They don't have money but they do have the classic authoritarian hierarchy of SciFi.
Want to travel the galaxy? You need a starship. How do you get a starship? Join the federation.
Picard retired to a grape farm in France. How did he get that perk? Can anyone have a grape farm in France?
SciFi has an inherent power imbalance between the fleet and grounders. This comes from the ability to move around and drop bombs on people. As much as they try to stay in a socialist paradise, they still have tons of incidents that end up being solved the starfleet way.
It's a quote from starship troopers, but the idea of "Service guarantees citizenship" is what draws fascists to SciFi. It's a tough problem to fix in fiction and most of the time it's overlooked because spaceships are cool on paper. They make great entertainment.
The reality is that serving in the federation usually would mean you've never been on a starship bridge. You're 20 levels down in a maintenance hold with no outside view. Nobody tells you shit and all you know is the ship is being fired at and you're fucking terrified.
Even if you can pull up an external view on your tablet (which is a massive security problem), you still don't have any control over the fight. Now you can watch torpedoes coming straight at you and realize the captain can't stop it, and you can't either..
Morale would be constantly in the toilet, and without a bigger reward than to explore strange new worlds you can't see from the hold, people would be constantly quitting.
In conclusion, I'm not saying that star trek is fascist. I'm just saying it hand waves away 90% of the problems with their alleged utopia and people like watching action packed SciFi adventures.
I have a whole separate rant about weapons like lasers that travel at the speed of light. In the real world most fights would happen across distances, with ships being undetectable against the blackness of space, until a beam comes out of nowhere and instantly destroys your ship. But because it's fiction you can ignore this.
FRIENDLY NOTE: I don't mean this to sound combative, I just want to offer a different (more optimistic) perspective.
What's missing here is the central conceit of Trek: that humanity grew up. We could have a utopia now if people would just stop being greedy little shits, and decided to embrace empathy and forgiveness. There's nothing stopping every single person in a modern conflict from dropping their weapons, but we still want vengeance and punishment. and I'm not saying I'm above that: someone kills someone I love, and I'm going to want blood. On paper I'm against capital punishment, but I know if I was faced with a war on my doorstep, bombs being dropped, my morals may not hold.
In Star Trek, they had WW3/the Eugenics Wars, and after that...humanity finally had enough. Never again, but for all the ills of humanity, in a way.
So very few people in the Trek world would actually complain about working a shit detail, because they're in it for the greater good. We saw in TNG episodes that randos from the 20th century could just waltz around the ship at their leisure, and how lax security is...because people just generally behaved well. Humanity really did bind themselves to a stronger social contract, if that's the right term.
As for needing ships: there seem to be plenty of civilian ships out there, from trading and light exploration to proper science vessels. Not all Starfleet, though the shows have focused on them. So I can only imagine there's plenty of opportunity for non-Starfleet folks to get out there.
Granted, DS9 pushed back on all this a little, as the Maquis are comprised of a lot of Federation members that went feral/colonial and don't hold themselves to the Federation ideals that seem to keep the rest of humanity and others acting in good faith at almost all times. Likewise still plenty of BadMirals out there, and they do show the Tom Paris-es of the world in some kind of prison, so it's not all roses, and could definitely be spun as drops of dystopia in a utopia, but we're also told (and have no reason to doubt) that it's all well-above board, humane, and focused on rehabilitation instead of punishment.
Also, all that said, I do wish it wasn't so hierarchical, but that's my anarchist streak flaring up.
To reply to myself, because it merits its own giant text box: for anarchist-minded folks like myself, I'd highly recommend reading Homage to Catalonia, because it gives some glimpse of how things might work in a less-hierarchical military (in the cases like in Trek's Starfleet that weapons are sometimes unfortunately needed).
The essential point of the system was social equality between
officers and men. Everyone from general to private drew the same pay,
ate the same food, wore the same clothes, and mingled on terms of
complete equality. If you wanted to slap the general commanding the
division on the back and ask him for a cigarette, you could do so, and
no one thought it curious. In theory at any rate each militia was a
democracy and not a hierarchy. It was understood that orders had to be
obeyed, but it was also understood that when you gave an order you gave
it as comrade to comrade and not as superior to inferior. There were
officers and N.C.O.s but there was no military rank in the ordinary
sense; no titles, no badges, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had
attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working
model of the classless society. Of course there was no perfect equality,
but there was a nearer approach to it than I had ever seen or than I
would have thought conceivable in time of war.
But I admit that at first sight the state of affairs at the front
horrified me. How on earth could the war be won by an army of this type?
It was what everyone was saying at the time, and though it was true it
was also unreasonable. For in the circumstances the militias could not
have been much better than they were. A modern mechanized army does not
spring up out of the ground, and if the Government had waited until it
had trained troops at its disposal, Franco would never have been
resisted. Later it became the fashion to decry the militias, and
therefore to pretend that the faults which were due to lack of training
and weapons were the result of the equalitarian system. Actually, a newly
raised draft of militia was an undisciplined mob not because the
officers called the private 'Comrade' but because raw troops are always an undisciplined mob. In practice the democratic
'revolutionary' type of discipline is more reliable than might be
expected. In a workers' army discipline is theoretically voluntary. It
is based on class-loyalty, whereas the discipline of a bourgeois
conscript army is based ultimately on fear. (The Popular Army that
replaced the militias was midway between the two types.) In the militias
the bullying and abuse that go on in an ordinary army would never have
been tolerated for a moment. The normal military punishments existed,
but they were only invoked for very serious offences. When a man refused
to obey an order you did not immediately get him punished; you first
appealed to him in the name of comradeship. Cynical people with no
experience of handling men will say instantly that this would never
'work', but as a matter of fact it does 'work' in the long run. The
discipline of even the worst drafts of militia visibly improved as time
went on. In January the job of keeping a dozen raw recruits up to the
mark almost turned my hair grey. In May for a short while I was
acting-lieutenant in command of about thirty men, English and Spanish.
