"The First Time Any Man's Freedom is Trodden Upon, We're All Damaged"

After watching the clip we were shown in class (Spock's famous needs for the many speech) We were asked whether we side with the needs of the many or the needs of the few.
The clip and the question made me think of another Star Trek quote.

While usually we need to think of the needs of the many we have to remember that "the many" is nothing but individuals. To ask whether we support the needs of the many or the needs of the few puts them at odds against each other. And I don't feel like this is a necessity.

The Bill of Rights in America and similar laws elsewhere guarantee individual rights. But they do so for the betterment of society as a whole. Failing to protect individuals and (especially) minorities fails society as a whole. We recognize that sometimes that the majority can be wrong and we have to have certain rules. But these rules are always what we considered to be rights. Things that can not and should not be taken away without good reason, even under pressure from the majority. By respecting individuals we protect society as a whole.

While many utopia novels, (including some that will come up in the following months, 1984 for example) Focus on the betterment of the society at the cost of the individual. This misses the point that societies are individuals though. If the entire society is "surviving" but the people are not then the society is missing the point. This is the equivalent of putting a nearly dead human on life support.
In one way yes the society is still "alive" but it is not truly alive or responding. It does not have life as we know it. And as humans we recognize that survival is not the only important thing. The idea of living, however you define it, is more important that merely surviving.

Star Trek can shows use quite a lot. It forces to think about what is right and how both the many, and the few, must be accounted for in a society.

The Final Frontier

Star ships. Holo decks. Warp drives. Advanced free health-care. Lack of currency. Saving whales with transporters. Very bad Patrick Stewart lookalikes.

That's what I've always thought of as utopia. The idea that mankind has united in a quest to improve ourselves and others sounds fascinating and full of hope. I always believed that that sort of thing would give mankind something greater than a political agenda to look towards. It would give otherwise mundane jobs meaning and purpose.

Now though, after reading sargent's article, I've realized two things. One: that   man likes to contradict himself, sometimes within the same sentence. Two: utopia, or the idea of it, is a misleading load of ...

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of improving society, but this article stripped me of my star trek given innocence and said, "screw you and your pre-conceived notions". Utopia was always fixed and unchanging. I thought that we're all working towards a life where we better ourselves, but never considered that other people might have alternative ideas. Sure, many of them might be the same, but as the article implied, some people's dreams are radically different have the possibility of being more detrimental than helpful.

It's something that is constantly changing, and is the product of people dreaming and scheming. We'll never really reach utopia, because there will always be somebody that thinks things should be different, as evidenced in season four of star trek: enterprise, where xenophobic people tried to force

"giant freggin laser" - http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Verteron_array

aliens out of earth with a giant lunar laser because they were afraid of becoming a minority. So, if utopia is unreachable, then why study it? It's kind of like the perpetual energy machine: the only thing perpetual about it is man's obsession in finding it. What can the pursuit of something unattainable do to improve ourselves? Can these parodies of our society really let us improve ourselves, or are they just skeptical or naive representations of fantasies and horrors unfulfilled? These questions, I leave to you.