Other than that ST doesn’t say anything about phonying up the need for war…
It also doesn’t say non-veterans can’t hold high positions. You have to be a veteran to vote, and hold office. Last time I looked, most positions like head of CDC are appointments. The book includes quite a few instances of specifically civilian jobs that are quite highly trained and placed - the doctors doing FS intake, for example.
I can’t think of anything the book says about the structure of government adjuncts like CDC, FEMA, etc. For all we know, the R&D facility on Pluto was headed up by a qualified civilian. It seems unlikely that it would be a serving FS member, since it would require many years of education and experience. I’m not even sure the assumption it would be a vet, post-service and later educated, holds up.
Getting a bit off-topic from Heinlein, but I have to say I find this phrase almost hilarious (and I suspect in his less ‘I’m better than you rabble’-crankiness phases RAH would agree on the historical record).
First of all ‘Bread and Circuses’ was originally describing how the extremely not-democratic Roman Emperors kept the populace pacified and distracted, and far away from any political power. So using it to describe how a democracy would ruin itself is, well, maybe we can argue whether ‘ironic’ is appropriate?
But it does bring up the second (more substantive) point about the general idea. Is anyone seriously arguing that, historically, Kings and Emperors as a group have shown any restraint at all about spending their country into oblivion on either personal luxury or self-aggrandizing military adventures?
I’m not saying that a desire for a free lunch isn’t a potential problem with democracies (hey, look at the U.S. Congress over the last half-century), but I think on this issue, Churchill’s remark (that democracy is the worst form of government, except for everything else that’s been tried) is really most apt.
I don’t think Heinlein was arguing for a dictatorship. He was arguing for limited constitutional government, rather than unlimited democracy.
This is made more clear in “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” in the final act, where the first thing the revolutionaries do after winning is to start jockeying for political power and forming committees to decide what the people shall be allowed to do.
Already mentioned: You don’t have to look any farther than Greece today. The people voted themselves unsustainable social services, went bankrupt, voted to borrow money to keep the party going, ran out of other people’s money, then in response to demands from creditors to pay the money back voted in a left-wing government that promised to keep the party going. And now that the shit has finally hit the fan and the party is about to end, they are going to vote to decide whether they should bother to pay back their creditors. If they vote against that, they will be voting themselves into a major financial collapse.
If the consensus of economists is correct and debt levels greater than 90% of GDP cause economic harm and slow growth, then a number of democracies are guilty of voting themselves into trouble. And if Greece falls, it’s possible that Portugal, Italy, and/or Spain will follow suit. All have had their citizens vote themselves largesse on borrowed money to the point of bankruptcy.
Germany voted in the Nazis basically on promises of lots of largesse from the public purse (and extracted from the ‘wrong’ kind of people).
Going back to the actual bread-and-circuses origin, Rome passed laws to spend increasingly large amounts of money to gain the votes of the plebians, and this policy (as well as others) strained the treasury. Rome responded with higher taxes and by cutting military spending, and their poorly-equipped legions in the frontiers began to get picked off by barbarians and the Empire came under assault from multiple fronts, adding to the strain. I’m sure this is all arguable as there were many other factors that led to the fall of the Roman Empire, but it’s a factor in Rome’s decline that has been talked about since Juvenal wrote about it in the 1st century AD (he is the origin of the phrase ‘bread and circuses’).
You’re being too literal - and also wrong. The phrase dates back to a law passed in 140 BC that allowed the government to give out free grain and provide entertainment to the poor specifically to earn their vote. And voting was definitely a part of Roman life - when new issues were posted, people would travel to the forum and other places to vote on them. The Roman Republic had a lot of Democratic principles, and I’m surprised you don’t know that.
Today, ‘Bread and Circuses’ is a common phrase used to denote any time a person in power attempts to bribe a constituency with promises of comfort, entertainment, or wealth to distract them away from more serious issues.
This is a much better point. There’s no evidence that other forms of government are any better in this regard, or that they won’t err in the other direction - by not having to worry about the opinions of the common people, it allows them to behave despotically or indifferently to human suffering. So you get 5-year plans that kill millions, forced labor battalions, ‘scientific’ planning that destroys the economic ecosystem, and other excesses.
Heinlein recognized that too. His progression as a political thinker led him eventually into a somewhat uncomfortable quasi-libertarianism, tinged with a healthy cynicism for all things political and a skepticism that the core problem could be ‘fixed’ by any government. That’s what I get out of reading his later work - I don’t have any textual examples to offer.
