We Klingons believe as you do — the sick should die.  Only the strong should live.

Kras, “Friday’s Child” (s2ep11), stardate 3497.2

Friday’s Child is an episode of Star Trek from the second season,¹ which pits both the Federation and Klingons in political competition over mining rights to a planet of really tall people with funny hats.

Whether it was intentional or not, it is also an episode contrasting two modes of thinking: one is an individualist, darwinian view-point (e.g. only the strong survive) promoted by the Klingon Empire versus a community-oriented, social-democratic viewpoint (e.g. for the good of many). The United Federation of Planets obviously favors the latter.

It’s not hard to find people who favor one approach to society over the other. Some strongly so.

For the sake of transparency, I prefer the community-oriented, social-democratic approach. I grew up pretty poor and had to rely on free school lunches, tuition programs for college and such, and thanks to those, I was able to grow and ultimately succeed. So, if it works for me, I believe others should benefit too.

I think this is also a very Buddhist outlook – the suffering of others is ultimately our suffering too, and vice-versa.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have to care for our own needs though. Looking back to the philosophy of Epicurus,² we can see that a perfectly reasonable approach is a quietest, isolated lifestyle, focused on just living a good life and not getting tangled in things.

But that’s not usually how it ends up.

For much of history, regardless of time or place, a privileged class rises to the top, whether it be ancient priesthoods, warrior classes, Party members, or corporate CEOs. Some rise to the top due to a mixture of time, place, money, and talent. And, for every one person that rises, many more are pushed down. Some are left behind to wither and die. “That’s the way things go”, some might say. The strong survive and the weak perish, so the thinking goes.

Kras the Klingon in this episode speaks much like the ancient Spartans did. They would not hesitate to leave sickly babies to die to exposure, and train the young constantly in rigid military training. People see this and admire the Spartans for their prowess, and revere them as an archetypal elite class of warriors.

And yet there are some glaring issues with this

First, even by the standards of slavery in the ancient world, Sparta as a city-state had an egregious system, where a large underclass (3-7 times larger than the Spartans) of helot slaves who did all the manual toil. The elite Sparta class thus used their time to focus on training. One can easily imagine plantations like those in the Antebellum South where workers toiled endlessly for nothing, while the landed gentry sat around and pursued the “gentlemanly arts”.

Second, for such a carefully engineered system, the Spartans actually lost a lot of battles. Setting aside the famous battle of Thermopylae which was immortalized as a film of naked, sweaty men in 300, the Spartan army lost frequently. A couple generations later, the Thebans under Epaminondas used clever strategy to smash the Spartans at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC despite being a smaller army. Rather than making the Spartans stronger, their system made them more brittle and inflexible.

Third, by creating such an elitist society, the Spartans couldn’t replenish their numbers. They couldn’t rely on helots as soldiers, since they hated the Spartans, and the Spartans couldn’t seriously stomach the idea of serving alongside former slaves. By their cruelty they had painted themselves into a corner.

Thus, each time Sparta lost a battle, its numbers got smaller and smaller until the Roman Republic just steamrolled them. The Roman Republic, by contrast, had a pretty open and flexible recruitment process so they could field huge armies quickly and furnish more if they lost (which admittedly they also did, but their long-term prospects were a lot better than the Spartans).

So, I suppose the moral of the story here (ethics notwithstanding) is that a society based on the premise that only the best and strongest survive ironically leads to an increasingly rigid and brittle society that cannot sustain itself. Diversity and mutual well-being strengthen society, not weaken it.

¹ I think most classic Trek fans would agree that the second half of season one through the first half of season two was peak Trek. I still love season 3 for a variety of reasons, but admittedly the quality of writing was best during earlier seasons.

² Epicurean philosophy gets a bad rap because “epicurean” means something different now. But Epicurus advocated a “quietist” approach, a life of solitude and non-involvement, surrounded by friends. Something vaguely akin to Chinese Taoism. He did not teach hedonism.