Swift used his characters to point out stupidities in our own systems of thinking. When you see the Lilliputians fighting and double-crossing each other, you are watching humanity through Swift's eyes. I’ve been sure from the first that the job of Star Trek was to use drama and adventure as a way of portraying humanity in its various guises and beliefs. The result was that Star Trek - in the original series but even more powerfully in the second series - is an expression of my own beliefs using my characters to act out human problems and equations
- Gene Roddenberry - Creator of Star Trek

Without a doubt, no show has done more to promote a positive vision of the future and a limitless sense of possibility than Star Trek. It's a series that has inspired several generations of fans, and helped to spur the development of actual technologies we now take for granted. - Gizmodo

Remember this was started in 1966. When the producers asked "C'mon, you're certainly not going to have blacks and whites working together." That sort of thing. Roddenberry said that if we don't have blacks and whites working together by the time our civilization catches up to the timeframe the series is set in, there won’t be any people.

Until we expand this into subpages of some of the better TNG episodes and the human problems they deal with, here is Picard explaining the Starship to a member of a cave-dwelling species as part of a Youtube Playlist we maintain.
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youtube: ZESAxrv88j8&list=PLsuI89eMBnMF0QO4wUsrCzU0ObiZkFJkg|03x04 - Who Watches The Watchers
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