Mirror World

We've been watching Star Trek Deep Space Nine at our house over the past several weeks. We just saw an episode from season 2 where two of the characters go into the same terrible mirror universe where Captain Kirk was transported in the original series. Do you remember? It's the one where Spock has a mustache and goatee, and Sulu and Chekov both try to kill Kirk.

The DS9 characters encounter several of their usually high-minded friends in the mirror version of the space station, many of whom are literal pirates or are using their skills to efficiently "just follow orders."

I admit I've never fully thought through what it would be like to grow up in a world where all the incentives are aligned around staying alive and doing what the violent, narcissistic people in power want. If there was no teaching at all about doing unto others as you would have done unto you, why would you develop a morality based on those precepts, especially when the most obvious examples of success around you are the exact opposite?

Since I became aware of morality as a thing independent of religion, in the last two years of high school, I have never questioned that anyone can have an innate sense of right and wrong, of being committed to human betterment without regard to their own compensation. But maybe that is incorrect if you grow up in a slough of depravity like the one depicted on DS9.

It seems as though there are an awful lot of rich, powerful people trying to create a U.S. society where amorality is the core value. As if they saw the bad future from Back to the Future II and said, "Yeah, that's what we want!"

So I was brought up short today while reading kottke.org, when I came across his post about a W.E.B. Du Bois speech from 1953. Du Bois was speaking about how he would measure prosperity. He said:

Work is service, not gain. The object of work is life, not income. The reward of production is plenty, not private fortune. We should measure the prosperity of a nation not by the number of millionaires but by the absence of poverty, the prevalence of health, the efficiency of the public schools, and the number of people who can and do read worthwhile books.

It almost made me weep to hear someone say something so opposite of the mirror world we seem to be living in. Something that should be commonplace, but that I know is not. And something that we're getting farther from with every day.