The ones who walk away from Section 31

Or, how cynicism masquerading as realism constrains our moral imagination and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that sabotages the futures we might otherwise create.

Credit: Andrew DeGraff

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Welcome to Speculative Cartography, a publication about stories, technology, and what’s possible.

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Moral compromise, moral surrender

The Star Trek: Section 31 movie came out recently. This is not a review and I’m not going to talk about its content. In fact, I haven’t watched it and don’t plan to, because despite the inclusion of Michelle Yeoh, the quality appears to be on par with Morbius.

I wouldn’t even have anything to say about the movie if I hadn’t come across some quotes from actors promoting the movie. One in particular jumped out at me:

"When you expand the [Star Trek] universe into something more realistic, the simple truth of the matter is, the Federation can only exist if a Section 31 exists. We can take it from being a nefarious organization to humanizing it and actually showing the need for it."

To understand what bothers me about this sentiment, we have to go back to the introduction of Section 31 on Deep Space 9, all the way back in 1998.

Star Trek’s Federation is a paradise — a diverse, space-exploring, diplomacy-first, post-scarcity civilization. In DS9, they come under threat from the Dominion, a authoritarian civilization that has genetically engineered hierarchies into their society. Up to this point, though the Federation had contended with strong enemies and fought great battles in The Original Series and The Next Generation, it was mainly tested in terms of its technology, strategy, and mettle. With the introduction of the Dominion, DS9 began to ask: How far should you go to preserve paradise?

It was in this context that Section 31 was introduced as a black wing that operates with Starfleet, but secretly, without oversight, and acting counter to many of Starfleet’s stated principles, such as… *checks notes* …no genocide. Their plan to win the war is to engineer a biological weapon that will kill off the entirety of the Dominion’s ruling species.

DS9 does ultimately suggest that not every moral principle can be maintained in war and that we can’t be precious about our conscience when the complete domination of civilization is at stake. Throughout the show, the protagonists all grapple with exactly where the line is. Lying? Sabotage? Murder?

Section 31 represented the line, not simply because their actions went too far, but because of their moral framework. Whereas characters like Captain Sisko agonize over crossing ethical boundaries to save lives, Section 31 sees those boundaries as naive fantasies to be erased. In their self-importance, they believe they are a necessary evil and that they are what makes the Federation possible. They represent not just moral compromise, but moral surrender.

Within the context of DS9, Section 31 was a clever vehicle to explore the central narrative tension. The protagonists contended not just with the external antagonist of the Dominion, but also with an internal antagonist Section 31, which pushed the conflict to the absolute limit. Unfortunately, even though Section 31 had served its purpose by the end of DS9 and the single character that embodied it was killed off, the writers didn’t fully destroy any possibility of the organization’s return.

Since then, it has been brought back in Enterprise, Into Darkness, and Discovery by writers who don’t seem to get that these are the bad guys. Instead, they think these are the cool, capable, black-leather-jacket-wearing badasses that Starfleet really needed. In successive appearances, writers have progressively normalized and institutionalized what DS9 had established as beyond the pale.

After 27 years of lazy storytelling, Section 31 is simply part of the world. The Federation has always had an evil faction inside of it and that’s fine and good and we will never — can never — be better than we are now.

The invention of suffering

A few days after I read the quote about “humanizing” Section 31, I was talking to my partner about Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”. She hadn’t read it, so I fished a copy off my shelf. (It’s a quick read.) **Spoilers for a classic short story from 1973.**

Omelas is a paradise for all of its denizens. All, that is, except for a single child that suffers alone in a closet. The suffering child is the price this society pays for the happiness of all others, and those that won’t accept this bargain leave.

LeGuin said that she took the premise for Omelas from The Brothers Karamasov. During an argument, Alyosha poses a philosophical question to Ivan: would you accept a world with divine justice if it required the torture of one innocent child? Ivan refuses, saying he "returns his ticket" to such a world. He chooses deontological ethics over utilitarian ethics; one should never choose to cause a child to suffer, no matter the good that may come from it.

Previously, I had read Omelas as making almost the same point: the ones who walks away are simply acting out of extreme moral principle. They refuse to be complicit in the bargain of their city. And I’m far from the only person who has interpreted it that way. Over the years, there have been many stories written in response to Omelas, some of which are founded upon this same understanding.

