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Patrick Stewart taught us what good men do with power

https://www.vox.com/politics/508526/patrick-stewart-jean-luc-picard-star-trek-liberalism
82•rhaynes•59m ago

Comments

tqi•49m ago
I think looking to popular entertainment for thought leadership is silly.
rhaynes•47m ago
Would you have said the same thing in Shakespeare's time?
vigilantpuma•45m ago
Or Homer’s?
tqi•30m ago
Yes, mostly?

My feeling is that while enjoyable and thought provoking, TNG is still a work of fiction, and as such favored entertainment and legibility within a 45 minute window over nuance or subtly. That meant there were clear distinctions between "good" and "bad" sides, and scenarios often felt like they were constructed backwards from an outcome/clever solution.

I think that in turn causes people to view the real world in the same way, except they are always the "good" side and solutions that require compromise and tradeoffs are seen as unacceptable failures.

Arainach•15m ago
Most things are to some degree works of fiction. The public personas of the rich and powerful are generally curated representations of how they want you to see them, and that isn't a new phenomenon.
fullshark•45m ago
I get my thought leadership from my LinkedIn feed.
PaulDavisThe1st•45m ago
Where do you prefer to look instead?
ajeet_dhaliwal•42m ago
I disagree, Captain Picard was a role model for me as a young boy and really helped me understand what a good leader, a good man, and what wisdom looks like. My dad died when I was young and this character very much helped me. Books, movies etc can inspire people including on leadership principles.
CursedSilicon•41m ago
The Americans elected a sub-par actor as their leader

Twice

criddell•32m ago
Three times. Nixon was a stage actor and in fact that’s how he met his wife, Pat (she was also an actor).
whalabi•41m ago
Sci fi is not for "thought leadership".

In this case it's like a what if: what if humans were the best they could be.

And that couldn't be less silly.

dyyd3333•28m ago
Maybe it doesn't have to be.
Avicebron•40m ago
I mean, some of the richest most influential people of our time are operating from a handful of science fiction books. Star trek is at least tonally more humanitarian than Snow Crash.
andyjohnson0•38m ago
I disagree. I'm not a Trekkie, but the character was imbued with sufficient depth, by the writers as well as Stewart's performance, that I think the article works.
orev•38m ago
I’ve often wondered if The Office inadvertently trained people to be bad managers.

People tend to follow examples they’ve seen before, even if they know it was a bad one. When faced with a new situation, they might just parrot the bad behavior because it’s the only example they know.

swed420•21m ago
> I’ve often wondered if The Office inadvertently trained people to be bad managers.

Maybe it exacerbated it, but The Office was mostly a documentary of preexisting behavior.

This is a classic breakdown:

https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...

Droobfest•14m ago
The nice thing about Michael Scott is that while he is a self-absorbed and very flawed manager and human, he also genuinely cares a great deal about his employees.
add-sub-mul-div•36m ago
Imagine this was an issue you were neutral on and someone proposed to you that culture is somehow isolated in a bubble, not interrelated with the rest of society. You'd laugh off that idea immediately. You'd go to bed still thinking about the guy who, faced with an idea he didn't like, pretended that culture in general should go away.
tqi•26m ago
I'm not saying that it is isolated, I'm saying that it has too much influence.
swatcoder•31m ago
"Thought leadership" is a troubling idea altogether (is that something you look for?), but socially reflecting on stories is ancient and presumably universal. Hardly silly!
BugsJustFindMe•31m ago
It's hard to imagine anyone not understanding the value of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory but here we are I guess.
Teever•28m ago
Why? To do so is to deny the power that fiction has in society.

An interesting question to ask: Is the world a better place because of the existence of Star Trek and the influences that it has on society?

How can we improve society with fiction?

DonHopkins•25m ago
Yeah, we should look to Shakespeare for thought leadership, since he's not popular.

Patrick Stewart as Macbeth ("Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZnaXDRwu84

  Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
  That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
  And then is heard no more. It is a tale
  Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
  Signifying nothing.
gmerc•23m ago
People seem to forget that stories and acting were the primary way of passing along critical lessons for surviving and building civilisation and human best practices befoee we came up with self help books and entertainment
happytoexplain•23m ago
That's actually a major function of fiction. Remember, it's written by real people.
fph•21m ago
And science fiction in particular: it is meant to be a reflection on reality.
nilamo•15m ago
Yes it's much more important to look at real figures making impact today. Such as... um... wait a second, I'm sure there has to be a few...
ip26•9m ago
Stories are like thought experiments. I agree that blindly trusting you should “be like this” is silly, but the story works through the preconditions and consequences with you.
vigilantpuma•42m ago
Big fan of Star Trek and Picard is my captain forever, but this credit seems more due to Gene Roddenberry.
cassianoleal•30m ago
This very much. Post-Roddenberry Trek mostly misses the point.
throwaway27448•22m ago
Yes it becomes space liberalism rather than space communism.
Avicebron•14m ago
Hilariously this was also around the time that the Ferengi started being written more sympathetically.
flatline•15m ago
Yes and no. DS9 plays with things at the edges, much like Ian Banks’ novels deal with the behavior that lies at the edge of the Culture and is part of what permits a utopian society to exist at all. It cuts directly to the question of when and if martial force —or other, more subversive mechanisms of power — must be deployed for protection against a force that threatens the existence of an otherwise non-violent society. I think these are criticisms of visions like Roddenberry’s without necessarily undermining them or missing the point entirely. I also think it’s been an ongoing commentary on modern civilization as much as speculative fiction.

