Shitting on the Prime Directive with Nagito Komaeda

[feotakahari]

Or, this would have been an Evenicle post, but none of you know what Evenicle is

The most vicious takedown I’ve seen of Nagito Komaeda’s personality is that he only values people as abstract figures, not as people. In his view, a great person is made greater by facing tragedy and overcoming it, so if someone he respects suffers a loss, he celebrates it. He doesn’t really get the idea that other people feel bad about loss, or that they resent him for treating their suffering like a good thing. Their feelings aren’t just irrelevant to him. They’re invisible, because feelings aren’t a part of his worldview.

Shit like Star Trek or Enchantress from the Stars* is built on a worldview of gradual positive progression. People suffer, and because of their efforts to alleviate their suffering, society grows greater. So you can’t act to help them, or their society won’t grow. Suffering feels bad and people don’t want it, but that’s not relevant to the grand sweep of history, so it’s ignored. And that’s why the Prime Directive makes you as morally bankrupt as fucking Komaeda.

*My entire grudge against the Prime Directive began with Enchantress from the Stars.

Comments

[random_thought_depository]

"In his view, a great person is made greater by facing tragedy and overcoming it, so if someone he respects suffers a loss, he celebrates it. He doesn’t really get the idea that other people feel bad about loss, or that they resent him for treating their suffering like a good thing. Their feelings aren’t just irrelevant to him. They’re invisible, because feelings aren’t a part of his worldview."

I knew someone who I think had something like this mindset, and I think it was one of the major sources of conflict between me and them.

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I think the Prime Directive was mostly a response to European imperialism and settler colonialism and Spanish missions and so on. It's less something extrapolated from abstract principles and more the writers took a look at bad things that happened IRL and said "we want to make it clear that the Federation doesn't do that."

I think there's also an element of, like... Imagine if relatively benevolent aliens came to Earth around 3000 BCE and gave us their knowledge and helped us build ourselves up to their tech and affluence level. In relatively objective terms this might be a much better world as humanity is spared millennia of poverty, tyranny, and half the population dying before their twentieth birthday, and by 2500 BCE humanity has achieved a level of affluence and safety and freedom comparable to the Star Trek Federation and is exploring the galaxy. But in such a scenario most of the culture we're familiar with would never exist; Shakespeare would never write his plays, Islam and Christianity and Buddhism and even Judaism would never exist, the Iliad would never exist as the events it depicted would not occur, even the pyramids would never be built, even the epic of Gilgamesh might be butterflied away, etc.. I think it's natural to feel a certain sense of loss when contemplating such a world. You could counter by saying the hypothetical more advanced version of humanity would make their own even more awesome culture, but I don't think the feeling is really about thinking the alternative world is objectively worse in some way, it's about the way people tend to value their self-ness. Contemplating this better alternate world is like contemplating a world where I was raised by an upper middle class family instead of a poor one; that alternate version of me might have a better life and be happier and maybe even be a better person, it's easy to imagine such an alternate world that's better than the real one in every way, but that person isn't me, so I can't help feeling that to contemplate such a scenario is to contemplate a kind of death, worse in a way a kind of super-death in which not only am I dead but I'm completely erased and never existed at all. I think when people use "what if your mother aborted you?" as an anti-abortion argument they're partly tapping into that reaction; not necessarily discomfort with the idea of fetuses being aborted, but discomfort with the idea of a world where you never existed at all. I think it's partly that real culture (Shakespeare etc.) and my real life is real, whereas the hypothetical better alternate culture or alternate life is abstract. I think it's related to Chris Wayan's Randomia concept: what you know to value is lost, and that makes it hard to see such alternate worlds fairly. I suspect some of the appeal of the Prime Directive comes from this; an idea that by the principle of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," well, we're kind of glad we got to write Shakespeare's plays and compose the Upanishads and build Angkor Wat and New York and paint and sculpt Renaissance masterpieces etc., so e.g. the Mintakans should be given time to write their equivalent of Shakespeare's plays, build their equivalent of New York, carve their equivalent of Michelangelo's David, etc., instead of their culture being mostly subsumed into the Federation's before any of that would happen as it probably would be if the Federation helped them develop to the Federation's level of technology and affluence as quickly as possible.

Which I guess does kind of lead into your thought. Between 3000 BCE and today tens of billions of people died before their twentieth birthday from what today are preventable diseases. Was a bunch of neat cultural products worth that? I'd say no.

This does get into a recurring thought I've had about Star Trek: I think a lot of problematic things about Star Trek are down to a lot of it being written by the kind of liberals who have a soft spot for Romantic nationalism. Romantic nationalism places great importance on a group having a unique culture formed by their particular history and homeland and sees connection to that as almost mystically/spiritually good for the group members, and that sort of thinking is how you get grotesque drama like the protagonists thinking it may be wrong to provide aid because it might contaminate a primitive race's culture even as that race is being wiped out by a natural disaster and would go extinct without help (Romantic nationalist thinking easily leads to the thought that it might be better to be dead than to be deracinated). With the Prime Directive that mixes with that teleological view of evolution and history that Star Trek writers also seem to be fond of, so you get this condescending attitude toward primitive societies where they have to be left alone to complete their psuedo-providential journey to enlightenment on their own.

[feotakahari]

Well, that’s where Evenicle comes into this. The dragons in Evenicle talk about how they don’t interfere because they don’t want to just treat humans like pets. They want humans to make their own decisions. What confuses me about that is that the dragons aren’t all-powerful, and it’s shown that humans are capable of telling them to sit down and shut up. In general, a lot of “we shouldn’t interfere with primitive cultures” seems to me like it underestimates how much “primitive” cultures could defend themselves. (Remember that what took down the Native Americans was plague, which never comes up as a thing in Prime Directive stories.)