with my people who think we're not doing things correctly so I'm thinking of for example international human rights lawyers who would love to violate the prime directive to put labor laws who think that it's a right to a vacation a right to healthcare a right to all these things that are the things that they would like to use force to put on to us so maybe the best sort of compromise is something where say I'm not going to get involved in your affairs and not going to force things on you if you don't force things on me and that creates a more livable situation maybe and I think these some of this is stuff that's too complicated to have presented in a television drama of one hour a week in the 60's so at some point the show is too broad to get into some of that depth but I would say the point that the original series is making and criticizing the prime directive is precisely the fact that there are certain universal human truths and that the idea that culture or hands-off practicalities should trump those truths is expressly rejected in the original series so that in today's parlance you often people often bring up the example of female genital circumcision as being a cultural practice and should the West just look the other way about genital circumcision of little girls in the third world and I think the original Star Trek writers would emphatically say no we should not look the other way that all human beings have certain rights and no society can legitimately violate those rights and that we are in the right to go into another country and say no you may not mistreat people in this way I think that is what the original series is saying personally I'm on board with that but the you are right to say that one of the reasons why next generation pushes that away is because of sort of the anti-colonialism movement that was just getting underway while the original series was on the air so you don't see a lot of it in the original series just because it really wasn't a cultural as big a cultural phenomenon as it became in the years after the show went off the air but the sort of anti-colonialism notion that a society has a right to govern itself without interference from outside gradually takes root and is a real infection in the side of the next generation it makes it very hard for the next generation to stay true to those principles of universal human rights while simultaneously believing that a society has the right to govern itself however it wants to govern itself and if that includes violating individual freedom then that's okay and that's why you have such awful episodes as when Picard says yes if these people are being kept in a drug induced slavery then that's okay with me But would you rather live in a world where interference was generally okay or people who believe themselves because that was my quite like sort of the thing about the religious wars of the 15th and you know the 16th and 17th century where everyone sort of thought they had a right to interfere in people's lives and that created a really bad 30 years war that they kind of decided with the West Failing and Compromise that we're just going to let, we're not going to interfere because a bunch of people thinking that they have principles that are universal who think they have the right to interfere in people's lives is actually fundamentally dangerous Well this actually I mean if I can quickly interject that as we're discussing this and as we're discussing the notion of you know war notion of liberalism plus moral absolutism and a strong sense of who the good guys and bad guys are and then that we should intervene to stop people who are doing things that run counter to this that you end up seeing a possible like mirror image of the original series of Star Trek and say the day the earth stood still which is the enlightened aliens coming in and saying like this America of the post-war moral consensus of absolutism is actually going to destroy the whatever I don't know the world, yeah this is really bad and unless you knock it off and get past this kind of moral belief we're going to destroy you Yeah, no that's a good point and I think that the question about well you know the earlier question about would you rather live in a world where the difference between the religious wars of the 15th century and what we're talking about here is that religion is nonsense I mean that's the fundamental difference between the two and something very important to Roddenberry who was deeply anti-religion and who and the show repeatedly in the episode The Apple and in many other episodes on the one episode in particular in which they the god Apollo appears to the Enterprise and in this case it actually is the god Apollo it's not some fake and the Enterprise makes it impossible he ends up you know basically destroying his power source and Kirk gives a speech saying we have outgrown the need for gods so the show is fundamentally humanist in that sense but the difference between the liberalism I'm talking about and the religious wars of the 15th century is that the principles of universal human rights are true and the proposition that three gods and one god are the same thing is simply arbitrary and nonsense and that's the most important point and if one disagrees with that that's fine but that's not what the original Star Trek was committed to the original Star Trek was committed to this idea of universal human rights being true and the reason why this sort of rings all our libertarian bells is because the original because libertarianism is a species of liberalism that's why and because the universal human rights that we're talking about are basically a right to be let alone it's basically a right to be free from interference from others now in today's political culture you very often hear people say who are we to impose democracy on other countries to which the right answer is