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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9580382" data-attributes="member: 18">I think you could do a crime show for Star Trek, but you'd want to lean into the Trek vibes and make it more like Knives Out! than say CSI or Criminal Minds or whatever. I.e. some fancy guy goes around solving very rare and exotic crimes (rather than grimy and grim ones used in the exploitative ways those shows do). Realistically, with people having so many options, insanely good health care (including free and probably kinda mandatory mental health for all) and there being no scarcity, about 99% (literally!) of the pressures which make people commit serious crimes would be gone. There have been a few episodes like this, like there's one I think in an early season of TNG (maybe S1?) where some people try to fit up poor old Riker for murder (possibly a murder than never even happened).Plus with the tech they have, they'd be so good at solving anything but the most overwrought and exotic of crimes, that criminals could 100% expect to be caught, which would further lower any desire to commit serious crimes.Teleporters and the like would mean what law enforcement there was could be on the scene in literally seconds as well, meaning again, almost no-one would get away with stuff. Plus as you say realistically Trek Earth is probably essentially a surveillance state in the most benign way possible.The evidence for meritocracy is pretty weak. Starfleet appears to, IN THEORY be a meritocracy, but we see staggering numbers of mediocre individuals in extremely senior positions, which really undermines that, or suggests that it's the kind of meritocracy that's more focused on getting people in who are good at specific jobs. So the mediocre individuals are probably very good day-to-day managers, they just can't handle serious stuff or crises, because the meritocracy has shuffled those people into captain-type positions and is busy preventing them from being promoted too much because otherwise it'll need to find new good captains!As we know there are many elected positions outside of Starfleet, we know that The Federation as a whole cannot be hugely meritocratic except through the perceptions of the voters.Post-scarcity and ultra-socialist, certainly though, with hints of meritocracy. Traditionally meritocracies and socialism have tended to go hand-in-hand though. I always remember the Looking Glass videogame Terra Nova, and how funny I found it that they had this bunch of American-vibes Libertarian "frontiersman"-types as the heroes, and explicitly meritocratic socialists (explicitly!) with Soviet-vibes as the baddies, because even at the time it felt like this was very forced, and the bad guys were only "bad guys" because you have made them wear black, have "scary" haircuts and so on.</blockquote>

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