Very cool link!
Divisions Starfleet should have
- Thread starter Laura Cynthia Chambers
- Start date
Very cool link!
No marines. No standing armies. Any standing military will want to engage in conflict, directly or indirectly, to justify its existence. This is what humanity has come to understand in the future, and why Starfleet is not a military organization. Everyone in Starfleet serves some civilian job duty and could easily transition to a non-Starfleet business or organization. They get double the training in the offensive/defensive arts to take up when in the statistically rare instances (adult) diplomacy breaks down or alien contact goes awry – for only as long as it takes to establish a diplomatic resolution. They are the fully actualized citizen soldiers of Utopia.
Interstellar nations that maintain standing militaries, regardless how noble their words or superficially well-meaning their people, invariably become captured and governed by their military-industrial complexes, the personal political interests of their leaders, and the fundamental bored, frightened, and culpable vacuousness at the center of their national and individual souls.
Interstellar nations that maintain standing militaries, regardless how noble their words or superficially well-meaning their people, invariably become captured and governed by their military-industrial complexes, the personal political interests of their leaders, and the fundamental bored, frightened, and culpable vacuousness at the center of their national and individual souls.
The word utopia means "no place." It's the name of an imaginary place that's too ideal and too idyllic to be real, to exist.
We're therefore free to imagine perfect conditions.
We can therefore imagine that the soldiers in the standing armies of utopia are not subject to temptations that you describe. Rather, any Starfleet Marines or Federation ground troops understand that their role is to defend the Federation when called upon, to train at all other times, and to be content with that. Their glory is not to conquer, but to serve.
This is no more implausible than utopia to begin with.
Like a land without slavery, where men and women are free to speak their mind, go where they like, own their own property, marry who they love, and elect or remove their own leaders? Where many diseases no longer trouble us and we live multiple times as long as we used to, eating and drinking and fornicating with peoples from every corner of the world? Our very real modern world is a very real utopia to peoples past. History does not end with our modern world.
Utopia’s such as ours are earned. Old utopias were thought possible via systems akin to those contemporary to their times. They had philosopher kings at the top. And indeed slaves below. Our modern utopias have no slaves below and elected officials at the top. What we miss today is non-military organizations like Starfleet. Scientists and explorers who through their work make the Federation more powerful than three Cardassian Unions, with their Central Commands and Obsidian Orders. Ships faster and stronger, foods more nutritious and plentiful, diseases fewer and more easily cured, and alliances overwhelming at every turn. Let the Dukat types simmer and stew in their high chairs on the other sides of their silly walls keeping in slaves ready to revolt at any opportunity. While we go where no one has gone before.
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