democracy is not imposed tyranny is imposed democracy or universal human freedom is the natural state of man because mankind is born free it's tyranny that's imposed so if one person comes and tries to enslave another person and I pull out a gun and I stop them from doing that I'm not interfering with his rights a slave owner can't complain when I liberate his slave because he had no right to enslave the man to begin with that's the perspective of the original series Star Trek and it's a perspective within libertarianism now within libertarianism you also have this hands off non-interference notion and a lot of libertarians or themselves believe that non-interference trumps the principles of human rights because the principles of human rights are just our own cultural myth and that's interchangeable with the cultural myths of other societies and therefore the clash between libertarian freedom and authoritarianism is no more universally valid than the religious wars of the 15th and 16th centuries because we're all just basically making it up and that's a proposition that I and the original series emphatically reject. The other alternative I mean aside from practicality concerns is the fear that if you do preach intervention if I were to live in a world and I could get them to believe in the prime directive and follow it religiously which of course half of Star Trek is about them breaking it constantly I probably would prefer that overall as a way of maintaining freedom because I think that generally the violations of the prime directive are going to be done by people who do not agree with universal values that are true throughout because the violation of the prime directive is going to be based off of those who have power sort of like I say that I don't want to do a lot of international interference in human rights stuff because a lot of times I will agree with it for egregious circumstances but a lot of times it's going to be taken over by international law professors who want to intervene for decidedly non-liberal reasons such as to make better labor laws or have universal health care or a right to abortion or things like this so there's a practicality of this and that doesn't concern you at all I agree with those what's interesting here is there's an episode of the original series Star Trek that kind of touches on these themes and it doesn't go too deeply into it but you can see them there and that is the episode Space Seed where we first are introduced to Khan who later comes back in Star Trek 2 and then later in one of the J.J. Abrams films and what makes Khan particularly interesting is that he actually is a superior being and in a lot of Star Trek that's right in a lot of Star Trek the crew encounters allegedly superior beings and it turns out that they're not actually superior that they have some sort of trick up their sleeve but here you have a guy who actually is superior and all the crew acknowledges it so this is a real challenge to the principle of fundamental equality that is the basis of all human rights theories I mean the Declaration of Independence starts with equality not with liberty and that's realistic because it is because we are all equal that we are all free it is because you have no right to it is because you are the same essentially as I am that means you have no inherent right to control my life and therefore you have to ask permission from me if you propose to control my life and that's what we call the social compact right we have government by consent but here you have Khan who actually is a superior being he stands in a position relative to the crew of the Enterprise in the same way that I stand to my pet dog I don't have to ask my dog's consent when I tell him to get off the couch he is an inferior being and I tell him to get off the couch and it's as simple as that so what does the crew do when they encounter Khan? Khan tries to take over the Enterprise and kill the crew in order to take in order to become the ruler of the Starship Enterprise the crew defeats his plans but they don't kill him they put him on trial but they don't convict him what Captain Kirk does is he says look you have all this strength you really are a powerful unique creature with special gifts so what we're going to do is we're going to put you on an unpopulated planet and give you the chance to create a society and make you a pioneer to put your great energies to work in a constructive way that's a good thing now of course 20 years later it turns out that that experiment failed and that's why we have Star Trek 2 but at the time the episode was filmed nobody knew that that was coming so you have to take it on its own terms here you have libertarianism in the broad sense I think libertarianism's answer to that question which is within the boundaries of respecting individual rights yes you can do what you like hands off we are non-negotiable on the principle that every being has the right to live their lives on their own terms but within those boundaries yeah you can have all sorts of cultural variation and different practices and so forth but we're not going to erase those boundaries once you do once you get into a completely relativistic sense where every society has the right to govern itself regardless or even to depict the idea of human rights in a different way which means overriding it and saying well in our society like in in Borat when he says you know she has no name because she is girl you know if we're not going to go that far we're not going to take our relativism to that extent so speaking of Khan I want to turn to the the new movies which I mean you are on record as being let's say not a fan of JJ Abrams work on Star Trek and I'm not terribly either but it largely has to do with a concern about why anyone would ever let Damon Lindelof write a script but you know those wait a minute there were scripts