Not much of a revelation, just an observation, but how much of sci-fi pushes the ideal that Humanity's path forward is unification?
Star Trek is a major one, and many would state it was a progressive show, and it earnestly was.
It also stated that in its ideal future, there's a Federation of like-minded extraterrestrials, and as a member species, Humanity lives in a united, post-scarcity society under a single government.
To that end, how many alien species in these stories are so inhuman, in that they have no differences, a world-wide government, a single language?
It's laughable how direct the propaganda was, and continues to be.
It’s easy to rag on Star Trek as being progressive crap, but if you look at it through Enterprise, it’s generally preaching classical liberal values. Mainstay elements of the series are completely opposed to modern leftist attitudes.
Just a few random thoughts: The Romulan neutral zone is a hard border. Wars are still fought. DS9 did a good job making things more realistic, and suggesting there’s still an economy of sorts, things don’t just magically work. Any number of Kirk and Picard’s speeches would leave an SJW seething. The shows (again, up to ENT) had sexy women who were clearly there to entice male viewers.
Was Roddenberry an irredeemable lefty? Yeah, I think that’s pretty clear. But thankfully all the series enjoyed other writers and producers that were trying to tell good stories about good people.
The biggest thing to me is that Star Trek basically only makes sense within a strict militarist society. Despite how much Starfleet and the Federation want to pretend they're not a military, they are a military. More importantly, the Federation's values are only effectively maintained inside of a command structure which requires strict regulation.
Society isn't a star ship, and is very fluid. But a ship or vessel of any kind requires a very strict kind of regular maintenance and control.
Star Trek preaches Liberalism, but it's social order is effectively militarist. In fact, the military leaders are all effectively intellectuals of one sort or another. This leads to a strange situation where the military doesn't just maintain political order, but effectively maintains a non-democratic meritocracy. Outside of Starfleet, the Federation can be all over the place (except for Earth which is a utopia stand-in).
Star Trek isn't communism, but Star Fleet is effectively... uh... Liberal Militarism?
For story telling purposes, it's fine because the social ordering allows for moral plays to be explored in a controlled environment, but no environment is as controlled as the moral plays would like to be. The fact that in a post scarcity world, Liberalism is maintained by a Militarist Meritocracy is something that should be deeply philosophically investigated.
Star Trek only works because it shows you a very narrow and heavily curated glimpse of its universe via the crew and adventures of, primarily, one starship. The people onboard the Enterprise have been carefully filtered by the federation to allow only highly specific and compatible ideologies to be present. Even in those cases where a crew member holds cultural values that diverge from the norm, like the Klingon Wharf, these differences are almost entirely paved over through a combination of shoddy writing and sheer selective blindness.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the social and cultural dynamics of Star trek are even more retardedly unrealistic than the technology.
Worf, not Wharf. But that is funny.
I mean, fair enough. As a morality play, it has to be so constrained.