Most people who love Star Trek love it for the same reason: it takes for granted a future where humanity has, more or less, figured things out. No money. No poverty. No war among ourselves. People work because they find meaning in the work, not because they would starve otherwise. Picard tells a twentieth-century woman in First Contact: “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”

It’s an appealing vision. And most of us, if pressed, would say we want it.

So why does it feel so impossibly far away?

The usual answers involve resource scarcity, political will, entrenched interests, and technological limitations. All of those are real. But I want to suggest that there is a deeper problem, one that rarely shows up in the conversation — and that a largely forgotten Norwegian philosopher named Peter Wessel Zapffe identified almost a century ago.

The Philosopher Who Thought Consciousness Was a Mistake#

In 1933, Zapffe published an essay called “The Last Messiah.” It is one of the stranger and more unsettling documents in Western philosophy.

His central argument is this: human consciousness overshot its mark. Unlike every other animal, we became aware not just of our immediate environment but of the vastness of the cosmos, the certainty of death, the indifference of the universe to our suffering, and the absurdity of existence itself. Zapffe called this “a surplus of consciousness” — an evolutionary overshoot that makes us, in his words, “fearful of life itself, of our very being.”

He described the resulting psychological state as a kind of “cosmic panic” that would, without intervention, be unbearable for most people most of the time. His conclusion was bleak — arguably the bleakest in philosophy — but the mechanism he identified is worth understanding on its own terms, even if you reject where he went with it.

Because he also identified how we survive it.

Four Ways We Keep the Terror at Bay#

Zapffe argued that civilization is built around the project of keeping this cosmic panic suppressed. Not consciously, not by conspiracy, but as a natural and necessary feature of any functioning culture. He identified four mechanisms:

Isolation is the simplest: don’t think about it. Civilization maintains elaborate social codes of mutual silence around the most disturbing facts of existence. Children are protected from too much too soon. Adults learn not to bring up death at parties.

Anchoring is the most important mechanism for our purposes. It is “the fixation of points within, or construction of walls around, the liquid fray of consciousness” — the act of attaching oneself to a value, an ideal, or an institution that provides stable meaning. God. The nation. The family. One’s career. A life project. Anything that says: this matters, therefore I matter, therefore existence is bearable. Zapffe noted that society reinforces anchoring aggressively — people who “sacrifice themselves totally” for an anchoring (the firm, the cause) are idolized, because their certainty shores up everyone else’s.

Distraction is what it sounds like: keeping attention perpetually occupied so the mind never has a chance to turn inward and confront the void. Zapffe observed that this is “typical even in childhood.” He described distraction as being “like a flying machine — made of heavy material, but embodying a principle that keeps it airborne whenever applying. It must always be in motion, as air only carries it fleetingly.”

Sublimation is the rarest: transforming existential dread into creative or philosophical work. Zapffe noted, somewhat dryly, that his own essay was an attempt at sublimation.

Where Capitalism Comes In#

Here is where Zapffe’s framework gets interesting in a way he did not fully develop, but which practically jumps off the page once you see it.

Consumer capitalism is not just an economic system. It is, among other things, a remarkably effective suppression architecture.

Zapffe actually said this himself, in a passage that tends to get overlooked. Discussing the craving for material goods, he wrote:

“The craving for material goods (power) is not so much due to the direct pleasures of wealth, as none can be seated on more than one chair or eat himself more than sated. Rather, the value of a fortune to life consists in the rich opportunities for anchoring and distraction offered to the owner.”

Read that again. Zapffe is not saying wealth is desired for comfort or status in any simple sense. He is saying that wealth is desired because it provides more anchoring and more distraction. A bigger house, a more impressive career, a more curated lifestyle — these are not just status symbols. They are consciousness-management tools.

Work functions the same way. A demanding career is one of the most socially legitimate forms of anchoring available: it provides identity, purpose, structure, social standing, and a constant stream of tasks that keep the mind occupied. David Graeber, in his essay “Why Capitalism Creates Pointless Jobs,” noted that John Maynard Keynes predicted technology would deliver a fifteen-hour work week by the end of the twentieth century — and that we are technologically capable of it — but we chose not to. Graeber’s explanation was characteristically sharp: “The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger.” He observed that “the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.”

The German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han reaches a similar place from a different direction in his book The Burnout Society (2015). He argues that modern achievement culture has internalized the exploitation so thoroughly that people drive themselves to exhaustion voluntarily, under the banner of self-optimization. The endless busyness, the side hustles, the productivity culture — Han calls these “the reaction to a life that has become bare and radically fleeting.” Elsewhere he is more direct: “the relentless exploitation and optimization of ourselves is filling a void.”