There’s no doubt in my mind that this is the case. Heinlein played with the idea of different ways to decide who got to vote, and why, in his other works. Have a look at the government the students put together on their own in Tunnel in the Sky, for instance. He also describes several possible alternatives in Expanded Universe, some of which must be tongue-in-cheek. He also defends, in that work, the polity used in Starship Troopers, and it’s probably significant that it’s the only of his alternatives that he felt compelled to revisit and defend.
I realize that rabid Heinlein defenders take umbrage at any suggestions that things in his books reflect his actual opinions, but this one is hard to avoid. Not only did he defend the “only veterans can vote” idea in EU, but in the second volume of William Patterson’s biography of Heinlein he states that the view that only people who had contributed to the nation’s safety ought to have a vote was held by Heinlein’s father (and backs this up with a cite). It suggests that this is where Heinlein first encountered the idea, and it’s not a big jump to suspect that he held it himself.
I’m not sure about the last (remember, the doctor doing the physicals for the applicants wasn’t a citizen) but that was always my take as well.
There was some choice but a lot of the non-violent and less military stuff ended up being really risky as I recall - like testing newly developed survival gear which may or may not work.
I have to admit to being one of those who really loves Starship Troopers; the book. That and Glory Road are two of many books I have read and reread fairly often over the years just because I enjoy reading them. Would I like to live in such a society? Hard to tell but I would be willing to give it a shot. Being conservative on a couple subjects and a flaming liberal on the majority of subjects I would be curious how I handled it from the inside/as a insider. I would be interested to see if, as the author seemed to say in the one classroom scene, “it worked”.
One thing I always took as interesting is the idea (and maybe it was unique to my reading) of removing wealth from the voting process and/or public service. Many of the rich, such as Rico’s father and the doctor I mentioned above, had no interest in earning a franchise. Or in serving the whole other than by paying taxes. But civil servants, from the cop on the beat on up, had to prove their willingness to serve with some discomfort or risk first. There is something in all that that has always intrigued me.
You know, normally I don’t like reading analysis of author’s works. That’s because so many of them are preposterous. Too many analysts have a preconceived notion or agenda and twist things to fit that point of view. I read a book about the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder (the Little House books) where the game of Mad Dog, where Pa would pretend he was a rabid dog, get down on all fours and chase Mary and Laura around the log cabin was interpreted as a form of suppressed sexual abuse. I read an analysis of Heinlein’s “Time Enough for Love” where Lazarus taking a train (in a time period where railroads were the form of long-distance public transportation) to return to his hometown where his family lives was interpreted as a sperm and his mother’s womb. Yes, Heinlein specifically picked train as form of transportation because it was sperm-like and not because in 1916 that’s how people traveled by land.
To put it mildly, both of those made me gag.
So generally I really don’t like reading analysis of author’s works. I’m more than capable of analyzing for myself what I read. And I’ve been reading Heinlein for 40 years.
But I have to say that I enjoyed reading your paper. You didn’t try to twist to fit your viewpoint. You simply took the text as it exists and gave a plain language interpretation of it.
I don’t know what country you live in, but I assume by “universal-suffrage” you don’t mean that everyone can vote.
Since this thread is about Heinlein and limiting the franchise, in one of his books (I can’t remember which off the top of my head), he writes about how even in places that have the widest franchise they still restrict a significant portion of their population from voting.
One day I sat down and worked out that number for the United States for my piece “If You Think Everyone Has the Right to Vote ---- You’re So Wrong”. It turns out that Heinlein was even more right than I thought he would be. Here in the United States 1 out 3 people who live here cannot vote here.
Even when the term “universal” is used, I’ve never heard it used where it actually means EVERYONE. There are always still restrictions.
I, in my OP to which you respond, wrote: “I live in a democratic, universal-suffrage country”. The land of which I am a citizen and resident, is the UK. With “universal-suffrage”, I was being “summarise-y and shorthand-y” – not wanting to bog things down at that stage, with detailed minutiae.
As I often bemoan, my computer skills are poor: my attempts at a direct link re who may and may not vote in UK general elections, seem not to work. So – will type out, below, what I found. Those who wish to verify: Google “UK eligibility to vote” – the very first hit should be: “Electoral Commission / who is eligible to vote at a UK general election?”
Answer thereto as above (with slight snippage by me):
To vote in a UK general election, a person must be:
registered to vote and also be 18 years of age or over on polling day
be a British citizen, a qualifying Commonwealth citizen or a citizen of the Republic of Ireland
not be subject to any legal incapacity to vote
Additionally, the following cannot vote in a UK general election:
members of the House of Lords
EU citizens resident in the UK
anyone other than British, Irish and qualifying Commonwealth citizens
convicted persons detained in pursuance of their sentences (though remand prisoners, unconvicted prisoners and civil prisoners can vote if they are on the electoral register)
anyone found guilty within the previous five years, of corrupt or illegal practices in connection with an election
So very similar restrictions to what the United States has. When you said “universal-sufferage” I thought you might mean that every citizen over a certain age could automatically vote without having to become a registered voter.
