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Original post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ShittyDaystrom/comments/175avw1/starfleets_hold_my_beer_doctrine_is_a_direct/
Copy-paste for convenience and functioning links:
How many times does Worf offer some sensible precaution or succinct method of resolving a dilemma only to be shot down by Picard? For instance, Cause and Effect.
Why are so many people in Starfleet, but especially Picard, hell-bent on not raising shields and just generally insisting on pursuing the solution most likely to lead to the most drama?
Answer: the Federation’s post-scarcity economy has utterly eliminated traditional economic corruption of meritocratic systems. This creates a problem. When everyone is hyper-competent and healthy, ambitious people are desperate for anything that can set them apart from essentially equally qualified candidates. With socioeconomic barriers demolished, it comes down to something else - who has the better story. Thus, a perverse incentive is created for people to manufacture the maximum amount of drama that they can possibly escape from by the skin of their teeth.
Hence, the lesson Picard takes away from Tapestry is not that diplomatically disengaging from unreasonable potential assailants with lethal weapons would be a wiser course of action. It’s that responding to such hostility with “hold my beer” and nearly throwing his life away over a bar game demonstrates that he’s willing to die for his career with a story that makes him unforgettable, not to mention earns him lifelong fascination of the nearest emotionally stunted god-entity.
Similarly, he could have also been quietly respectful of said god-entity. Instead, he’s openly grating and arrogant, practically daring him to throw anything at him - consequently prompting Q to make an introduction to the Borg - a connection which eventually makes Picard even more notorious and unforgettable to the entire Federation.
This is perhaps why the Federation ends up getting along with the Klingons so well. Klingons look at the tech that Starfleet utilizes as woefully inadequate. And yet, they completely miss that the reason that Starfleet officers are engaging in battle wearing no more protection offered by a pair of pajamas, rather than deploying a platoon of force-field-equipped mobile infantry, is because their only chance at promotion or a better posting is by pulling off some balls-to-the-wall stunt that they can brag about at their next performance review.
Meanwhile, Klingons are performing similarly idiotic stunts for glory, Sto-vo-Kor, or the chance to end up in a lyric in a song.
And so Worf winds up being the only one incentivized to suggest sane, rational approaches. Casual self-centered speciesism in the Federation means that kind of reckless behavior gets perceived negatively as just average Klingon militancy by his human crewmates. Even as they obliviously enlist his help to threaten to embroil the entire quadrant in a war by charging across the Neutral Zone in the Federation flagship, with children and civilians on board, accompanied by cloaked Klingon warships, taunting the Romulans with an eloquent “come at me bro”.
This is probably also why the crew and especially Riker despises Captain Jellico. The man has no more fucks left to give and just wants to get home safe and sound to his grandchildren by exhausting every possible resource to stack the deck in his favor to prevent interstellar war. Meanwhile, Riker is having a crisis trying to maintain his tinder dates’ interest when he’s on the Cardassian front tweaking the duty roster so people don’t have to request an extension for the art class they were taking, rather than clutching someone’s bloody heart in his bare hands while the doctor desperately tries to save their life, or grappling with lifelong PTSD from killing for the first time to rescue women and children.