# Musing on Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [June 22, 2015, 7:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-on-heinleins-starship-troopers/723171 "2015-06-22T19:08:56Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Sangahyando](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f14d63/32.png) [@Sangahyando](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sangahyando)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2015, 7:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-on-heinleins-starship-troopers/723171/1 "2015-06-22T19:08:56Z")
Prompted by thoughts about Robert A Heinlein’s novel _Starship Troopers_. The most-discussed aspect of said work seems to be, its being set in a basically democratic society, one of whose rules is that nobody may vote, or hold public office, unless they have successfully served a term of military service, or the equivalent (great lengths are gone to, to accommodate aspiring volunteers who are in one way or another “non-abled” for the tougher ends of said service). There are all sorts of ways to run societies – one can see ways in which the above-described, could make sense. It somewhat irritates me, though, that this idea of Heinlein’s in his novel, seems to have been latched onto on the message boards, by basically conservative, gung-ho folk who passionately agree with Robert on this: viz. everyone should participate here, everyone should wish to be a participating citizen, so should rush to enlist for what the author calls “Federal Service” – sometimes patting themselves on the back for their own real-world volunteering for a spell in the armed forces, so that they may consider themselves real-world entitled to vote. My “take” re these people, is – if this is how you feel, re yourself – fine, go for it. However – I resent your sometimes delivered implication, that anyone who does not enthusiastically feel this way and accordingly gallops to the nearest recruiting office – not only should not be allowed to vote; but is a worthless wretch who has forfeited the right to be acknowledged as properly human, and deservedly belongs in an at best “hewers of wood and drawers of water”, underclass. Perhaps I exaggerate here, and wrong these folk; but it’s the drift that I sometimes get from them. I pick up from my reading of _ST_, that Heinlein – not overall big on tolerance of wimps – was not implying the above-mentioned. I understand his meaning being, that Federal Service was about people’s being ready to serve a term of doing stuff which would probably not be what they wished to be doing, but was for the benefit of the polity – rewards being, voting / public office eligibility (if they survived). The society about which he was writing, understood that it wasn’t for everybody. IIRC, Federal Service aspirants were actively discouraged from applying – were put through an interview with a hideously maimed and mutilated veteran, who asked them, “do you really want to risk ending up like me?”. This would suggest that there was no great shame attached to refraining from serving. If you didn’t serve – OK, you couldn’t vote or hold public office, but there’d be a million other ways in which you could find fulfilment / contribute to society – trying to list them, would be wearisome. Most Federal Service veterans / voters and potential public-office-holders, would be happy to interact with you; and veterans / non-servers friendships, would come about. In any place where there are humans, there are a few (on whichever side) up-themselves bigots / exclusivists, but I persist in thinking that people are in the main, more sensible / decent, than that. In real life, I have mercifully never had to do military service – I’d have hated same, and would have been beyond-useless at it: in Heinlein’s _ST_ universe, I would for sure have opted to be a non-serving thus non-voting and non-public-office-holding “helot”, and taken one of the numerous other life-paths. By the way, I live in a democratic, universal-suffrage country; am so made that I take very little interest in politics / current affairs: so, I don’t exercise my right to vote, on the basis that I feel that at the very least, those who vote should have some interest in / understanding of, national and world affairs. In this, I kind-of subscribe to Heinlein’s basic idea, if not to his exact suggested way of bringing it to be. ---
**Author:** ![Ethilrist](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ethilrist/32/4604_2.png) [@Ethilrist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ethilrist)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2015, 7:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-on-heinleins-starship-troopers/723171/2 "2015-06-22T19:27:31Z")
Heinlein was pretty consistent about portraying bureaucrats & politicians as not the cream of the crop; he only had one protagonist who was a bureaucrat. In _ST,_ the idea that people would only go on to be part of the voting populace (and therefore, more likely to be elected to office) if they had served in the military places the job of politician in the vein of “It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.” ---
**Author:** ![Ranger\_Jeff](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ranger_jeff/32/2065_2.png) [@Ranger\_Jeff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ranger_Jeff)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2015, 7:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-on-heinleins-starship-troopers/723171/3 "2015-06-22T19:41:49Z")
My take on it was that it was Federal Service, not necessarily military service. A tour in their equivalent of the Peace Corps or Civilian Construction Corps would work. Or sign up to work in a public hospital. ---
**Author:** ![adaher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@adaher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adaher)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2015, 8:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-on-heinleins-starship-troopers/723171/4 "2015-06-22T20:11:08Z")
It’s actually a fascist idea rather than a conservative idea. The idea of limiting suffrage is not inconsistent with conservatism in my view, but making government work the way to get the vote places the state firmly at the center of society, which is anathema to conservatives. If we were going to go away from universal suffrage, you’d want to base it on education level, whether or not someone is employed, or where they are employed(ie, government flunkies can’t vote because it’s a conflict of interest). ---
