Farpoint...

Every now and again, I watch "Encounter at Farpoint," the inaugural two-part episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and marvel at how well the story line was written, specifically the back story was fleshed-out; the acting mature and impeccable. I, like a lot of Trekkie fans at the time gave the series a broad brush of disappointment, especially at seeing a 137-year-old cranky Admiral Leonard "Bones" McCoy - we were lamenting our old Trek and not being fair to the then "new" one. It makes me miss good television.

The above somewhat "Nazi-like" banner hung in the kangaroo court the entity Q conjured Captain Picard and crew into. Q stood as judge, jury and presumably executioner, but also witness and soothsayer: who but the Q-continuum knew the Federation would eventually make contact with The Borg? Captain Picard's defense in a nutshell: yes humanity was once quite barbarous; we were guilty of discrimination and inequality, but we were in that fictional "then" as far from the depiction of a 21st century court post WWIII as he and his crew was far from Earth.

The Optimum Movement was a political movement that came about during the mid-21st century on Earth, and spread to a number of nations—including Great Britain and the United States of America. They are believed to be one of the instigators behind the Third World War, and the following post atomic horror. Memory Beta (please forgive the annoying embed commercials). The story was further "made flesh" in the novel Federation by Judith-Reeves Stevens, which I've read - an excellent Kindle read.

En route to Farpoint, Captain Picard and his crew first meet "Q." The mysterious and powerful being denounces the human race as barbarians and challenges the crew of the Enterprise to disprove his belief. If Picard and his crew are not persuasive in their arguments, they will be sentenced to death.

It's interesting in the 21st century, another author I've read - Naomi Klein - has written "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate." (I'd also recommend her book "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.")

Star Trek in the mind of Gene Roddenberry was born on the back of the Cold War with the former Soviet Union possibly becoming a hot nuclear one, and on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement, thus projecting forward a positive, more accepting of science, less xenophobic, survivable future.

Nuclear war would be a fool's errand - whether as in Federation we established colonies on off worlds, the conflagration would leave swaths of Earth clearly uninhabitable for thousands of years. Corpses would have no care who actually "won" such an insane engagement. The Trek universe alludes to the discontinued existence of Washington, Moscow and other global capitals, hence the location of the fictional United Federation of Planets in San Francisco.

Ms. Klein's treatise seems to share a similar concern (book description):

In "This Changes Everything" Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn't just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies. She exposes the ideological desperation of the climate-change deniers, the messianic delusions of the would-be geoengineers, and the tragic defeatism of too many mainstream green initiatives. And she demonstrates precisely why the market has not—and cannot—fix the climate crisis but will instead make things worse, with ever more extreme and ecologically damaging extraction methods, accompanied by rampant disaster capitalism.

In Escape From Freedom, Eric Fromm makes an excellent case that the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation cooperated in strange, significant ways: The Renaissance came after the fall of European hierarchies/caste systems, i.e. if your father was a carpenter, you were likely to be as well as your sons, etc. This gave rise to the individual and capitalism, but isolated the individual from the familiar; the safe. Luther and Calvin appealed to the poor and middle class respectively: the former for a better hereafter life, but disdain for opposing the status quo; the latter a fatalism of being born predestined to either going to heaven or hell - saved or condemned. The mental gymnastic escape is if you were "doing good work," you were probably going to heaven, and thus part of the "chosen." This mentality coupled with the rise of wealth in the hands of a moneyed few that ultimately primed the populace for rule by a single Fuhrer and totalitarian, authoritarian rule. He spoke of the rise of inequality, concentration of wealth with [that then] 1%; their influence on politics, religion, education - I could swear I was reading current headlines.

We may or may never, even with great research - achieve warp drive. Nor possibly not ever encounter omnipotent watcher beings like the Q-continuum. But we could - here - make mature decisions as a species, to reduce inequality - thus the crime and terrorism it inspires - and avoid our own failings without going through painful lessons and casualties - caused by, climate, inequality, nuclear or otherwise.

We don't have to go far from home to do that.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana (16 December 1863 in Madrid, Spain – 26 September 1952 in Rome, Italy) was a philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist.