The Cloud Minders & The Federation

Okay been thinking about this for a few days.

Would a visitor to Ardana realize that the some of the troglytes had a work place created mental defect? Droxine said the troglytes are workers, they mine zenite and till the soil. We also know that troglytes are servants and police.

We have no idea of Ardana's population, however in America today out of a population of 330 million there are about four million farmers, one and a half million fishermen, and a third of a million raising livestock. Miners are in the tens of thousands.

So, not only wouldn't a visitor reasonable be expected to figure out the miners have a special problem, neither would the Ardana general population.

And given that they don't really care about the troglytes as a over all group, the fact that a fraction of one percent of them are being effect by zenite gas probably wouldn't be noticed by the Ardana leadership either.

Nothing was being "hidden."

If Ardana has industry, and the troglytes work there as well, then the fraction of one percentage who are miners of zenite would be smaller still, and even less noticeable.

Droxine: "The troglytes are workers, Captain."

No, the episode really doesn't.

That relatively few people live in (can live in) the small floating city, well that pretty obvious. That the majority of the population are workers of one sort or another, and not members of the elite, that's out in the open too.

That last is probably the norm on all Federation planets.

 

Yes--pro-diversity when its convenient. The Federation of the TOS era is not this imagined pure Space Do-Gooder organization. As noted before, no government enters into partnerships blind. It patently unrealistic, even in fiction. They did not show up to Ardana, asked for Zenite, shook hands, signed a contract and then bailed until time to pick up resources. We have seen time after time that the Federation is aware of member planets they benefit from and/or have interests in partnering with, as seen in "Friday's Child" where McCoy--in advance of formal negotiations--was knowledgeable about the tribal customs (including their views of the value of life and death).That is exactly what governments do--send representatives to learn all they can, not only for the hope of a mutually beneficial arrangement, but to learn their security / military capabilities / determine likely threat level.

The idea of the Federation not knowing anything about Ardana's class/worker system to any degree is frankly, ludicrous. They knew, and did not care as long as the Zenite was supplied. In fact, the plight of an indigenous species took a backseat in other TOS situations: in "The Devil in the Dark," the first priority on Janus VI was to kill the Horta--not engage in a form of wildlife conservation. The number one concern was the continuation of Pergium production. That is the Federation's single-minded, ends-justifies-the-means methods, which also includes--in Ardana's case--ignoring a world's cultural problems as long as their interests are met.

Pretty much.

 

Really? You assume that gross class inequality is typical of the Federation, that most citizens are wage slaves living in drudgery and only a tiny elite gets the full benefits of civilization?? That's a bizarrely dystopian interpretation of a franchise that's always been predicated on the idea that the inequalities and injustices of the past have been eradicated.

 

I assume that in the future there will still be bosses and workers.

I assume that Picard is typically cleaner at the end of his shift, than the people who scrub the warp conduits.

 

Which is not even remotely the same as the extreme, systemic class oppression that "The Cloud Minders" was an obvious allegory for.

Did you miss the part where there's no money or scarcity in the 24th century and nobody has to work for a living unless they choose to?

 

We're trying to.

srsly, @Tenacity has a point. Somebody has to scrub the warp conduits (and do other similarly demeaning tasks - like the janitors from TWOK, "waste extraction" from multiple series, that sort of thing). And you wouldn't expect anyone to volunteer for jobs like those, would you?

 

Well, someone knew, that's for certain. And examined the situation. How else does McCoy know that the Trogs test as mentally inferior?

MCCOY: That may not be easy, Jim. Medical analysis indicates the Troglytes are mentally inferior.
KIRK: That's impossible, Bones. The Troglytes have accepted personal sacrifice, a common cause. Mentally inferior beings aren't capable of that.
MCCOY: Look, I've checked my findings thoroughly. Their intellect ratings are almost twenty percent below average.​

Since McCoy never visits the surface during this mission, (or otherwise is afforded access to Trogs,) then the only place he can be getting the information is from existing Federation/Starfleet records.

 

...which comes from the Ardana supplied data.

 

I can't see many people working for nothing and the abuse and orders that come with it to be honest!!!
JB

 

Joseph Sisko gets more in his pocket than his waiters.

I completely missed the lack of money in the 23rd century, and where are you getting this idea that no one has to work unless they want to? Obviously not from the show.

 

I was responding to the part where you talked about Picard, i.e. the 24th century.

 

Whether Picard's Federation is different from the "actual", broader Federation is unknown: Bolarus having a bank is fairly immaterial there, as we can't really tell whether Bolians are members at all. (And DSC now tells us that the Bank of Bolarus is a legendary thing, the one anybody of any clout in the bank robber circles must hit - even if it's just for "bettering themselves"!)

Whether Picard's Federation is different from Kirk's Federation is a bit more probable. Picard's or at least Janeway's Starfleet certainly thinks it has moved forward since those days. OTOH, it has grown to include even weirder folks than Vulcans or Ardanans, and we hear of even fewer federal laws or rights...

As for Ardana, it's a bit of a stretch that this exotic society could conform to division-of-labor percentages familiar from today's Earth when it expressly, well, doesn't.

Indeed, indications are that everybody is a miner, or was - until a few managed to get out and founded Stratos. Or that is what McCoy states to be "obvious", at any rate.

So what do we have here? An old human(oid) mining colony on an otherwise lifeless planet - lifeless because ravaged by a plant disease like the one that was going to do Merak II in? Yet with the disease stopped in the vicinity of the zenite mine, thus revealing the most significant side effect of the mineral, and allowing for the colony to expand and eventually sprout the cloud city? Certainly the place looks dead when viewed from the clouds, despite the Stratosians no doubt wanting to park right over arable land so that they can't be starved to death.

Quite possibly the bosses were bosses back before Stratos already, and this is what allowed them to rise above the rest of the population, quite literally, and then keep on forcing them to mine the mineral. And yes, till the soil, but quite possibly again only under the careful control and literal shadow of Stratos.

(I also can't help but think that zenite, in addition to its nice side effect, has a primary purpose for which it was originally mined - perhaps even as the magical ingredient that allows Stratos to float.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

Okay, there are references to money use in the 24th century, in the Federation. Picard himself made a purchase on a Federation world while on vacation.

 

Yes--and how a employer and/or leader's "caring" has a leash based on how much "caring" stands in the way of self-interest. The real world certainly operates that way, and the Federation (and numerous TOS member or investigated worlds) do. That illustrates that the Federation are not the revisionist Do-Gooders in Space that some have tried to paint it has in some modern day retrospectives. It---and non-member words--are flawed. Fairyland utopias take a back seat to the pragmatic needs of leaders, employers, et al.

 

We've seen plenty of captains commanding people who carry out their orders, so no assumption is necessary when it comes to what's depicted in Star Trek.

 

It's possible that the worker revolts on Ardana are simply a very recent event, and that all was well and good when they joined the Federation. There are some things that we cannot argue that the Federation didn't know:

Such as,
Ardana has a sole "ruler."
This ruler has the legal right to have criminals executed if their crime warrants it.

 

The past, and therefore the present, of Ardana is certainly open, from the viewpoint of the audience. And it appears to be an open book, from the viewpoint of our heroes who whip out surprising facts and boost their apparent speculation with "obviouslies" and "surelies".

The combination works to the advantage of the story. We can't know how much or little our heroes know, but we can always decide on a Goldilocks level of knowledge. We can even argue that the heroes know less than their own bosses (true in the case of pon farr as well, in all probability) but that those bosses, too, lack the final cues into just how serious the issue of the week is.

Sole rulers may or may not be at odds with Kirk's "Errand of Mercy" boast of his side being "a democratic body", but the UFP and death penalties are no strangers...

Timo Saloniemi

 

As did Janeway and Tuvok (offscreen).

 

Well, they weren't "well and good," because there was gross class injustice as bad as in Industrial-Age England when children were being worked to death in coal mines. They may have been well and good for the minority elite that lived in extreme luxury in the cloud city, but things were consistently terrible for the majority that lived in poverty and worked in toxic conditions in the mines. Really, the whole premise of the episode is an incredibly blatant metaphor for social injustice and worker oppression, so there's no way the depicted situation was intended by the writers to be "well and good." The premise of the episode was that this was an obscenely unjust system that Kirk corrected. (Well, in Gerrold's version, he just got the two sides talking, but the injustice was still there.)

And that's the problem. Why would the Federation have admitted such an unjust society? The idea that the UFP in Kirk's time was dystopian and classist enough to be perfectly fine with the Ardana situation might possibly be defensible in a universe where only TOS existed, since it was fairly vague about what the Federation was like, but everything since then has clearly stated that the Federation is an egalitarian utopia where social injustice has been abolished. Hence, it's implausible that the UFP would admit such a cartoonishly oppressive society as Ardana into its union, unless somehow the admission was done in a rushed, cursory manner, or if someone decided that gaining Ardana's mineral wealth outweighed the usual laws and principles that govern admission.

That's another bit that's tricky to reconcile, since we know that General Order Seven is the only death penalty on Federation or Starfleet books. (Mendez just said "our books," so it's unclear whether he meant just Starfleet or the entire UFP. But it seems unlikely that there would be more death penalties under civilian law than military law; the reverse would be more probable.)


Ultimately, it boils down to this being a third-season episode and not really thought through very well. Its problems could've been easily fixed by removing the reference to Ardana being a Federation member and making it an ally instead, or maybe a protectorate like Elas & Troyius.