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izacus a day ago

Works of fiction are critical to understanding the society in which they're made and interpreted.

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WalterBright a day ago | parent | next [-]

The Hero's Journey suggests otherwise.

https://www.jcf.org/learn/joseph-campbell-heros-journey

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kilpikaarna a day ago | parent | next [-]

Big fan of Jungian thought and those he influenced suvh as Campbell, and Hero With A Thousand Faces was like a bolt of lightning when I first read it. But it’s just one of many maps, not the territory.

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izacus a day ago | parent | prev [-]

It suggests nothing of sort.

	▲	WalterBright a day ago \| parent [-]
		The Hero's Journey shows major commonalities across time and cultures.

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a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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mike_hearn a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Sometimes, but not this one. The Federation is an impossible society, and it can teach us nothing about the real world.

It wasn't intended to either. The writers realized early on that Roddenberry's ideas were deluded and so they carefully avoided any plot that might get too close to exploring Federation society. There are a few quotes where they discuss their frustrations with Roddenberry's ideas. ST:TNG spends much more time on alien non-Federation races than the Federation itself.

Eventually the writers and especially DS9 manages to smoothly steer Roddenberry's universe back to something approximating human reality and exploring Federation life becomes possible. But the early years of TNG are largely a writeoff from a social commentary perspective.

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izacus a day ago | parent | next [-]

I believe you somehow managed to miss the basic idea and storytelling approach of Science Fiction as a genre.

	▲	mike_hearn 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The fictional part of sci-fi is the science, it's in the name. Stories that involve beings presented as humans but who don't behave like humans don't have a name, because they aren't something most people want to hear. The social side of Star Trek was always its weakest parts by far.

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hollerith a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree. Roddenberry was a genius at inspiring enthusiasm for a vision of the future that is delusional in the Maoist way and in other fundamental ways.

Our critics (e.g. thoughtful sci-fi authors like David Brin) should have criticized Roddenberry much more strenuously than they actually did.

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mike_hearn 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah. Luckily the parts of Star Trek that inspired people were the gadgets. It's common to hear Valley startup founders talk about seeing something in Star Trek and then thirty years later it's their product launch. The social side was much less impactful, you never hear people talk about how to create the Federation, probably because the writers never explored it (as they couldn't).

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hollerith 3 hours ago | parent [-]

>The social side was much less impactful

I'm not so sure.

I was once in a long conversation in which my interlocutor was trying to get me to support socialism during which my interlocutor asked me to envision a future society "like Star Trek" then looked at me expectantly as if he had some hope that that would bring me around or at least soften my stance.

Beyond inspiring enthusiasm for socialism, it seemed to have inspired an unquestioning support for technological development:

Consider for example this comment by someone (rayiner) who is certainly capable of subtle thought, but who believed it would be a good reply to worries about the effect of the current crop of AI assistants on the psychology of children to write, "it's literally like the computer in Star Trek": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49326105

Or this comment by the same author in which he asserts that "we need to increase energy output by an order of magnitude in order to upgrade civilization to the next level. . . . Nuclear, moreover, keeps us on the tech tree for space exploration. I don’t think solar is going to lead us to fusion or antimatter powered spaceships" (which most of us would judge to be at least a little reckless with the environment). An then in a follow-up comment writes, "getting us to a Star Trek future shouldn’t be a politically polarized issue". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49820988

If Roddenberry's Star Trek (i.e., The Original Series and the first 4 seasons of The Next Generation) were merely more delusional than most works of sci-fi, we probably wouldn't be discussing it now. You and I consider it worth talking about because Roddenberry's Star Trek has had been extremely influential. I would maintain that that influence has been very negative: it is has made people more zealous and ideological -- and not just about socialism.

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mike_hearn 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Hmm. Interesting perspective. I must admit I've never had someone try to convince me of the merits of socialism using any kind of argument, let alone by way of comparison to Star Trek.

But I'm not sure that enthusiasm for technological progress can be truly said to be an ideology? I know it would have seemed that way to any pre-Christian era man, as the concept of linear time with forward progress isn't an intuitive one and had to be developed. But I think all Rayiner was getting at was something like, "it talks in a flat professional inoffensive monotone".

People are pretty uniformly enthusiastic about technological progress. It doesn't always seem that way because new tech tends to cause people to stress out about change and predicting doom is good for getting attention, but when we look at people who are genuinely committed to rejecting techno-progress we're limited to the Amish and nobody else. It's not a big or growing community of people. Given the choice, people always take the upgrades.

I think that's why rayiner thinks support for progress shouldn't be politically polarized. It's actually not, most of the time. In the context of modern politics we see this with the various attempts at starting an "abundance" movement amongst the Democrats. The more moderate subfactions realize that the left is becoming strongly associated with anti-tech, anti-progress politics, and that this lacks mainstream appeal so they need to fix it.

	▲	hollerith 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>But I think all Rayiner was getting at was something like, "it talks in a flat professional inoffensive monotone". But then why not write what you wrote? His bringing Star Trek into his reply suggests that Star Trek is affecting how he thinks about the issue being discussed.