Why There's No Public Urination In The ‘Star Trek’ Utopian Future
No Neutral Zone here.
Homelessness remains a significant problem in American cities, and often it can seem as if vocal segments of the far left don’t want to resolve the issue but rather inure us to it. Someone on social media mentioned that her husband was horrified to see an obviously disturbed woman pull down her pants and urinate on the New York subway. That’s a normal reaction to an alarming event, but someone instead smugly replied, “I’ve been on the subway with homeless people that peed, screamed, all sorts of stuff. It was mildly uncomfortable but truly didn’t impact my day in any way. Maybe your husband needs to toughen up.”
I lived in New York from 1996 until 2011. I rode the subway regularly and rarely encountered anything like this — OK, there was the old woman who stripped nude on the A train, but that was at 5 a.m. and was my punishment for letting a friend talk me into going to the Tunnel. Usually, my experience on the subway was not like foolishly entering Room 237 from The Shining. When friends and family visited me, I made a point of reassuring them that New York wasn’t like their worst nightmares in 3D smell-o-vision. I wouldn’t have had many visitors if I told them that public urination was a common event but they needed to “toughen up.”
Someone from San Francisco also boasted online that he’d “stepped in poop maybe six times in 30 years.” (It’s unclear if those six times were spread out evenly or if he had a bad couple years but is now on a feces-free streak.) I should clarify that they don’t actually pay you to live in New York, San Francisco, or any major city. It’s actually quite the reverse. Back when New York and San Francisco were notoriously “gritty,” the cost of living was also much lower. If I still lived in New York but paid $3,5000 a month for the equivalent of Travis Bickle’s run-down apartment in Taxi Driver, I might also wish that a “real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.”
My personal liberalism doesn’t involve learning to coexist with human misery. I don’t consider that a societal positive. It’s also not at all kind. In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Past Tense,” one of those classic “transporter malfunctions” sends Commander Sisko, Dr. Bashir, and Lt. Dax to the distant past of August 2024. (The episode aired in 1995 so it took place almost 30 years in the future for viewers at the time.) Earth was not yet a futuristic utopia. Homelessness was an even greater problem. Cops assume the weirdly dressed people with no money are vagrants and escort them to one of San Francisco’s sanctuary districts — sealed-off ghettos that contain the poor, sick, and mentally disabled. You know this is fantasy because housing in the sanctuary district is affordable. (Watch below.)
The issue with the sanctuary districts isn’t simply that the residents are “out of sight and out of mind” but that they live this way at all. Sisko doesn’t point out that in the 24th Century people freely live in tents on the streets, and Bashir doesn’t boast about only stepping in human feces half a dozen times while living in San Francisco — leading a puzzled Sisko to ask if that number was spread out or if he had a rough first month in the city.
Sisko and Bashir view extreme poverty and homelessness as problems that society can fix, not something the more fortunate should blithely tolerate as evidence of some perverse urban “sophistication.” Their future is less performative and more constructive. (Watch below.)
BASHIR: Every building we go to, it’s the same story. They can’t all be full.
SISKO: Don’t be so sure. One of the main complaints against the sanctuary districts was overcrowding. It got to the point where they didn’t care how many people were in here. They just wanted to keep them out of sight.
BASHIR: And once they were out of sight, what then? I mean, look at this man. There’s no need for that man to live like that. With the right medication, he could lead a full and normal life.
SISKO: Maybe in our time.
BASHIR: Not just in our time. There are any number of effective treatments for schizophrenia, even in this day and age. They could cure that man now, today, if they gave a damn.
Of course, mental illness — and certainly drug addiction — is not so easily cured. “They”— i.e. the government — could cure that man, but he would want to seek help. If he refuses because he doesn’t like the side effects or believes that vaccines make you impotent, the government can’t force him to comply or stop listening to Nicki Minaj.
However, maybe the Star Trek future has found a cure for oppositional defiance disorder, which prevents many people from leading a “full and normal life.” As a child, the ODD symptoms that emerge include arguing with adults/authority figures, refusing to do what an adult/authority figure asks, and always questioning rules and refusing to follow the most basic ones. This becomes pathological within adulthood and makes it difficult if not impossible for someone to function in an ordered society, no matter how many replicators exist.
