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Patrick Stewart taught us what good men do with power

122 points rhaynes 1 hour ago 70 comments

tqi 1 hour ago | parent

I think looking to popular entertainment for thought leadership is silly.

rhaynes 1 hour ago | parent

Would you have said the same thing in Shakespeare's time?

vigilantpuma 1 hour ago | parent

Or Homer’s?

tqi 51 minutes ago | parent

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 36 minutes ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

I get my thought leadership from my LinkedIn feed.

PaulDavisThe1st 1 hour ago | parent

Where do you prefer to look instead?

ajeet_dhaliwal 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

The Americans elected a sub-par actor as their leader

Twice

criddell 53 minutes ago | parent

Three times. Nixon was a stage actor and in fact that’s how he met his wife, Pat (she was also an actor).

whalabi 1 hour ago | parent

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 49 minutes ago | parent

Maybe it doesn't have to be.

Avicebron 1 hour ago | parent

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 59 minutes ago | parent

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 59 minutes ago | parent

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 42 minutes ago | parent

> 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 35 minutes ago | parent

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 57 minutes ago | parent

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 47 minutes ago | parent

I'm not saying that it is isolated, I'm saying that it has too much influence.

BugsJustFindMe 52 minutes ago | parent

It's hard to imagine anyone not understanding the value of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory but here we are I guess.

Teever 49 minutes ago | parent

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 46 minutes ago | parent

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 44 minutes ago | parent

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 44 minutes ago | parent

That's actually a major function of fiction. Remember, it's written by real people.

fph 42 minutes ago | parent

And science fiction in particular: it is meant to be a reflection on reality.

nilamo 36 minutes ago | parent

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 30 minutes ago | parent

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.

GenerWork 23 minutes ago | parent

I completely agree, and I'm willing to bet that most people here would agree. The only reason you're getting pushback in this case is because HN is filled with Trekkies who're unable to separate their love of Picard from your statement. If you wrote this same comment about an article that focused on Don Draper from Mad Men, you'd probably be upvoted.

hnbad 20 minutes ago | parent

It seems a more honest place to source your fictional characters to admire than the news or non-fiction, though. Makes it clearer that the character is fictional than when you try to pretend you're talking about a real person rather than the idea of one.

Or to put it bluntly: all paragons are made-up fictions, some just use real persons as framing devices, but that doesn't mean they're any more "real".

keybored 7 minutes ago | parent

Good fiction instils children with rolemodels. Then they can try to live up to those rolemodels as adults while the whole world runs on cynical and self-serving rules.

vigilantpuma 1 hour ago | parent

Big fan of Star Trek and Picard is my captain forever, but this credit seems more due to Gene Roddenberry.

cassianoleal 51 minutes ago | parent

This very much. Post-Roddenberry Trek mostly misses the point.

throwaway27448 43 minutes ago | parent

Yes it becomes space liberalism rather than space communism.

Avicebron 35 minutes ago | parent

Hilariously this was also around the time that the Ferengi started being written more sympathetically.

flatline 36 minutes ago | parent

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 43 minutes ago | parent

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 43 minutes ago | parent

...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 36 minutes ago | parent

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 35 minutes ago | parent

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

j45 10 minutes ago | parent

Well said

MitPitt 1 hour ago | parent

Patrick Stewart or the show writers? I'm not a fan of equating TV character personalities to actors.

whalabi 57 minutes ago | parent

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 28 minutes ago | parent

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.

ltbarcly3 11 minutes ago | parent

"The college professor or the people who wrote the textbook and set up the university and arranged for students to come to it or..."

I think we can let him take a little credit for the work he did without trying to exactly determine how much of that credit is his exactly.

umvi 44 minutes ago | parent

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 37 minutes ago | parent

An important function of fiction is showing us things to aspire to that are not quite possible in real life.

jacquesm 37 minutes ago | parent

As opposed to Gorbachev?

Gandhi?

Mandela?

rhaynes 24 minutes ago | parent

The title didn't start with "Only"

fnord77 35 minutes ago | parent

He was a fictional leader. In a fictional utopia.

throw8393038 27 minutes ago | parent

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...?

Patrick was great actor, he was still able to carry Star Trek. But writing was horrible! Vegetarian communist utopia tries to imagine real combat!

Veliladon 26 minutes ago | parent

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_ 25 minutes ago | parent

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)

krapp 5 minutes ago | parent

Rarely does one see so much effort put into such aggressive ignorance. Bravo.

ralgo 24 minutes ago | parent

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.

rhaynes 8 minutes ago | parent

Darmok especially for our polarized time. ED Hirsch argued in "How to Educate a Citizen" that the lack of teaching core knowledge in American schools robs its citizens of a shared language to use to communicate. Troi uses "Juliet on her balcony" as an example in the episode, but today I'm not even sure how many people would know even that reference.

And your comment illustrates the point. We've never met but I can relate to you with just the name of an episode because I know the large ideas you're expressing in 3-4 words: I've thought of Picard's speech in the Drumhead often in recent years. Whenever I catch myself having life regrets, Tapestry comes to mind. The Measure of a Man... maybe not relevant for today's AI, but one day when it is, I hope that generation has watched it.

moralestapia 19 minutes ago | parent

Rest in peace, fleet admiral. See you in Valhalla!

*makes salute motion*

People make fun of this but cartoons and sci-fi series are great models to learn about and guide the development of society.

We lost the best one, no good actors remain.

TacticalCoder 19 minutes ago | parent

The shills pushing for LLMs and datacenters to take over the world really respect nothing. Going to find old Star Trek episodes and then push the narrative that "machines have feelings too" (when, in case you missed it, a human actor is pretending to be a machine) is low... So low.

At a moment where a sizeable part of the world is rising against the externalities of datacenters and the dangers of having two companies trying to do regulatory capture on AI in the US (and probably in the vassal EU too), using an episode of Star Trek to push the narrative that "Good men consider LLMs should have the same rights as humans" just makes me sick.

You guys are seriously unwell and totally falling for a narrative that's pushed on you.

prhn 19 minutes ago | parent

So odd the arguments I've been reading when this is brought up since his death.

> He's fictional though

Aren't most of our heroes? Yes, we create scenarios in art to exemplify extraordinary human behavior. To explore humanity.

> Patrick Stewart or the show writers?

Both, but mostly Patrick Stewart. Let me give you the same material and crew and see if you can evoke the same cultural reaction.

sevenzero 13 minutes ago | parent

You cant possibly evoke the same cultural reaction in the modern day. Things are short lived now. Star Trek wouldn't have survived if it came out in 2026.

cosmic_cheese 13 minutes ago | parent

Another retort I’ve seen is, “but it’s unrealistic” or it’s too idealistic”.

That doesn’t make it any less of a noble goal to strive for. If I can become half the man that Patrick Stewart portrayed in Picard, I’ll consider myself as having done well.

dofm 15 minutes ago | parent

So, class: what does this tell you about our current predicament and the people at the helm of it?

sh56s6 6 minutes ago | parent

Everyone got dumber and a lot of traitors took advantage of it.

j45 11 minutes ago | parent

Patrick Stewart didn’t teach this.

A character he acted did.

Patrick Stewart on his deathbed referred being estranged from his children from always putting work before his kids in his own words.

gadders 11 minutes ago | parent

I think Picard was a good example of positive masculinity. Strong and not a wimp without being overbearing or a bully.

dabinat 6 minutes ago | parent

The danger is that we give good leaders too much power, and they’re then replaced by someone who abuses it. And that’s why we need to be careful how much power we give someone, even if we’re sure they will use it wisely.