Still, sometime in the mid seventies, Roddenberry lost his goddamn mind and started to push the whole socialaist utopia and 'Starfleet isn't a military organization' bullshit that most of the writers had to include but didn't really like.
I don't know. Given the timeframe you're speaking of (late-60's/mid-70's) I don't know if I would say he "lost his mind" as much as rode the wave of the free-love zeitgeist of the day. It was the 70's, "man". Peace, love, and acid. The collective demographic of twenty-somethings and younger would not see a "military organization" of any kind true to the philosophy of their day, any more than 80's kids "loved" authority figures. Those kids wouldn't have found it "cool" to dig Vietnam Era "space soldiers". Thus, between '69 and the '79 movie, TREK swung into the "global peace" ideology of the hippy movement. Thus, it's actually a pretty genius business move on his part.
He molded TREK from the "Wagon Train to the stars" as it was pitched in the westerns-of-the-60's era, into an intergalactic Peace Corp for the next decade and culture swing. The kids followed. Spock became a cultural icon as his "logic" was embraced by the hippie crowd. Just look at all the "SPOCK FOR PRESIDENT" slogans of the day.
Then, by the late 80's, it was time to move into the "Next Generation" of Star Trek viewers. Thus, TREK became the evolution of the 70's utopia (which admittedly Roddenberry held onto) but with the avarice of the 80's (check the size of that bridge and ship) and the burgeoning pseudo-psychological feel-good New Age vibe of the mid-to-late-80's (which was in itself a sociocultural response to the height of the Cold War tensions). Enter TNG. Then, the darkness and cynicism of the 90's was front-and-center in DEEP SPACE NINE, curtailing that utopian platform that TNG had preached. So, taking all of that into place, I think Gene was a genius to evolve it to sell, even if he had no idea what he was actually talking about.