When I was a college student, I interviewed a street performer in Athens, Georgia. He was effectively homeless, traveling aimlessly, and playing the guitar for tips downtown. He was a nice guy with long hair like the lead singer from Tesla who complained about “Signs,” but when he described his life to me, even my 20-year-old self wondered why he couldn’t just follow simple rules. He seemed to exist in defiance of them all, for no logical reason than they exist in the first place. “Landlords think they own the land and they lord it over you!” he proclaimed. “Why should you pay a security deposit to live someplace? They are assuming you’ll damage their property, which is just property, man.” (I don’t know what happened to him since the mid-1990s. Maybe he moved to Portland, Oregon, and successfully ran for City Council.)
In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Neutral Zone,” the unfrozen businessman from the 1980s uses the comm panel to summon Picard like he’s captain of the Love Boat. When Picard tells the creep that the comm panel is only for official ship business, the businessman does his version of whining about “signs.”
“If they’re so important, why don’t they use an executive key,” he asks Picard, who patiently — well, for a Frenchman — explains, “That isn’t necessary. We are all capable of exercising self-discipline.” This is a future where oppositional defiance disorder has been magically eliminated. (Watch below.)
Most of the desperate residents of the sanctuary districts depicted on Deep Space Nine don’t have issues with drugs or mental illness. They don’t demonstrate anti-social behavior. They simply need jobs and housing. As an old expression goes, their problems could vanish with a single phone call. However, they probably do the sort of work that Star Trek’s equally utopian technology later renders redundant.
“A lot has changed in the past three hundred years,” Picard tells the obvious 1980s Donald Trump analogue. “People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy.”
The 1980s tycoon insists that his uber capitalism “has never been about possessions. It’s about power … to control your life, your destiny.”
“That kind of control is an illusion,” Picard replies.
However, the premise of a post-scarcity utopia argues that providing for everyone’s basic needs does grant people the power to control their lives and destiny, but that type of control is also an illusion.
Star Trek never explains how its post-scarcity, non-capitalist utopia actually works. Who needs movers when you can teleport your belongings to your new home in seconds? Who needs restaurants or coffee shops when replicators can produce anything you might desire? Not everyone can work in Starfleet, after all — not when Klingons and androids took all the good jobs.
“This is the 24th Century,” Picard tells the 1980s businessman before sending him back to a very different Earth. “Material needs no longer exist.” That’s an adorable sentiment.
“Then what’s the challenge?” the businessman wonders. This is a reasonable question, and Picard’s answer is from a self-help Instagram page: “The challenge is to improve yourself, enrich yourself.”
One of the unfrozen humans’ listed profession is “homemaker,” which confuses Data who assumes she worked in construction. See, in the utopian future, stay-at-home mothers are as obsolete as greedy corporate tycoons. That’s very on-brand 1980s liberalism, and I might have agreed at the time. Now, I consider parenthood an ongoing opportunity for self-improvement and personal enrichment.
In “Past Tense,” Bashir tells Sisko, “Causing people to suffer because you hate them is terrible, but causing people to suffer because you have forgotten how to care? That's really hard to understand.”
I’d argue that this also applies to some liberals who insist they care about the homeless and distressed. Rather than actually confronting the issue, they pour on the gaslight and argue that tents erected on city sidewalks and public transit that functions as homeless shelters are “normal” — something that we should just ignore or “get over.” They claim that demanding a clean, safe orderly society is effectively fascism. Yet, that was never the future Star Trek offered. When the Enterprise crew visits Starfleet headquarters in San Francisco, they don’t dodge human feces on the streets. Disturbed people don’t scream vulgar comments at Counselor Troi. No one pees on Data. The future is a paradise because everyone has accepted their responsibility to make it so.
If liberals don’t address the problems of homelessness and crime, people are going to let the conservatives do it. Look at the societal reactions to urban life in the 1970s and 1980s. Bernard Goetz became a hero to many, as Daniel Penny did more recently.
Only a fool would lament the loss of “gritty” cities (they’re welcome to spend some time in Baltimore if they still want that). It also—to use an overused insult—shows their privilege. The urban poor certainly don’t like having to live in fear of everything from harassment to serious crime.
Homelessness is a hard problem to solve, but “accept it” is not much of an answer.
We have the wealthiest society that has ever existed. To accept that there's a growing number of people who are homeless is a deliberate choice. And a whole lot of people just retreat into judging those who are on the street. There aren't enough permanent beds and all the social services are fucked. Americans also love to kick people when they're down, so they make social service acquisition as painful as possible.
We could house the homeless but we choose not to, as a national priority. Now there is going to be a movement where the pricktator says something to the effect of "I don't want people to have a house if they didn't work so hard."