to those movies questionably but so what's outside of problems with characterization or problems with enormous plot holes and nonsensical decision making from the political standpoint what's wrong with the new Star Trek movies Oh I don't think we have enough time for all of it so the problem begins basically with JJ Abrams acknowledging that he's neither a fan of Star Trek nor has he actually watched Star Trek he acknowledged in an interview that he found Star Trek boring and really wasn't a fan of it but if you don't like your material you have no business making the movie contrast that for example with the director of the recent film of Le Miserable that won so many Oscars and deservedly so it's an amazing master piece of film and in he in an interview about the same time said that he basically ate, breathed and slept Victor Hugo for years before making that film so you have a if you don't like your material you shouldn't be making the movie that's the basic problem what Abrams films come out doing is being basically just sort of a pastiche and a really bad pastiche of the original Star Trek where Kirk is all about having sex with the girls and he's all about emotional impulses and so forth and he's no reasoning now the original Captain Kirk is a very intelligent guy he's a competent scientist for one thing he's modeled on Captain James Cook the great 18th century explorer who was a who rose to become you know and he was not a nobleman he was an average commoner and he rose to become a fellow of the Royal Society and the greatest explorer in the history of the earth so he's modeled on that and he's a very intelligent thoughtful leader he's a ladies man but he respects women in a way that the new Kirk does not and what you end up with when you have a drama that's centered around these emotional impulses is they have no real reason for respecting Captain Kirk why should Kirk be Captain of the Enterprise instead of say Spock and the answer we're given in a weird sort of Deus Ex Machina way when Leonard Nimoy appears as Spock from another dimension to tell them that Captain Kirk should be Captain of the Enterprise just because and that's it he just says that's the one rule you must not break why? I don't know because even though in one of the Abrams movies Captain Kirk has this monologue where he explains that he has no idea what he's doing he doesn't know why he's Captain of the Enterprise and he shouldn't be running things I mean it's truly a chaos that does not withstand any kind of intellectual scrutiny it's presented as this and the problem with that is if that is correct if Kirk should be the ruler just because well then why shouldn't Khan be the ruler if Khan is a superior being genetically engineered Superman as we're told then why shouldn't he be the Captain of the Enterprise and we're never given an answer to that the only time that they have an approach giving an answer to that in Star Trek Into Darkness is in the very last moment when Captain Kirk gives this speech at Starfleet Academy and he says you know there's these bad guys out there but we're not like them because that's not who we are that's it the phrase that's not who we are is invoked as a cover an explanation for the entire movie and we're never told why that's not who we are or why it shouldn't be I mean it just it makes no sense and in order to cover up the fact that it makes no sense JJ Abrams films long for a strong man to come and impose his will because he's stronger which again is the opposite of what the original Star Trek stood for So now Tim the most important final question from someone who's qualified to talk about Star Trek as you is what is the correct solution to the Kobayashi Maru test? So the Kobayashi Maru test is an unwinnable test in which it's to evaluate Starfleet candidates for command and test their command abilities before they go out into space and actually run a starship and it's unwinnable so the idea behind it is just to see what you would do if you were in a situation where there is no escape and it's revealed in Star Trek 2 that Kirk took the test three times and failed and finally just figured out a way to reprogram the computer so that the test could be won and he got a commendation for original thinking and doing so and that's the right answer is to reprogram the simulation and that I think is what Roddenberry would say Roddenberry would say life is a no-win scenario everybody's going to die and if you're looking for some utopian fairy tale solution to that conundrum you're not going to find one so the solution is to reprogram the scenario the solution is to think about what it is that you want from life you're here on Earth and you have all these great potentials because you're a human being so find a way to do some good with it find a way to pursue happiness to make some great scientific discovery to become the best writer or thinker that you can be or to be the best marathon runner to be the best parent you can be or some way to use the special fire that you have as a human being to light up the world because otherwise the world is just darkness there's a line in Edmond Roestan's play Chanticleer which is about a rooster who is persuaded that his crowing causes the sun to rise and all the other animals make fun of him for it until one moment when he says the reason I knew the reason I wanted the sun to rise is that the darkness celebrated my silence that's what the universe is going to do if we don't devote ourselves to the principles of civilization and progress that the original Star Trek stood for so I think that's the solution to the Kobayashi Maru scenario is to reject the premise that life is a no win scenario that's why Captain Kirk is a hero because he does that and he's right Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel To learn more about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org