Star Trek executive speaks on humanism

It annoyed Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry when fans treated the show as a religion, said his long-time executive assistant Susan Sackett.

Sackett, who worked with Roddenberry on Star Trek from 1974 until he died in 1991, spoke Saturday in Woodburn Hall about humanism in Star Trek.

The talk was co-sponsored by the Secular Alliance of IU and the Center for Inquiry in Indiana.

Roddenberry didn’t want to create a religion, Sackett said.

Through Star Trek, Roddenberry said a belief in a God interferes with humans’ ability
to treat each other with respect.

Sackett said Roddenberry introduced her to this idea of humanism, where humans don’t need a higher power and can develop morals with reason.

Sophomore Aaron Rincon, who described himself as a “trekkie,” disagreed with this definition. Rincon, who said he was converting to the Eastern Orthodox religion, said humanism can exist with the supernatural.

“We need humanism,” Rincon said, defining it as caring for the fellow man. “I don’t care how you do it.”

Humanism is also the idea that everyone is equal, Sackett said.

The Starship Enterprise had men and women from different races working together, a strange idea in the 1960s and 1970s, she said.

The show’s financiers resisted putting these ideas into the mainstream media.
Roddenberry believed television exists to make money, not to entertain and inform, Sackett said.

“The purpose of television is to sell toothpaste and hemorrhoid cream and that’s about it,” she said.

But Roddenberry got around TV’s commercialism to express his views on morality and his opposition to the Vietnam War, Sackett said.

For instance, the Enterprise’s crew had a rule that it could never interfere with other cultures, she said. It broke the rule in nearly every episode, though.

This is what brought graduate student and Star Trek fan Steve Stanzak to the talk. He wants to use Star Trek to teach a class about the ethics of meddling with other
societies.

“The episodes do a good job of showing its strength and weaknesses, I thought,” Stanzak said.

Aliens expressed a lot of Roddenberry’s views, which let his controversial message get past conservative censors.

“You can say whatever you want as long as it’s little purple people on a different planet,” Sackett said.

Sackett showed a clip from a 1967 Star Trek episode called “Return of the Archons.”

An Enterprise crew member, Sulu, is “brainwashed” on a planet called Beta III where inhabitants dress and act similarly, where people walk around in a haze, Sackett said.

The planet is controlled by Landru, which the crew discovers is a 6,000-year-old computer Landru installed to ensure the planet’s peace and goodwill.

The clip showed that a world as a theocracy would be dull, Sackett said.

“You attacked the body, you have heard the word and disobeyed,” a cloaked guard tells the Enterprises’ crew. “You will be absorbed.”