A Federation observation team gets discovered by the local primitives after a malfunction blows their cover, and while rescuing them, Picard accidentally makes himself the local god.
One episode, from TNG, shows the Federation take on this. Also Cargo Cults are a good example of this. soldiers can just be talking about some random little gadget like a GPS or something, and everyone treats them like a grand wizard performing magic feats. There's actually similar cases of even relatively advanced nations, but just poor, like Iraq and Afghanistan, where U.S. Theres episodes that also shows another possibility with primitive species, basically they try to worship you. Religious people can be bad enough as is when even mildly questioned about religion, how would you think they would take essentially having their entire lives proven wrong? True Dyre, but the revelation that we are not alone would for example, absolutely destroy every organized religion on the planet. We do see the odd flair up, usually by someone who as an individual was in some way let down by the powers that be, but it is more surprising we do not see whole people take offense to the practice. Whether it is the Federation or the Council, I am surprised there are not more militant societies who enter the galactic community so jaded and bitter by the realization their shared suffering was for nothing. Plagues, famines, wars, and natural disasters which all could have been avoided or seen aid received where none ever came?
Now imagine, all of it could have been avoided. But consider humanity, all the strife and hardship of recorded history, of just the last 100 years. One of my favorite dilemmas is actually the moral obligation to intervene rather than sit idly by, which runs in direct opposition to Federation's Prime Directive coincidentally, the rule broken almost as many times as it is brought up.īut where most discussions of the directive are from the crew level, as a plucky captain takes issue with the practice and does what feels right in the moment, we rarely see a consideration of what this intentional indifference actually leads to in species and civilizations which do, on their own, reach the galactic stage.