**Author:** ![Sangahyando](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f14d63/32.png) [@Sangahyando](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sangahyando)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2015, 8:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-on-heinleins-starship-troopers/723171/5 "2015-06-22T20:14:04Z")
Per my understanding (maybe wrong) – you had no choice: no exemptions for pacific stuff re your individual conscience – you might be assigned to pacific stuff, but that had nothing to do with your personal preferences: you were totally bound to what the powers that were, decided. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2015, 8:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-on-heinleins-starship-troopers/723171/6 "2015-06-22T20:57:52Z")
A friend of mine has been [doing some writing on far-right SF authors](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-secret-authoritarian-history-of-science-fiction). His bit about Heinlein: > [@David Forbes](#): > > In the '50s, Heinlein associated himself with the John Birch Society — a group so conservative that the likes of Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley would later seek to expel it from the movement. Shortly after, Heinlein launched a far-right campaign of his own, the Patrick Henry League, in 1958. Worried that a skeptical public was turning against rampant nuclear testing, he and his wife Virgina ran an ad in newspapers around the country supporting the military and inveighing against communism. They also wrote letters and organized meetings. The group accused opponents of nuclear testing of being not just wrong, but part of a communist plot; a move straight out of the Birch playbook. The ad warned that “if we fall for them, then in weeks or months or a few years at most, Old Glory will be hauled down for the last time and the whole planet will be ruled by the Butchers of Budapest.” > > Obviously, that didn’t happen. The Patrick Henry campaign sputtered (in the process Heinlein dissed Eisenhower, of all people, for being too soft on communism) and the author put his plans to write Stranger in a Strange Land on hiatus in favor of penning the military sci-fi classic Starship Troopers, musing gleefully decades later that “the Patrick Henry ad shocked ’em, Starship Troopers outraged ’em.” > > Indeed, despite its influential reputation and numerous debates over its themes, this connection makes a lot of sense: Starship Troopers is an unsubtle defense of militarism. It glorifies a regime that came to power through a coup d’etat, and its main character/mouthpiece Johnny Rico says at one point that: “it may be verified by observation that any breed which stops its own increase gets crowded out by breeds which expand.” > > Musing on Starship Troopers during the '80s in his Expanded Universe collection, Heinlein denied that the regime in the book was as authoritarian as its critics asserted. But he nonetheless maintained a withering criticism of democracy: “democracies usually collapse not too long after the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses . . . for a while,” he wrote. Instead, like his forebear, he argued that the rich should be able to purchase votes, or that voter eligibility should be based on an IQ test, among other methods to keep the unwashed masses out of the electoral process. ---
**Author:** ![adaher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@adaher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adaher)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2015, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-on-heinleins-starship-troopers/723171/7 "2015-06-22T21:06:28Z")
If it turns out that democracies do fail because of the “bread and circuses” thing, or as another person once said, "When the voter vote themselves the treasury), how do we do it better the next time around? Science fiction authors should be commended for considering that question, although I think Heinlein gets it wrong. I suspect the right answer will be continued universal suffrage, but removing the budget from the public. Perhaps give that whole process to the Fed since they already manage the money supply. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2015, 9:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-on-heinleins-starship-troopers/723171/8 "2015-06-22T21:12:42Z")
I have to admit not seeing an _automatic_ problem with this - there are (though fewer than there used to be) functioning democracies with mandatory military service. Heinlein’s version could just be “okay, you don’t have to do the service, but you also don’t get the franchise.” I don’t quite see this as guaranteed doom or guaranteed success for a country, but Heinlein is sufficiently vague about how his ST society works (except to say that it works very well) that there isn’t really anything to analyze. Looking at modern American society, I can almost picture making some kind of physically demanding service mandatory just to combat early-adult obesity and hopefully instill some long-term habits toward physical fitness, but that’s cheerfully speculative. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2015, 9:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-on-heinleins-starship-troopers/723171/9 "2015-06-22T21:25:10Z")
> [@adaher](#): > > It’s actually a fascist idea rather than a conservative idea. The idea of limiting suffrage is not inconsistent with conservatism in my view, but making government work the way to get the vote places the state firmly at the center of society, which is anathema to conservatives. I strongly disagree. One of the central tenets of fascism is that there is a group of people who are inherently superior to everyone else - and if you’re not born into this group, you can’t join it. Heinlein explicitly rejected this kind of elitism. He made it clear that everyone had a right to submit themselves for public service - you could not be rejected. So suffrage was only self-limited - the only reason you couldn’t vote was because you chose not to go through the process. Heinlein also rejected the implied elitism that the OP describes. It’s true that some people say that people who have served are superior to those who haven’t. But Heinlein seemed to see service as more of a humbling experience. You had to first be willing to submit yourself to serving the needs of other people. Only after you had shown you could do that would you be fit to hold political power over other people. ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2015, 9:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-on-heinleins-starship-troopers/723171/10 "2015-06-22T21:25:51Z")