Hannah Arendt saw the structural version of this in 1958, in The Human Condition. She distinguished between labor (cyclical subsistence tasks), work (creating lasting artifacts), and action (disclosing who we are as free citizens). Her worry was that modernity was collapsing all three into mere labor: endless cycles of production and consumption with no lasting meaning, accelerating to prevent us from noticing the emptiness.

None of these thinkers were working directly from Zapffe. But they all converged on the same observation: the structures of modern capitalist life function, at least in part, as consciousness-suppression machinery.

The Non-Obvious Problem with Post-Capitalism#

Here is what this implies for anyone who thinks seriously about a Star Trek future.

The usual framing is that post-capitalism is a distribution problem. We have (or could generate) enough; the challenge is making sure everyone has access to it. Solve scarcity through automation and wise governance, redistribute the output, and people will flourish.

But Zapffe’s analysis suggests this misses something. People do not just consume goods and services. They use work, career, and consumption as anchoring and distraction mechanisms. The forty-hour work week, the mortgage, the career ladder, the upgrade cycle — these are not just economic arrangements. They are, for many people, the primary structures that keep existential terror at bay.

If you simply remove those structures — even in the most benevolent way imaginable, by replacing them with material abundance and free time — you do not automatically get flourishing. You might get what Zapffe called the failure of distraction: “When all distractive options are expended, spleen sets in, ranging from mild indifference to fatal depression.”

This is, in miniature, what we actually see in studies of sudden retirement, of lottery winners, of people who achieve their anchoring goals only to find the goalposts have moved. The issue is not the stuff. The issue is the suppression architecture that was wrapped around it.

What Star Trek Actually Depicts#

The most insightful analysis of Star Trek’s economics I have come across argues that the Federation is not post-scarcity in any simple technological sense. It is post-greed: a society that underwent a fundamental cultural transformation in how meaning is generated and pursued.

Manu Saadia’s book Trekonomics makes this explicit. The Federation’s economy works not because replicators solve scarcity, but because something changed in what humans anchor to. Status decoupled from wealth. Identity decoupled from consumption. The compulsion to accumulate dissolved once the psychological need it served had been met in other ways. As Nog puts it to Jake in the Deep Space Nine episode “In the Cards”: “It’s not my fault that your species decided to abandon currency-based economics in favor of some philosophy of self-enhancement.”

That phrase — “some philosophy of self-enhancement” — is doing enormous work. It gestures at exactly the cultural transformation Zapffe’s analysis implies is necessary. If career and consumption are currently functioning as anchoring and distraction mechanisms, then getting to post-capitalism requires replacing those mechanisms with something more genuinely sustaining. Not dismantling them and leaving the void exposed, but building the replacement first.

Mark Fisher, the cultural critic, argued that contemporary capitalism has become so hegemonic that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Part of what makes that true, I think, is exactly what Zapffe described: capitalism’s suppression machinery is so embedded in daily life that most people cannot imagine what a meaningful existence without it would look like. The problem is not just political. It is, in a deep sense, psychological and philosophical.

The Harder Question#

None of this is an argument against trying. It is an argument for trying with clearer eyes.

Getting to a Star Trek future probably does require better technology, fairer institutions, and serious redistribution. But it also requires something subtler: a culture that has developed richer and more honest ways of providing meaning; ways that do not depend on keeping people too busy, too indebted, and too distracted to ask the questions that Zapffe thought civilization was organized to suppress.

That is not a solved problem. It is barely even a named problem. Philosophy, religion, community, creative work, and genuine civic participation have all served as alternatives at various points in history — as anchoring and sublimation rather than mere distraction. But none of them have yet been woven into a culture at the scale that consumer capitalism operates.

Zapffe himself was a pessimist. He thought the whole arrangement was ultimately unsustainable and that the correct response was not to have children. Most of us are not going to follow him there.

But his diagnosis stands whether or not you accept his conclusion. If we want a world where people genuinely flourish without the compulsive busyness, the debt cycles, and the identity-through-consumption that define the current arrangement, we are going to need a viable alternative to what those things were doing in the first place.

The technical and political problems are hard. This one might be harder.

Zapffe’s essay “The Last Messiah” (1933) is available in English translation at Philosophy Now. His major work, “On the Tragic” (1941), has never been translated into English. An overview and critical analysis of “The Last Messiah” is available at Partially Examined Life.