Riker: Sir, couldn't we just settle our weekly disputes out of court?
Picard: Well we could if we hadn't evolved beyond the need for money.
Troi: But clearly we haven't eliminated economic competition of resources -
Picard: Evolved!
Riker: When you think about it, our positions on board this ship were purchased with valuable years of training and obedience to a complex system of justice based on millennia of economic conflicts. Why, even our autopilot could tell you about how there's always an economic cost to eras of high culture. Right Data?
Data: If I were alive I might be offended by that objectication, but as I am not, the shoe fits! I am a machine designed to imitate sapient judiciousness to such a degree as to be virtually indistinguishable from it. But y'all are talking to a bedpost right now. Sorry - "you all". And even I can tell you that there's always an economic cost involved in the competition for resources. Take for example the high cultural magnificence of artistic periods such as the 17th century Dutch Golden Age, characterized by the Baroque period. Your Rembrandts, your Caravaggios, your Vermeers. These artists who enrich our evolved culture even today were flourishing in the economic abundance of Northern European global trade, made possible by the international shipping interests of companies like the Dutch East India Trading Company - a huge imperial concern with interests in expansion and conquest that would later characterize the British Empire, by leveraging trade monopolies and large-scale wars in India and China; and the Dutch West India Trading Company, leveraging human trafficking from West Africa to the Americas in a slave trade that would come to threaten multiple continents and the birthplace of our own Marxist utopianism - sorry, constitutional democracy.
It was even estimated that plantations in the West Indian slave trade funded Europe's industrial revolution at the latter half of the nineteenth century by as much as one pound for every twenty. Remember, this is your evolved, automated Second Officer telling you this. As a result, we might want to go sparingly on describing our current "technopian" culture as having risen above the very economic brutality from which it continues to benefit. We may no longer conquer - but we are certainly the technological and economic heirs of traders and conquerors.
This is why I paint - to contemplate the human cost of our noble cultural evolution. But perhaps you would rather be enjoying your civilized tea and its origin in the blood-soaked conquest of Asia, than listening to my tangents, sir.
Picard: Erm,
touché. But at least we're not the bloody Ferengi! Eh, Geordi? Eh?
Geordi: .........................................................................................................................
Riker: Um, the Alex Haley thing, remember sir....
