What exactly was the cause for Turkana IV falling into barbarism?

[Unimatrix Q]

I have trouble believing that humans born and raised in the UFP showing uncivilized and cruel behavior like implanting people with detonators and preying on others.

How exactly did the colony fall?

The only way i can see something like this happen is if the colony was founded either before or in the early days of the Federation.

 

[Nerys Myk]

You under estimate humanity's ability for cruelty.

 

[Twilight Phoenix]

I have trouble believing that humans born and raised in the UFP showing uncivilized and cruel behavior like implanting people with detonators and preying on others.

I have no trouble believing it, on contrary to you...
No matter if we're speaking about real life or about a TV series, humans still are what they are : primates who evolved to survive in a changing, challenging environment, and who developed natural strategies to do so.
No matter how awful and disgusting they are from a moral perspective, war, violence, rape, murder, cannibalism, selfishness and manipulation are natural survival behaviours. Only our culture and education prevent us from crossing the boundary between morality and immorality.

When you are aware of that simple ethological fact, you realize that no amount of education will ever be enough to totally eradicate humans' vilest inclinations. There will always remain a dark and violent sparkle somewhere in humankind, that can be transformed into a roaring fire as soon as the situation allows it.

Being born in the UFP wouldn't change those ethological facts. Humans would always be humans, with the same inclination towards hatred, violence and selfishness.

 

[Nerys Myk]

“We’re human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands! But we can stop it. We can admit that we’re killers . . . but we’re not going to kill today. That’s all it takes! Knowing that we’re not going to kill — today!”

Sometimes we don't.

 

[Timo]

When the place was a UFP colony, there was crime, including but probably not limited to rape gangs. The UFP apparently paid no attention. So the local security corporations gained in favor, competed with each other, and the top two became the de facto government.

"Uncivilized and cruel"? The Cadres reduced crime into harmless paintball games!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Nerys Myk]

When the place was a UFP colony, there was crime, including but probably not limited to rape gangs. The UFP apparently paid no attention. So the local security corporations gained in favor, competed with each other, and the top two became the de facto government.

"Uncivilized and cruel"? The Cadres reduced crime into harmless paintball games!

Timo Saloniemi

Your head canon is a scary place.

 

[Unicron]

I've often wondered about this myself, as I'm not sure why any of the factions started fighting or why the Federation seemingly made no attempt to restore order.

 

[C.E. Evans]

It could have started with something as simple as a freighter carrying urgent supplies that didn't arrive for some reason. That could have cause some to who didn't believe in Federation kumbaya to take advantage of the situation or could have driven some to ditch it in order to survive (it's easy to be a saint in paradise). Either way, by the time things got sorted out, it may have been too late for Turkana IV--the government had already collapsed and there was no unifying force on the planet.

Or it could just be that there still assholes in the 24th-Century and Turkana IV simply fell victim to them.

 

[Nerys Myk]

I figured a bunch of "screw the Feds, we're better of without them" types took over.

 

[Sakonna]

I figured a bunch of "screw the Feds, we're better of without them" types took over.

That's plausible. It's depressingly easy to picture the "Make Turkana IV Great Again" campaign they would have run...

 

[Timo]

What we know about the place is that it's a single underground city. Odds would seem to be that the planet is uninhabitable for the most part, then (no mention is made of lost surface settlements or the like). Does that make it dependent on outside help? Apparently not, as the city is still working after having severed its links with the outside (no mention is made of non-UFP links, either).

But building an underground city on an otherwise lifeless planet suggests one of two Trek staples: that the planet had something of value, meaning it would be something of a banana republic, ruled by those in charge of shipping out the product and shipping in the riches - or that the planet was a refuge for some sort of an isolationist cult. Either of these monocultures would be susceptible to instability of a single-point failure sort...

By the time we meet Turkana IV, there's no sign of exports or cults (remaining?). It might be Turkana had solved its problems by getting rid of such inherent weaknesses, then. But "getting rid" might have required drastic measures, ones incompatible with UFP oversight, which is why the place seceded.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

Had Yar stuck around it could have been answered.

 

[Timo]

And the big point is that she didn't. Indeed, she left Turkana IV before she had any chance to gather relevant intel. Seems our heroes believe in a "totally lawless" colony against the facts of the matter because the only intel they have to go by is Yar's out-of-date childhood tale.

That is, Tasha escaped from Turkana IV fifteen years before the events. The colony seceded fifteen years before the events. The unrest was a further fifteen years older than that, though. But from Ishara's story, it seems the unrest ended with the seceding, and with the coalescing of the numerous factions into just two; Tasha just bailed out a moment too early to be able to tell.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

I believe the novel Survivors went into a little detail about the place.

Except it was written prior to "Remember Me" and so the place is called New Paris. And there's no mention of Tasha having a sister.

 

[Unimatrix Q]

What we know about the place is that it's a single underground city. Odds would seem to be that the planet is uninhabitable for the most part, then (no mention is made of lost surface settlements or the like). Does that make it dependent on outside help? Apparently not, as the city is still working after having severed its links with the outside (no mention is made of non-UFP links, either).

But building an underground city on an otherwise lifeless planet suggests one of two Trek staples: that the planet had something of value, meaning it would be something of a banana republic, ruled by those in charge of shipping out the product and shipping in the riches - or that the planet was a refuge for some sort of an isolationist cult. Either of these monocultures would be susceptible to instability of a single-point failure sort...

By the time we meet Turkana IV, there's no sign of exports or cults (remaining?). It might be Turkana had solved its problems by getting rid of such inherent weaknesses, then. But "getting rid" might have required drastic measures, ones incompatible with UFP oversight, which is why the place seceded.

Timo Saloniemi

According to "Legacy" the colonists lived in a city above the ground until the city was destroyed in the conflict that drove them underground into the tunnels.

 

[Timo]

More probably, the city always had underground and surface parts, with the reactors and utilities down below, and people were forced to live deeper underground than intended due to the conflict.

But the thing is, Turkana IV is a city rather than a planet. We hear of no opportunity to flee to the surface, perhaps to a distant village, perhaps to a hut in the mountains. Living on the surface is likely to be more or less impossible, then. And the extent of underground construction we witness (systematic construction, with a carefully symmetric geometry and all) tells of a predicted need at a time when resources were plentiful - this is no farming colony for those who want to distance themselves from the UFP technocracy, or even the capital city of a balanced settlement.

It's all part of the dramatic setup, of course: the paintball games organized by the Cadres are only viable in a closed environment. But it's also pretty standard for Star Trek.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Unimatrix Q]

But why than build parts of the city above the ground?

 

[Timo]

Why did the Masterpiece Society build in domes when it's safer inside bedrock? Possibly they valued the scenery.

In the ruin matte, we saw one conventional building with stairs opening to a main street (with sloping concrete banks and bent lampposts) of some sort, surrounded by lots of small, round standalone towers, looking like so many pagodas. It reminded me of the forests of oil-drilling towers 1880s Pennsylvania - perhaps the interesting stuff in Turkana IV was underground, and the settlers initially built in between their drilling rigs and then followed the money down?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Unimatrix Q]

Yes, you could be right. Maybe they mined the planet for something and the troubles of the colony started because of economical reasons.

 

[Timo]

...The only quoted aspect of the troubles was a gradual but comprehensive breakdown of law and order, and I could well see that happening in a cutthroat capitalist settlement where everybody has his own oil well, sometimes just meters apart! The system could still remain stable until economics created the slightest tremors, after which the only way out would be draconian measures that would mutually alienate the world and their soft-touch Federation overlords.

Timo Saloniemi