Oy. Here we go again. 🙂 You have to keep two things firmly in mind when assessing _Starship Troopers_. The first is that it’s a very, very short book, and just about everything except Johnnie’s direct experiences are much more lightly sketched than most readers recall. The main point here is that almost everything that’s actually said about the structure, order and function of the government would fit on one book page. Just about the only absolute is that you have to be a “veteran of Federal Service” to vote or hold office - everything else is very vague. (The collateral consideration there is that you have to differentiate between what the book actually contains and says, and the added baggage from decades of discussion and critique - especially any you’ve picked up on your own.) The second thing is that there is no evidence and no convincing argument that “Federal Service” is anything but military service… or makework for those who can’t do any kind of real military service. This is another area where outside discussion, including comments from Heinlein 20 years later, seriously cloud the issues. [**This paper**](http://nitrosyncretic.com/pdfs/nature_of_fedsvc_1996.pdf) makes a complete and coherent argument for the latter, leaving only some very subjective interpretation and a willingness to take Heinlein’s post-authorial comments at face value to give any credence to the notion that there is Federal Service that is not military. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2015, 9:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-on-heinleins-starship-troopers/723171/11 "2015-06-22T21:29:18Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > A friend of mine has been [doing some writing on far-right SF authors](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-secret-authoritarian-history-of-science-fiction). His bit about Heinlein: Heinlein’s one of those people who started out on the left wing and then, when he realized the flaws of the left, overcompensated by going just as far out on the right wing. ---
**Author:** ![DinoR](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dinor/32/2821_2.png) [@DinoR](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DinoR)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2015, 9:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-on-heinleins-starship-troopers/723171/12 "2015-06-22T21:32:30Z")
> [@Sangahyando](#): > > Per my understanding (maybe wrong) – you had no choice: no exemptions for pacific stuff re your individual conscience – you might be assigned to pacific stuff, but that had nothing to do with your personal preferences: you were totally bound to what the powers that were, decided. Essentially right. You got to state your preferences but as you went through testing they put you where they put you. Of course once you completed your entrance processing they gave you a pass to go home and say goodbye. Rico got told quite explicitly that if he didn’t come back they wouldn’t chase after him. If you didn’t like what you got deserting was an option. It got you a couple lashes if you reported back to clear your conscience but then you just got kicked out with no chance to try again. ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2015, 9:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-on-heinleins-starship-troopers/723171/13 "2015-06-22T21:34:51Z")
The only firm basis for the model of government Heinlein gives, in the book or out of it, is that after some disastrous era of war, it was veterans who pulled together the first working government… and then chose to let only other veterans join in voting and office-holding. For all the attempts at justification, some of which he knocks down himself in the book’s dialogue, it really does come down to “because.” ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2015, 9:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-on-heinleins-starship-troopers/723171/14 "2015-06-22T21:37:40Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Heinlein’s one of those people who started out on the left wing and then, when he realized the flaws of the left, overcompensated by going just as far out on the right wing. Horse poopies. Simplistic 'orse poopies. Heinlein’s writing and thoughts are astonishingly consistent from his 20s through his death; you have to allow that he was writing at different times for different audiences, with different aims and restrictions, and that the world changed around him two or three times from the 1920s to the 1980s. You only have to read the wretched first novel _“For Us, The Living–”_ to see how many ideas that were doled out over the decades were fully formulated before he even became an established writer. ---
**Author:** ![Loach](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/loach/32/350_2.png) [@Loach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Loach)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2015, 9:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-on-heinleins-starship-troopers/723171/15 "2015-06-22T21:52:49Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > I strongly disagree. One of the central tenets of fascism is that there is a group of people who are inherently superior to everyone else - and if you’re not born into this group, you can’t join it. > > Heinlein explicitly rejected this kind of elitism. He made it clear that everyone had a right to submit themselves for public service - you could not be rejected. So suffrage was only self-limited - the only reason you couldn’t vote was because you chose not to go through the process. > > Heinlein also rejected the implied elitism that the OP describes. It’s true that some people say that people who have served are superior to those who haven’t. But Heinlein seemed to see service as more of a humbling experience. You had to first be willing to submit yourself to serving the needs of other people. Only after you had shown you could do that would you be fit to hold political power over other people. In the book the cultural elite did not vote or really care about it. Johnnie’s father was wealthy and thought going into service was a waste of time. Not being a full citizen did not hold him or anyone back. Serving in the military did not put you in an elite class in the book. Of