Some of the other series and movies miss the point more dramatically for me by just becoming space opera. Star Trek was always political.

throwaway27448
MitPitt•39m ago
Patrick Stewart or the show writers? I'm not a fan of equating TV character personalities to actors.
whalabi•36m ago
They messed up the title. The title tag on the page is "Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard taught us what good men do with power | Vox"

I imagine it was too long and because he just died they chose to use his name.

rhaynes•7m ago
Yes, and I think that unfortunately with the latest "Picard" series, it shows that writers were the unsung heroes of TNG. At the same time, the actors make us believe the story. They get most of the popular credit of course and the writers should be acknowledged more (and even brought back as mentors... can we get an inspiring vision of Trek this century?), but had I been born in a different time and place and fortunate enough to land a writing job on TNG, I would be proud of what the whole team accomplished in their hour upon the stage.
umvi•23m ago
He's fictional though... It's easy to make a fictional ideal leader. How about real life examples? "Dalinar Kholin taught us what good men do with power" vs. "George Washington ..."
adrianN•16m ago
An important function of fiction is showing us things to aspire to that are not quite possible in real life.
jacquesm•16m ago
As opposed to Gorbachev?

Gandhi?

Mandela?

rhaynes•3m ago
The title didn't start with "Only"
fnord77•14m ago
He was a fictional leader. In a fictional utopia.
throw8393038•5m ago
Star Trek and Jean-Luc Picard is horrible example of leadersnip! Every time he meets real danger, he gets his crew needlesly killed to make empty gestures!

Like with Q, he has to give lectures to literal god! Perhaps shut up for 5 minutes to get more information?

Or when meeting borg...?

Veliladon•5m ago
One of the most interesting things about the clip where Picard defends Data's humanity is the pronouns. Picard consistently uses he/him to refer to Data while Maddox uses it/them. Captain Louvois uses he/him during her ruling. Then, once all is said and done, Maddox finally calls Data by "he".
_wire_•4m ago
Star Trek is cultish ideological juju in the form of swashbuckling egomania and theme park vacation.

Look at the colors: a tribe of C-suite nerds zip around in an atomic powered space-faring Hyatt Regency trying to train the universe to Taylorize all production methods. Its protagonists are utterly entitled and classist, who teach war as the essential force by which their lives incur meaning.

It's is a soap-operatic long tail of Western empire indulging in fatuous "adventure", which amounts literally beaming into alien realms to cause disturbance and justifying it through dominion or ignorance, while the executives try to believe they've moved beyond themselves so they can feel noble.

As a dramatic art, the show offers some moments of transcendence, but these end up sequestered to the commercial dictates of the franchise, which is an epic advert for consumerist Americana.

I feel deep suspicion about anyone who regards cosplay as instructive about what makes for "good men with power". And as Vox is a notable outlet in the great system of commercial attention-whoring that defines our culture, I feel double the suspicion.

Also See:

Phase IV (1974) Futureworld (1976) Lathe of Heaven (1980)

ralgo•3m ago
The essential Picard Episodes of TNG The Measure of a Man (S2E9) Q Who (S2E16) The Best of Both Worlds (S3E26 & S4E1) The Drumhead (S4E21) Darmok (S5E2) The Inner Light (S5E25) Tapestry (S6E15)

A pretty good use of six hours.

•
22m ago
I disagree. Not only did he continually & substantially contribute to Picard's character, it clearly aligns with his own values and ethics as demonstrated over and over in interviews. Why not both? That seems like the obviously best perspective.
jimmySixDOF•22m ago
...who who once said "The strength of a civilization is not measured by its ability to fight wars, but rather by its ability to prevent them" which I find very Trecklike. Live long and Prosper.
rhaynes•15m ago
In part, yes of course. One thing that I respect a lot about Roddenberry was that when Isaac Asimov gave Star Trek a "bad review" publicly, he reached out and asked for feedback. They ended up becoming friends and Asimov helped advise him on the character development of Kirk and Spock's friendship that became central to the original series.

But, if you watch the first season of TNG, it feels like there is a turning point where Patrick Stewart starts taking the role seriously (Symbiosis) and understands that he's depicting Starfleet as an institution and the restrictions (the prime directive) that institutions must enforce. The fellow actors also seem to take the series more seriously after that episode while before it felt campy.

It's clear he brought a gravitas to the role that inspired a team of young/new actors around him. As he later joked in Making it So, he once took things too seriously on set yelling "We're not here to have fun!" It became more than a job/role to him and in doing so he and the other actors inspired a science-inclined subset of a generation and brought Roddenberry's utopia vision to life.

ajkjk•14m ago
it does also take an actor to sell the vision of a character. an unconvincing portrayal would make the vision seem more like a farce or caricature and if anything undermines the morals

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