I mean while an overall kinda vague good idea, the PD ended up just being a shit pile mouthpiece for the idea of "Hurr durr, just let nature run it's course" even in the face of the negative consequences of doing something would be much less harmful than the negative consequences of doing nothing.
The PD itself seems to be born from people learning about the horrors of colonialism, and the push back against the publicly known standing US foreign policy at the time of stopping the spread of communism. Pretty much, 'we shouldn't contact civilizations that are less advanced', and 'keep our nose out of foreign affairs'. How it ends up playing out from TNG onward is that it equates 'saving a civilization from an epidemic, or a ecological disaster' to 'stopping a civilization from extincting themselves in a war'. Or my favorite, the one time on TNG where two planets suffered from the same illness, but one found a cure and decided to be shitheels and make an addictive cure to sell to the other planet, and Picard just decided to do fuck all about it by taking the enlightened centrism road by helping neither planet.
Point being, the Prime Directive was already toilet paper by being treated as holier than thou uncompromising religious dogma starting in TNG onwards.
I mean while an overall kinda vague good idea, the PD ended up just being a shit pile mouthpiece for the idea of "Hurr durr, just let nature run it's course" even in the face of the negative consequences of doing something would be much less harmful than the negative consequences of doing nothing.
The PD itself seems to be born from people learning about the horrors of colonialism, and the push back against the publicly known standing US foreign policy at the time of stopping the spread of communism. Pretty much, 'we shouldn't contact civilizations that are less advanced', and 'keep our nose out of foreign affairs'. How it ends up playing out from TNG onward is that it equates 'saving a civilization from an epidemic, or a ecological disaster' to 'stopping a civilization from extincting themselves in a war'. Or my favorite, the one time on TNG where two planets suffered from the same illness, but one found a cure and decided to be shitheels and make an addictive cure to sell to the other planet, and Picard just decided to do fuck all about it by taking the enlightened centrism road by helping neither planet.
Point being, the Prime Directive was already toilet paper by being treated as holier than thou uncompromising religious dogma starting in TNG onwards.