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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9580505" data-attributes="member: 18">For sure, different cultures have different ideas of what meritocracy is.I mean, the Prime Directive is a utopian directive. Utopian doesn't mean perfection, it means striving for enlightened goals, striving for better, more perfect society. The Prime Directive is enlightened in precisely that, it's just that it's not yet perfect in how it is applied. Had there been no Prime Directive, far more harm would likely have been done, and the Federation might easily have turned into essentially an exploitative colonialist machine, possibly even a war machine.The mistake is seeing the Prime Directive as this sort of "barrier to helping people". In the vast majority of situations, they don't need help. Only when are things are truly desperate or the Federation has already screwed up in some way does it become a problem. And then its clear that it can circumvented, unless the Captain is an ABSOLUTE DUNCE called Archer. The meritocracy sure failed on that one!Also the Prime Directive isn't just protecting societies from Federation interference, it's protecting the Federation from itself, as it were, because it would be so, so easy to start landing on every planet with sentients and indoctrinating them into Federation ways. But the utopians of the Federation believe its better to avoid that. You can say they're wrong, but they're striving in a very utopian way.</blockquote>