We had all been under fire for months, and I never had the slightest
difficulty in getting an order obeyed or in getting men to volunteer for
a dangerous job. 'Revolutionary' discipline depends on political
consciousness--on an understanding of why orders must be obeyed; it
takes time to diffuse this, but it also takes time to drill a man into
an automaton on the barrack-square. The journalists who sneered at the
militia-system seldom remembered that the militias had to hold the line
while the Popular Army was training in the rear. And it is a tribute to
the strength of 'revolutionary' discipline that the militias stayed in
the field at all. For until about June 1937 there was nothing to keep
them there, except class loyalty. Individual deserters could be
shot--were shot, occasionally--but if a thousand men had decided to walk
out of the line together there was no force to stop them. A conscript
army in the same circumstances--with its battle-police removed--would
have melted away. Yet the militias held the line, though God knows they
won very few victories, and even individual desertions were not common.
In four or five months in the P.O.U.M. militia I only heard of four men
deserting, and two of those were fairly certainly spies who had enlisted
to obtain information. At the beginning the apparent chaos, the general
lack of training, the fact that you often had to argue for five minutes
before you could get an order obeyed, appalled and infuriated me. I had
British Army ideas, and certainly the Spanish militias were very unlike
the British Army. But considering the circumstances they were better
troops than one had any right to expect.
I mean yah, the vertical integration, means tested everything, nostalgia bating and assembly line techniques that Disney does sure do ruin otherwise fine properties.
“No, I don’t mind that, that’s just good business. I just hate the gay people who kissed in the background”
Recently had an argument with my conservative father, he's always been big into Trek and Wars, and I had just started really watching Trek again, never watched a lot of the shows all the way through. So this father of mine started going on about how woke Trek was now, and I just lost it on him, I just get so tired of the "anti-woke" nonsense and he just finds some way to insert it into every conversation. So I was like "oh no, not woke Star Trek, the series about a socialist utopia, the series that holds the title of "the American show with the first interracial kiss", the show where Kirk throws his dick at every species with a quim, the show that had a Ruskie character in the middle of the f'n Red Scare." Star Trek was always woke, and my father was always too dumb, racially biased, and narcissistic to pick up on the lessons that they were trying to teach us when he watched it as a child in the 60's.
I have not even tried to bring up Star Wars since the Disney acquisition, I'm sure my father has an insufferable take on that series now as well.
It is worth noting that the rapist Bill O'Reilly knew, because it was so blindly obviously a parody of him, and whatever else you might say of him he isn't outright stupid.
The interesting bit is Ol Rapey Bill has quotes about Jan 6th saying his Fox would never have downplayed or enabled it, and yet, he's now supporting Trump in 2024.
It's almost like the actual truth doesn't matter to them. Like they just want a comfortable lie that benefits them personally, some kind of "Truthiness" perhaps.
Any echo chamber can produce illusory truth effect. Repeated exposure to misinformation can result in a person failing to identify it as a lie, and begin to register it as fact and the lie gets amplified.
One of the smartest people i knew was a former systems designer for NASA, I live close enough to the Cape to watch every launch from my backyard, anyway, this guy definitely worked for NASA, had his office decorated with the Patents that he held, really smart guy, complete conspiracy nut who was immediately on the Trump train.
I've always loved conspiracies too and we got along through that stuff, but then he went down the rabbit hole of Right wing and Russian propaganda/disinformation and no matter how much i tried to prove everything wrong, with good evidence, he went deeper down that hole, he died during COVID and one of the last things he sent me was about the "stolen election", it was after January 6, to which my reply was "do you mean the 2016 election or the 2000 election?" and never got a response back and I'd heard he passed away a few months later from a mutual friend.
My dad navigated satellites and exploration probes for NASA his entire career, even doing work in getting better climate data. He's a total MAGA and FOX loyalist now. Misses Bill O'Reilly and Tucker Carlson.
The educated laborers that perform highly skilled labor convince themselves that they have it better than everyone else because Capitalism worked and selected for them, it's a comfy and delusional position to hold that requires having absolutely zero self-awareness. Unfortunately common.
Same with conservative Fallout fans that somehow unironically think it's pro-Capitalism, despite nearly every instance of actual Capitalism and not just bartering being absurdly evil.
The non-woke Trekkies (or do they call themselves Trekkers? ) didn't think about interracial kisses or the post-scarcity society in which capitalists were small-time traders. They see Captain Kirk running roughshod over other societies and turning them into America (see The Apple and A Taste of Armageddon ) which was more about 60s Hollywood imagining cold war United States as the height of civilization.
The Next Generation dared to imagine a more internationalist sense of culture and got into the notion that even extremely weird aliens might be deserving of civil rights. But by DS9 the Federation was reimagined as a failing coalition with multiple rising renegade factions and worlds teeming with disregarded peoples. The story became less about rising to ideals and more about dealing with grimdark realities and compromising principles to preserve status quo.
Then the Kelvin Timeline Reboot got J. J. Abrams'd and Paramount got litigeous about fan films it previously endorsed and I became so disgusted with the state of Trek, I divested myself from it. Star Wars would suffer a similar fate, and I don't watch many movies these days.