But when I shared the story with my partner, she pointed out something I had glossed over on my first reading, and it changed my understanding of the story entirely.

For the first part of the story, the narrator describes Omelas as a vague, joyful place where everyone is happy, but they don’t go into many specific details. The narrator is allowing you to fill in the blanks yourself in order to make as many concessions to your imagination as possible, then, finally, they ask: "Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing." Only then is the suffering child introduced.

Before that moment, the suffering child was not a part of the world of Omelas. The narrator only invents them because the reader was unable to accept a happy world — even a vague, modest one — unless there was a price to pay. The suffering child isn’t necessary for Omelas to function; it's necessary for the reader to believe that Omelas could exist. LeGuin is holding up a mirror, revealing our collective inability to imagine utopia without building in tragedy. We summoned the suffering child into existence because our cynicism demanded it.

In this light, it becomes clear that the ones who walk away are not people who value the cleanliness of their conscience so highly that they choose non-participation, they are the ones with the most courage.

“The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”

They believe a world better than Omelas may be possible, and they’re going to try to find it, even if it doesn’t exist.

The cynical reader can’t say “Well I would have stayed and fought until there was a just society,” because the reader didn’t believe that such a world could exist. And if someone were to free the suffering child, everyone else in Omelas would now suffer. (Isabel J. Kim explores this morass in one of the very best responses to Omelas, ”Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole”. She also introduces the excellent phrase “load-bearing suffering child”.) Because the reader created the suffering child, they cannot judge themselves morally superior to the ones who walk away.

The trap of cynicism

After I reread the story, it occurred to me that it was an indictment of the exact mentality that led to a Section 31 movie. Some people have watched Star Trek and thought “Hm, this post-scarcity, non-coercive utopia is cool and all, but there has to be some cruelty or violence that makes it go…” And thus, just as the cynical reader demands a suffering child to make utopia "believable,", the cynical writer creates a genocidal black wing to make the Federation "realistic."

Section 31 continues to exist because contemporary audiences and creators couldn't accept Gene Roddenberry's optimistic vision without inserting their own load-bearing suffering child. But the original vision of Star Trek wasn't naive, it was aspirational. It acknowledged humanity's flaws but suggested we could evolve beyond them. By insisting that the Federation can only exist if a Section 31 exists, the writers aren’t making Star Trek more realistic; they're revealing their own inability to imagine a better world without cruel compromise. They're refusing to walk away from Omelas.

This isn’t merely an aesthetic complaint either. LeGuin believed (as I believe) that stories shape our world:

"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words."

I’ve written about what I call prefigurative belief. It’s an aspect of hope.

The power of prefigurative belief

I argue that we don’t know what the future holds, but our beliefs about the future can shape what’s possible. We imagine possible futures, we believe in them, and we act to make them real. Believing there are solutions makes it more likely that we will find those solutions, believing that battles can be won makes them more winnable. But the reverse is necessarily true as well.

Cynicism constrains the possible. If you believe that your enemies are invincible, that institutions will fail, that there are no silver linings, then those things much more easily turn from possibility to reality. If you believe that you are a victim, that it is “correct” to be depressed and anxious, that the world is doomed, that we cannot make anything better than we have, you will personally play a role in making that true. If you cannot believe in the city of happiness, you will invent the suffering child.

Cynicism often masquerades as realism. Any expression of idealism risks being called “unrealistic”, while cynicism virtually always gets a pass. This is why you sometimes see people who superficially resemble utopians — for example, people who want to go to Mars or make electric cars — become sort of… evil. They have been “realistic” about the wrong things. They believe in the beautiful possibilities of technology but try to balance it with with cynicism about human society. They come to believe that the evil is necessary and therefore good, thus making the same moral surrender as Section 31.

We do not live in Omelas or the Federation, not yet. But I refuse to believe that they aren’t possible, or that their price is a suffering child or a genocidal black wing. To quote a much better Star Trek movie (the best):

“You knew enough to tell Saavik that how we face death is at least as important as how we face life.”

“Just words.”

“But good words. That’s where ideas begin.”

— Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

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