DS9 also makes it clear why the populace accepts martial law so cleanly and that part of it comes from a people who live in paradise and aren’t used to threats in their security.
That this episode was made 5 years before 9/11 is astounding in what it gets right about the populace of a democratic system filled with comfortable people accept a loss of liberty due to a perceived external threat.
That’s very true, and it might be fair to call Earth a kind of paradise before the Dominion war hit. I think we might actually be hitting up against an important distinction between “paradise” and “utopia”. To me, a paradise can be a brief and fragile perfect place that can’t long endure. But a utopia is a kind of political project that would need to be designed to survive threats and maintain itself. If a society becomes so complacent that just the idea of a foe can upend it, I wouldn’t consider it utopian.
DS9 also makes it clear why the populace accepts martial law so cleanly and that part of it comes from a people who live in paradise and aren’t used to threats in their security.
That this episode was made 5 years before 9/11 is astounding in what it gets right about the populace of a democratic system filled with comfortable people accept a loss of liberty due to a perceived external threat.
That’s very true, and it might be fair to call Earth a kind of paradise before the Dominion war hit. I think we might actually be hitting up against an important distinction between “paradise” and “utopia”. To me, a paradise can be a brief and fragile perfect place that can’t long endure. But a utopia is a kind of political project that would need to be designed to survive threats and maintain itself. If a society becomes so complacent that just the idea of a foe can upend it, I wouldn’t consider it utopian.