this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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Paternalistic implies the benefit to be on the recipient, but I see it more as self defense (for the benefit of both, but primarily the offerer), based on the premise that "nice" civilizations grow up to eventually gain technology, and they need the tempering of pain to help get them there. i.e. they need to lose their dependency upon magical thinking before they can be considered cultural equals.
Dead children cry out from a thousand worlds.
The prime directive is the most amoral thing in all of Star Trek.
If there are space faring aliens out there who have solved scarcity and they're just watching the suffering that unfolds daily on this world - they better indeed hope we don't figure out space travel because I will have serious unanswered questions.
(This same shit applies to all-powerful deities.)
There's a pretty key difference between the Federation and a hypothetical tri-omni god. The Federation is not and cannot be omniscient. They might be, for all effective purposes, omnipotent, and we certainly like to think of them as highly benevolent. But we know, and they know, that they cannot foresee the longer-term consequences of action or inaction, in most cases.
My opinion is that when inaction would obviously doom an entire planet—such as if that planet is about to be catastrophically struck by a meteor—the Federation should intervene on a humanitarian basis. But nearly anything short of that and the Prime Directive is Good, Actually. In the case of intraplanetary conflict, asylum could be offered to victims of genocide or persecution, but contrary to @lugal@lemmy.dbzer0.com's statement, I think it is paternalistic to interfere because "you know better". How many times have real-world powerful empires stepped in claiming to be doing good, only to end up causing very much the opposite result. Dozens of times in the last two centuries in the Middle East alone. There are people who will still try and claim that white colonists were good for Aboriginal people on the basis of this reasoning.
I totally see where you are coming from but hear me out.
The first mention of the prime directive is a TOS episode which is an explicit allegory of the Vietnam War with federation and Klingon Empire supporting each side (they even mention it, not the name directly but something like "a war in south eastern Asia in the 20 century. Remember, this was during the war itself). This is a total valid critic of imperialism.
But interference isn't always about coming with all the solutions and saying we know better. It can be about offering help on eye level, taking the other side serious.
Let's take vaccination programs. It is paternalistic to roll out a program that produces results that suit you well and make you look good on paper (looking at you, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation). It is not paternalistic to be in exchange with the locals to adjust to local needs and most and for most release the patents which didn't happen with the covid vaccines due to the ~~prime directive~~ argument that only "we" know how to make vaccines safely. (I hope release is the right term, meaning making public domain)
Edit: TL;DR: Prime Directive is a good concept in it's first mention that was generalized in the wrong direction