Looks like “Acquisition,” the Ferengi-themed episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, will rerun on Heroes & Icons tonight, Sunday night. Well, technically in the first wee hour of Monday. Depends on your time zone, too.
The premise of the episode is that Ferengi pirates believe that the Enterprise NX-01, commanded by Captain Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula), carries a lot of gold.
It’s one of the better Ferengi-themed episodes in all of Star Trek, in my opinion; they are somewhat hit and miss. I don’t want to give spoilers, so let's just say that the Ferengi will probably leave disappointed.
In talking about this episode, it is mandatory to mention that the Ferengi never say the name of their species nor the name of their home planet (Ferenginar), so Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) of the USS Stargazer (and later the Enterprise NCC-1701-D) still gets to make first contact.
The Ferengi have evolved since they were first introduced on Star Trek: The Next Generation. So have the writers’ attitudes towards money, which will probably still exist in some form in the 24th Century.
For the original Star Trek, a lot of things hadn’t been decided, and there are several lines of dialogue that could be interpreted to mean that the Federation still uses money and that Starfleet pays servicemembers just as our U. S. Armed Forces do.
Just as easily those lines can be explained away as figures of speech. It could be that “earning your pay for the week” becomes a figure of speech with a forgotten origin much like biting bullets has become mostly unnecessary (and unlikely) with modern battlefield anesthesia.
By the time of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Roddenberry had firmly decided that the Federation does not use money, except sometimes to deal with peoples outside the Federation.
Remember the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Price,” in which the Federation was ready to pay millions of Federation credits for the Barzan wormhole?
Three Ferengi were also at the negotiating table, and their greed caused them to get lost in the Delta Quadrant (where they would later be found by the passing Voyager—“False Profits,” Star Trek: Voyager, another good Ferengi episode).
Technology changes the form of money, and Star Trek shows this. For example, in Archer’s time, the Ferengi considered gold valuable (remember that Star Trek: Enterprise, although produced after all the other Star Trek series currently airing on Heroes & Icons, takes place before all of them).
But by Picard’s time, the Ferengi considered gold worthless, perhaps useful only for containing the valuable but inconveniently liquid latinum. It’s my understanding that gold can be replicated but latinum cannot, for some reason or other.
Perhaps the most hilarious illustration of this is to be found in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Who Mourns for Morn?” which aired last night. Hiding in a shipping container, a pathetic Quark (Armin Shimmerman) is disappointed to find the bricks of gold that Morn’s associates are willing to kill each other for in fact contain no latinum whatsoever.
At the end of that episode, as Quark and Morn ponder what to do with the worthless gold (oops, that’s a spoiler for that episode), Quark suggests that there are still primitive cultures in which the people think gold is actually valuable.
It’s not just through the Ferengi that Star Trek criticizes our obsession with material accumulation. Ralph Offenhouse (Peter Mark Richman), the 20th Century businessman found cryogenically frozen by the Enterprise-D in the 24th Century is a caricature of greed only slightly more flattering than the Ferengi.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) explains to Offenhouse:
A lot has changed in the past three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We've eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We have grown out of our infancy.
Picard has an even more eloquent speech about this in Star Trek: First Contact:
The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves, and the rest of humanity.
Of course there are people who think that a society without money is just as much a fantasy as transporters and warp drive, and some of those people have worked on Star Trek.
One idea is that human want is unlimited, but even with replicators and abundant renewable energy, resources will always be limited. Not everyone can be captain of the Enterprise, for example. But isn't wanting to be captain a much nobler desire than wanting to have more money than your neighbors?
In an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) expresses the following wish for Paris and Torres's daughter: “May all her desires be fulfilled except for one, so she'll always have something to strive for.” There’s nothing wrong with having an unfulfilled desire, as long as that unfulfilled desire is not a basic necessity of life.
Screeds against the Star Trek conception of money almost always invariably complain that communism or socialism doesn't work. But when your baby has some awful disease and socialized medicine is there to take care of the treatment, socialism is a good thing.
There is something profoundly wrong in a society in which some people can work hard for forty or more hours a week and still not have enough for the basic necessities of life.
Maybe you can’t be captain of the Enterprise, but if you have to scrub the ship's plasma ducts, it's because of a sense of duty, not because you won’t get lunch otherwise. And who knows, maybe Picard would give you a hand with the scrubbing.
An entire book could be written about money in Star Trek, and in fact someone has already written precisely such a book: Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek, by Manu Saadia.
But we don’t have to wait for replicators and warp drive to become a better society. George Orwell understood that we have to overcome our demons, such as envy and hatred, which often manifest themselves as racism, in order to attain a fairer, more equitable society.
Although President Barack Obama has helped us take steps towards that fairer, more equitable society, getting there requires a conscious effort by everyone. We can’t just expect a few visionaries to do all the work.
The so-called “Obamaphones” are frequently derided as an example of government waste. But never mind who actually started the phones for the poor program, nor who actually pays for it.
There is almost always a racist undertone to the criticism of the phone program, and the people who deride it generally don't see a contradiction in also demanding that the poor get jobs. Yeah, just call me on an my imaginary android phone to schedule me a job interview.
Attitudes towards the Affordable Care Act (ACA, usually called “Obamacare”) have changed now that lots of white people have availed themselves. It’s easier for people to understand health care price gouging when they can see its impact on their own finances.
Even without the racist element, there might always be a resentment of people who seem to be getting something for nothing. I think that there will always be people who don't work as hard, or at all, yet their needs are provided for.
The much more important question than who is pulling their weight or not is what kind of moral values a given monetary system encourage or discourage. Our current monetary system rewards dishonesty and sometimes even treason. Speaking of treason… Donald Trump.
Under our current system, the rich can be lazy. Prime example: reality TV moron Donald Trump, described as “lazy” by Newsweek’s Alexander Nazaryan. Why bother to work hard when some Russian oligarch will bail you out if you go bankrupt? (Well, your company can go bankrupt, it supposedly does not reflect poorly on you).
Theoretically, anyone in the Federation could be lazy. In one alternate timeline, Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill) presumably served out his time in prison and then whiled away his days in some French pub until he met Harry Kim (Garrett Wang) from the main timeline.
Ultimately, though, why should we care if Tom Paris wastes away his life playing pool somewhere out of the way? The freedom to not always have to demonstrate that you’re actually contributing something to society is, in the big picture view of things, good for you and good for society at large.
When someone else is not obviously contributing to society, they’re goofing off. But when you are not obviously contributing to society, you’re getting ready to do so again. Lack of empathy towards others, that’s another failing we need to overcome as a society in order to become like that better society shown on Star Trek.
In the Next Generation episode “The Masterpiece Society,” Aaron Conor (John Snyder) asks:
Are there still people in your society who have not discovered who they really are, or what they were meant to do with their lives? They may be in the wrong job, they may be writing bad poetry. Or worse yet, they may be great poets working as laborers, never to be discovered.
I’m not advocating the genetically engineered society presented in that episode. But that “masterpiece” society is still in many ways better than what we have today.
The great poet among us today, working as a laborer, does that work not necessarily because he doesn’t realize he’s a great poet, but because he’ll starve otherwise. The pressure to earn a wage just for the basic necessities of life can be quite draining on the soul.
For the pursuit of happiness, the goal is much more attainable when one is not encumbered by the pursuit of material wealth.