The Prime Directive Is Stupid

I’m hardly the first person to point this out, but the Prime Directive from Star Trek is dumb. At least in TOS it seemed to be taken as more of a friendly suggestion than the pre-eminent rule of Starfleet. That’s in direct contradiction to its name, but also makes way more sense. “Avoid interfering with other civilizations unless they will clearly be worse off if you do” is not a terrible rule the way “don’t interfere with other civilizations ever even if they’re facing imminent extinction” is.

But by TNG, the Prime Directive is living up to its name as the first and most important rule of Starfleet, so we get things like S1E22, “Symbiosis,” where there is a planet of drug dealers and a planet of drug addicts, the latter of whom think that they’re infected with a terrible disease and that the dealers’ product is a treatment that alleviates the symptoms, when in fact it causes the symptoms via withdrawal. And apparently it would violate the Prime Directive to tell the addicts this. Totally cool to mediate negotiations between the two for sale of the drugs! That’s not interference. Sharing information about the nature of the “illness,” though, that’s strictly forbidden. Repairing ships that facilitate the drug trade wasn’t a violation of the Prime Directive in the first half of the episode, but in the second half of the episode, now it is. Captain Picard is pretty clearly changing what counts as “interference” in order to suit himself – so why doesn’t it suit him to share some information for the addict planet?

They try to justify this at the end of the episode with a historical precedent, but the show takes place 300 years in the future so the historical precedent is completely made up. So rather than drawing on real historical precedent to say “we may not understand why, but clearly interfering in other civilizations harms them in the long run,” the show is instead saying “I’m totally certain that interfering in other civilizations harms them in the long run despite being totally unable to provide any reasons why. Just believe me now and assume that the evidence will show up later.”

The implicit justification is that species have some kind of natural evolution to warp flight and that interfering with this prevents them from achieving their full potential somehow. If you think of it as “we should not use our superior technology and economy to turn single-planet civilizations into dependent states” then that is at least a coherent justification, although it’s not like there isn’t historical precedent for dependent states being perfectly capable of picking themselves up and carrying on when big brother crumbles. Sure, the smaller states often suffer, but the suffering is in the form of no longer receiving the benefits they used to. But regardless, sharing a bit of information isn’t turning the addict planet into a dependent state of the Federation (and they’re already a dependent state of the dealer planet!).

Rather than a practical concern about dependency, this justification seems more mystical if you scratch the surface, like they do in S2E15 “Pen Pals,” that each species has some kind of destiny that they would be held back from if the Federation shared its knowledge and wealth with them. In reality, people generally flourish in abundance and grow weaker in poverty. The popular idea of harsh conditions breeding strength and resilience is completley in opposition to real history – powerful empires are usually people who go around starting wars, not having wars declared on them, and they start those wars because they have a position of superior wealth and power from which they expect to win, and nine times out of ten, they do.

There’s also echoes of the American isolationist movement here (and Star Trek was made in America, so that’s not surprising), that big powerful nations trying to help small ones usually goes poorly for the small ones. But that’s not really true. Like, obviously when a big, powerful nation sends an invasion force that doesn’t become a good thing just because the troops have been instructed to shout “we’re here to help!” before mowing down every native who voices support for local sovereignty. And sending out gobs of free stuff blindly to poorer nations is a terrible long term solution to their economic problems and can destroy local industry by forcing them to compete with donated hand-me-downs. So there are defintiely forms of intervention that are bad for the smaller nation. But disaster relief is pretty purely a good thing, and whether or not trade ends up being good depends mostly on the smaller nation’s own government. Trade creates wealth, and whether or not that’s a good thing depends on who gets to have that wealth. The Marshall Plan worked out great for western Europe, so just giving people a shitton of money for infrastructure projects works at least some of the time. The Belt and Road Initiative is struggling and looks like it’s going to collapse, but those were loans, not gifts.

Again, this is voiced more explicitly in Pen Pals, but that explicit voicing just makes it clear that TNG is committing to stupidity. Picard insists that there’s no clear delineation between intervening in a natural disaster and intervening in a war, but yes, there is! One requires temporary economic aid to offset a disaster and/or scientific expertise to mitigate or avert the disaster, you can swoop in, solve the problem, and rocket off with no longterm entanglements and without having killed anyone. A war is going to require either years of investment, a massive bodycount, or both. Saying “taking sides in a war might go poorly, so let’s not save people from natural disasters either” is absolutely braindead.

Things like comparing the Marshall Plan to the Belt and Road Initiative (and in defense of Star Trek, the latter was not a thing during the production and original airing of TNG) makes it clear that it’s not immediately obvious what interventions are going to be beneficial to smaller states, but also that it is totally possible to intervene beneficially. A Prime Directive of “no interference, ever” only makes sense if Starfleet is a domineering organization with a history of malicious interference that the Federation needs to slap down with a straightforward, inviolable rule, even if that leads to a few cases where Starfleet refuses to intervene even when it would clearly be beneficial to do so.

This hardly seems to be the case in Star Trek – the Enterprise crew are consistently portrayed as highly ethical and highly skilled professionals. Even if other ships tend to be less competent (which does seem to be the case), the Enterprise crew never brings this up when justifying the Prime Directive. No one’s ever like “hey, sure, this specific intervention would probably be good, but if we set a precedent of this sort of thing for the rest of Starfleet, those clowns on the Constellation Class ships are going to start orbitally bombarding any pre-Warp civilizations who refuse to embrace pacifism.” They always act like the intervention itself would somehow be harmful in the long run, and their justifications for why are always paper-thin. It ultimately boils down to “because the Prime Directive is Star Trek-y,” and that slavish devotion to the established lore of the show is in direct violation of the general spirit of progression to a brighter future pushed by the show.