course things changed once asteroids started getting lobbed at Earth. ST has a few interesting discussions on what service means. There are some giant holes in how it would have been actually implemented. The book is after all an action/adventure novel at it’s core. Even given its limited scope, any one thinking the society portrayed in the book has anything to do with fascism has either brought their own prejudices into it or they only watched the movie. ---
**Author:** ![Baker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bb73d2/32.png) [@Baker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baker)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2015, 10:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-on-heinleins-starship-troopers/723171/16 "2015-06-22T22:10:57Z")
Don’t forget that while in Federal Service(which wasn’t necessarily the military, not even the majority) one could not vote. That came when service was up. You took a test(s), you were placed where needed, and that was that. The franchise didn’t come until your service was up. So those in service could not be a political force. Heinlein was against a mandatory draft. To him it was better to serve with the place on either side of you empty, than having that space filled by someone nursing a conscript syndrome. ---
**Author:** ![astro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9dc877/32.png) [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2015, 10:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-on-heinleins-starship-troopers/723171/17 "2015-06-22T22:13:58Z")
interesting article here [http://blog.govfaces.com/who-deserves-to-be-a-citizen-a-reflection-on-robert-a-heinleins-starship-troopers-55-years-onward/](http://blog.govfaces.com/who-deserves-to-be-a-citizen-a-reflection-on-robert-a-heinleins-starship-troopers-55-years-onward/) > [@](#): > > Most people today know Starship Troopers as Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 cult classic film, which stands very well on its own as an over-the top and at times satirical action flick, but cannot be seen as an accurate reflection of Heinlein’s December 1959 book. What distinguishes Starship Troopers the book is not merely its unique view of inter-planetary human civilization or marines-in-space combat, but the curious political philosophy which emerges from the its compelling narrative. Although the book is set in the future, the political system of the Terran Federation, the civilization-cum-state of the Starship Troopers world, is in some ways more reminiscent of the limited-suffrage Roman Republic or Athenian Democracy than contemporary Western liberal democracy. While many of us today may assume that the future of democracy and politics will continue to be some form of liberal democracy with the core feature of the universal franchise – the right of all adult citizens in a polity to vote and stand for elections – Heinlein looked to a future in which this was not the case. In the Starship Troopers’ universe one does not merely have the right to be a citizen and vote by virtue of what Heinlein called the mere accident of birth; rather, one has to earn this right through Federal Service that tested one’s ability and willingness to sacrifice for the greater good of the polity. ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2015, 10:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-on-heinleins-starship-troopers/723171/18 "2015-06-22T22:20:17Z")
> [@Baker](#): > > …Federal Service(which wasn’t necessarily the military, not even the majority)… Again… wrong. FS == military service. It doesn’t change the nature of this discussion very much, since the point here is earning the right to vote rather than simply having it handed to you, but it does change some nuances about the meaning of earning a franchise. ---
**Author:** ![Deeg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/deeg/32/2955_2.png) [@Deeg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Deeg)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2015, 10:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-on-heinleins-starship-troopers/723171/19 "2015-06-22T22:27:11Z")
> [@Bryan\_Ekers](#): > > I have to admit not seeing an _automatic_ problem with this - there are (though fewer than there used to be) functioning democracies with mandatory military service. I kinda’ like the idea of requiring some sort of service before being allowed to vote. However I’m very leery of giving a government the ability to limit the vote in any way because I’m concerned they’d end up limiting it in a way that gives them extra power. In the end my fear of limits overcomes my opinion of required service. ---
**Author:** ![Unpronounceable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/9de0a6/32.png) [@Unpronounceable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Unpronounceable)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2015, 11:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-on-heinleins-starship-troopers/723171/20 "2015-06-22T23:10:39Z")
> [@Amateur\_Barbarian](#): > > Again… wrong. FS == military service. Well, from the wiki: > [@](#): > > [The Federation is required to find a place for anyone who desires to serve, regardless of his skill or aptitude (this also includes dangerous non-military work such as serving as experimental medical test subjects). > … > Federal Service is not necessarily military, although it is suggested that a certain hardship and discipline is pervasive. > … > indicating that he sees Federal Service as military in nature, or not necessary to a businessman during peacetime. Some Federal Service recruiters wear military ribbons, and a term of service “is either real military service… or a most unreasonable facsimile thereof.” Moreover, the history of Federal Service describes it as being started by military veterans who did not originally allow civilians to join and are not described as allowing them to join later. Gifford decides, as a result, that although Heinlein’s intentions may have been that Federal Service be 95% non-military, in relation to the actual contents of the book, Heinlein “is wrong on this point. Flatly so.”](http://starshiptroopers.wikia.com/wiki/Starship_Troopers_(novel)) So, no, it isn’t solely military service. Though the risk to life & limb seems intentionally required. So, it’s got the “Starfleet’s not a military” problem at the very least. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/musing-on-heinleins-starship-troopers/723171.md?page=2)