Or even where there isn’t even any age limit. IIRC, Heinlein had a society like that, too, in one of his books. I think it was the California Republic, possibly in Friday.
Yes. Kind of. He did have the infants having to be able to toddle into the booth and pull the lever. But maybe Friday was using poetic license in how she described it. If she was being literal, that would put the minimum age at about one year.
However, death didn’t stop people from voting. They did it with proxies.
But, in this world, when it’s talked about everyone voting, say some place like Australia with its compulsory voting, there’s still restrictions based on age and citizenship. So what Heinlein said in that one book (whose name still escapes me — someone please tell me which book it’s from) holds true. The franchise is still limited and a significant portion of the population cannot vote.
(Mods, sorry about the nine year bump; if there’s a more recent thread on this topic, please let me know).
I just ran into a ten-minute YouTube where the narrator explains why he thinks that in Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, military service (or rather service in the military) IS the only path to full citizenship. His case sounds compelling; any counter-arguments anyone can think of?
“At no point in the text does the book state that there are non-military alternatives. There are a few lines that suggest as much when taken in isolation, but the ambiguity is canceled out by things that are plainly stated elsewhere”.
While there are clearly non-combat roles within the military, the argument is made that all service is ultimately military and made as arduous as combat training.
“This I think is the key. It’s not about giving the state a few years of your life in exchange for elevated status <…> it’s about tying the status and authority of exerting political force to real personal costs and a sense of responsibility. This take more than a summer in the Peace Corp or a stint as a research assistant at McMurdo Station”
and
“It’s selecting for people willing to sacrifice their own comfort and safety, people with the grit to stick out hardship for a greater goal; it’s trying to weed out freeloaders and opportunists. They don’t want to make it easy.”
I don’t have the book handy, but my recollection is that someone (the recruiting sergeant who signed Juan and Carl up?) described Federal Service as military or an unreasonable substitute — implying that there were non-military tracks which were just as demanding. And (again, my recollection), Carl ended up — literally, as it turned out — at a research facility on Pluto.
When Juan was undergoing assessment he asked the doctor how many were rejected, and the response was that nobody who volunteered was turned away. If someone came in deaf, blind and in a wheelchair they might be assigned to count hairs on a caterpillar by touch, but they would be found a suitable job.
A suitable military job; designed to be as grueling as infantry training. As the video points out, the military was required by law to accept anyone who wasn’t non compos mentis– even people who were all but useless even as cannon fodder. So something would be found, but the washout rate was set deliberately high.
Counter though - the washout rate, EVEN IN NON-COMBAT UNITS was set so that outside of malfeasance (which the protagonist almost managed) you couldn’t be washed out for failures beyond your actual ability. Juan later meets up with a former member of his trainee group who was “washed out” for being incapable of keeping up with the troop but still demanded to serve and continued his service in the non-combat arm. They make it as unattractive and unpleasant as possible, but pretty much have to continue to give you the opportunity absent active efforts on the part of the applicant. Similar to what @OttoDaFe mentions, they’ll find something unpleasant and difficult that makes you want to quit - but won’t say no.
Now, to be clear, that’s how things play out in the narrative as written. For all the flaws of the Federalist group, they by-and-large seem sincere in what they do, and how they do it. After all, the entire officer corps is recruited from the front line fighters - Officer training isn’t something you helicopter into from above, instead it’s bottom up.
But in an every vaguely more realistic world, the rot would likely have set in early. And there are already huge elements of what I’d consider hazing, both physical and non, throughout the society. Given even a generation or two of peacetime (which is implied) or the ongoing stressors of the active combat society (in which we find the story) I’d have bet the rot would have spread rapidly, and the possibilities of “accidental” friendly-fire when your infantry has nukes seems to be terrifying.
So whether or not you consider it satire, or an idealization of a society where service commands respect and instills responsibility, it doesn’t jive with my experience of human nature. At least, not for a more than a period of a few years to a few decades at most.
I did mean “washout” in the sense of making as many as possible want to quit, not that anyone would be told they just weren’t good enough. And yes the Terran Federation is starting to suffer from the old adage that there’s nothing stupider than an army in peacetime; witness the disgraceful, inexcusable unreadiness of US Army troops in Korea 1950, a mere five years after the end of WW2. Wasn’t there a throwaway line in the novel about people starting to question that only veterans should have suffrage or hold office?
