TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

People forget.

Okay, setting aside for a moment just how extremely damaging it is for a person to be a slave - lacking autonomy even over one's very body, legally unable to provide either consent or negation for anything at all - the system of slavery is even more damaging to the "owner" class. Something about treating others in such a demeaning, dehumanizing manner that hollows our your own soul/spirit (I don't mean here in like a religious sense but rather the core of who we are).

This is what made Star Trek The Next Generation so incredibly amazing. Even people within that very universe - like Doctor Pulaski - refused to see Data as a "person", regardless of the fact that he's definitely not human. So it's not that the Federation upheld whatever bullshit "principles" than few truly followed (c'mon, people broke those principles, and also the rules, on an episode to episode basis!), it's that Picard himself did, personally.

And against the backdrop of the Federation at least striving to live up to those principles too.

But irl, people are much more mundane. Yeah there's types like Putin who would enslave humans - it doesn't matter that they are fully "human", only whether useful or not to his goals - and others such as Bezos or Zuckerberg or Musk or the much less successful Huffman. But then there's also those who simply don't uphold their principles in their own daily lives, thus allowing the system to creep into decay as surely as if it were attacked outright. We needed people more like Picard. But I've never met even one person like that, irl?

Hence it is a fantasy, as much as The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars or Stargate or whatever, it does not correspond to reality.

And yet in its hyper realistic (caricature?) state it all the more reflects the principles that everyday we all live out. Like just because others are racist or misogynistic, does not mean that I have to be, or to go along with such? What would Picard do?