# Debunking Star Trek / Orville Utopia
Date: 2022-08-06

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### Debunking Star Trek / Orville Utopia

> Well, look at this place. It’s a utopia. No poverty, no starvation, every need provided for.

The Orville’s “Future Unknown” comes right out and claims a future utopia for humanity while the series simultaneously shows that humans are not yet even able to **imagine** utopia. First how does this utopia supposedly work:

> See, on your planet, currency is money. In the Union, it’s reputation. So if you do something, anything, that benefits our society, and you work hard at it, you’re rich. And that could be anything from being a great scientist, or a great doctor, a great chef, or a great waiter. It’s all valued.

Unfortunately substituting a reputation based currency for a currency based one doesn’t solve poverty at all. In the Orville world when you lose your reputation you are bankrupt and when this happens to a main character, Issac, they attempt suicide.

Fredrik deBoer in the *Cult of Smart* describes this problem for education but it is true of society in general:

> This is the basic trap, the essential contradiction that we can’t get out of. Our system can promote equality or it can sort people into a hierarchy of ability. It can’t do both.

If one person is a “great waiter” then it has to be relative to someone one else’s service not being as good. A person benefiting society is relative to some other person, say Isaac, harming society. Isaac’s reputation is eventually restored by participating in the invention of a weapon that can destroy his entire race of robots — a weapon that comes seconds away from doing just that.

Ironically its the robots in the Orville that give us one possible peak at utopia. Unlike Union society, robot society instantly forgives the death and destruction Isaac causes them. The robots are all equal in ability and there is no hierarchy other than a “primary” that for all we know rotates frequently.

In a world where a human has “every need provided for” one of those needs is to feel valued. Feeling valued by your spouse isn’t a zero sum game as you can equally value your spouse as well. Feeling valued in a society without a zero sum game is a much more complex undertaking.

How do you value the great chef and the great waiter equally? As humans we have difficulty imagining a restaurant where every worker is valued equally. Something about valuing the dishwasher as equal with the chef that studied and honed his craft for years rubs us the wrong way. The order the Orville lists these occupations in is telling, “great scientist, or a great doctor, a great chef, or a great waiter”.

Even holding occupation and effort level constant, humans want to value the great talent over the less talented. Oddly enough that tendency is reserved for other humans. Magnus Carlsen beats everyone at chess shows his awesome merit but computers beat all humans at chess doesn’t mean anything at all.

Are humans really interested in “something, anything, that benefits our society” or is our real interest in games that rank people regardless of benefit? A society one step above the sustenance level would definitely vote for benefit over ranking. However as the output of our labor is further and further divorced from immediate needs, ranking becomes the only game in town.

This is the second basic trap that we can’t get out of**— the more successful a society the less easily measurable benefit its members provide.**

In an advanced society with very few problems, Isaac’s arc is not uncommon, the most likely way to provide great benefit is to solve an issue you helped cause. Here again is another hint at utopia, a world divided between problem causers and problem solvers where the contributions of both are equally valued.