The Cage
The Episode
Today I watched the Star Trek original pilot "The Cage". In it, an alien race with the power of creating reality-indistinguishable illusions capture the captain of the starship Enterprise in order to make him mate with another human girl and repopulate the alien planet under a pleasurable submission. The aliens want this because they almost self-destructed by living in their our illusions and forgetting about reality. The captain, who was in a bad time in his life, choose the cruel reality over the enjoyable illusions. After this, the aliens learned, by accessing the computer of the Enterprise, humans had always embrace freedom to the point of preferring death over captivity. So they let the captain go. He attempts to offer them some kind of deal in order to help them avoid extinction, but they reject him by saying humans will eventually learn their powers and make the same mistakes. So they choose their eventual own death instead. They certainly did not predicted holodecks.
The message
This episode have the same message than The Matrix: Will you choose The blue pill or the red pill?
I will disagree with the point of view of the show that humans love freedom so much. I believe, as a I have seen it, the average human tend to tolerate huge levels of oppression. People only want freedom if oppression reaches a certain breaking point. A very high breaking point: a careful dictator can control people potentially forever.
At the same time I do not believe people care about truth itself. The average human embrace conspiracy theories, ideological tribes, religions, cults and other falsehoods. How many times we heard people saying "all truth is relative"? If all truth is relative, there is neither reality nor illusions.
In my opinion, most people will choose the illusion if they have the guaranty that nobody will tell them they are in one. The plan of the aliens failed precisely because they told the humans about the illusions.
Not A Great Plan
The aliens did not act smart. They showed themselves pretty easily and reveled their plans. It would have been cleverer to use their illusions to make the captain think the Enterprise was destroyed and he is living freely in that planet at the same time they trick the crewmen to believe the captain died accidentally. Or something like that