"Starship Troopers"

[fiefoe]

I wouldn't say that I hate-read Robert Heinlein's ode to militarism and corporal punishment, but once in a while it's fun to be on guard while reading something, just to spot what parts the author idealizes and what parts he demonizes. It's so convenient that the enemies are bugs and there is no way to communicate with these beings.

• had been rampaging in among them in a fashion that let us fire at will without fear of hitting each other while they stood a big chance of hitting their own people in shooting at us -- if they could find us to shoot at, at all. (I’m no games-theory expert but I doubt if any computer could have analyzed what we were doing in time to predict where we would be next.)
• Anyone who clings to the historically untrue -- and thoroughly immoral— doctrine that ‘violence never settles anything’ I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst.
• (Whew!) Mr. Dubois had analyzed the Service oath for us in History and Moral Philosophy and had made us study it phrase by phrase -- but you don’t really feel the size of the thing until it comes rolling over you, all in one ungainly piece, as heavy and unstoppable as Juggernaut’s carriage.
• “They talk. You simply have to train your ear to their accent. Their mouths can’t shape ‘b,’ ‘m,’ ‘p,’ or ‘v’ and you have to get used to their equivalents -- something like the handicap of a split palate but with different letters. No matter, their speech is as clear as any human speech.
• A neo, a trained Caleb, is about six times as bright as a dog, say about as intelligent as a human moron—except that the comparison is not fair to the neo; a moron is a defective, whereas a neo is a stable genius in his own line of work.
• “The emotional relationship between the dog-man and the man-dog in a K-9 team is a great deal closer and much more important than is the emotional relationship in most marriages.
• He looked at us. “You apes—No, not ‘apes’; you don’t rate that much. You pitiful mob of sickly monkeys . . . you sunken-chested, slack-bellied, drooling refugees from apron strings. In my whole life I never saw such a disgraceful huddle of momma’s spoiled little darlings in—you, there! Suck up the gut! Eyes front! I’m talking to you!”
• It was not. It was too scheduled, too intellectual, too efficiently and impersonally organized to be cruelty for the sick pleasure of cruelty; it was planned like surgery for purposes as unimpassioned as those of a surgeon... I do know (now) that the psych officers tried to weed out any bullies in selecting instructors. They looked for skilled and dedicated craftsmen to follow the art of making things as tough as possible for a recruit; a bully is too stupid, himself too emotionally involved, and too likely to grow tired of his fun and slack off, to be efficient.
• when you’ve got a real weapon you can use to win? What’s the point in a whole lot of men risking their lives with obsolete weapons when one professor type can do so much more just by pushing a button?” ... “I see. Well, the question you asked is one that a sergeant isn’t really qualified to answer . . . and one that you shouldn’t ask me. You’re supposed to know the answer before you join up. Or you should. Did your school have a course in History and Moral Philosophy?”
• I understand that even back in the days when wars were fought and decided with just such rifles it used to take several thousand fired shots to average killing one man. This seems impossible but the military histories agree that it is true -- apparently most shots weren’t really aimed but simply acted to force the enemy to keep his head down and interfere with his shooting.
• No doubt the duty corporal could wheedle you, say ‘pretty please with sugar on it,’ inquire if you’d like breakfast in bed this morning—if we could spare one career corporal just to nursemaid you. We can’t, so he gives your bedroll a whack and trots on down the line, applying the spur where needed. Of course he could simply kick you, which would be just as legal and nearly as effective. But the general in charge of training and discipline thinks that it is more dignified, both for the duty corporal and for you, to snap a late sleeper out of his fog with the impersonal rod of authority.
• Time to admit that I was wrong and Father was right, time to put in that little piece of paper and slink home and tell Father that I was ready to go to Harvard and then go to work in the business -- if he would still let me.
• But blurt it out he did, to me, in front of witnesses, forcing me to take of official notice of it—and that licked us. No way to get it off the record, no way to avoid a court . . . just go through the whole dreary mess and take our medicine, and wind up with one more civilian who’ll be against us the rest of his days. Because he has to be flogged; neither you nor I can take it for him, even though the fault was ours.
• So I had plenty to think about as I lay awake that night. I had known that Sergeant Zim worked hard, but it had never occurred to me that he could possibly be other than completely and smugly self-satisfied with what he did. He looked so smug, so self-assured, so at peace with the world and with himself. <> The idea that this invincible robot could feel that he had failed, could feel so deeply and personally disgraced that he wanted to run away, hide his face among strangers, and offer the excuse that his leaving would be “best for the outfit,” shook me up as much, and in a way even more, than seeing Ted flogged.
• Simply this: The noblest fate that a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war’s desolation. The words are not mine, of course, as you will recognize. Basic truths cannot change and once a man of insight expresses one of them it is never necessary, no matter how much the world changes, to reformulate them. This is an immutable, true everywhere, throughout all time, for all men and all nations.
• All the work one cares to add will not turn a mud pie into an apple tart; it remains a mud pie, value zero. By corollary, unskillful work can easily subtract value;  ... nevertheless the disheveled old mystic of Das Kapital, turgid, tortured, confused, and neurotic, unscientific, illogical, this pompous fraud Karl Marx, nevertheless had a glimmering of a very important truth. If he had possessed an analytical mind, he might have formulated the first adequate definition of value . . .
• “Wrong,” he said coldly. “ ‘Value’ has no meaning other than in relation to living beings. The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human -- ‘market value’ is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average of personal values, all of which must be quantitatively different or trade would be impossible.” ... “This very personal relationship, ‘value,’ has two factors for a human being: first, what he can do with a thing, its use to him . . . and second, what he must do to get it, its cost to him. There is an old song which asserts that ‘the best things in life are free.’ Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century;
• The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion . . . and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself—ultimate cost for perfect value.”
• Pipes seem very odd when you first hear them, and a tyro practicing can set your teeth on edge—it sounds and looks as if he had a cat under his arm, its tail in his mouth, and biting it. <> But they grow on you. The first time our pipers kicked their heels out in front of the band, skirling away at “Alamein Dead,” my hair stood up so straight it lifted my cap. It gets you—makes tears.
• While a judge should be benevolent in purpose, his awards should cause the criminal to suffer, else there is no punishment—and pain is the basic mechanism built into us by millions of years of evolution which safeguards us by warning when something threatens our survival. Why should society refuse to use such a highly perfected survival mechanism? However, that period was loaded with pre-scientific pseudo-psychological nonsense.
• Young lady, the tragic wrongness of what those well-meaning people did, contrasted with what they thought they were doing, goes very deep. They had no scientific theory of morals. They did have a theory of morals and they tried to live by it (I should not have sneered at their motives) but their theory was wrong -- half of it fuzzy-headed wishful thinking, half of it rationalized charlatanry. The more earnest they were, the farther it led them astray. You see, they assumed that Man has a moral instinct.”
• “But the instinct to survive,” he had gone on, “can be cultivated into motivations more subtle and much more complex than the blind, brute urge of the individual to stay alive. Young lady, what you miscalled your ‘moral instinct’ was the instilling in you by your elders of the truth that survival can have stronger imperatives than that of your own personal survival.
• “The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to group that self-interest has to individual. Nobody preached duty to these kids in a way they could understand -- that is, with a spanking. But the society they were in told them endlessly about their ‘rights.’ “
• year to train a private to fight and to mesh his fighting in with his mates; a Bug warrior is hatched able to do this. <> Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M. I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commissars didn’t care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo. Perhaps we could have figured this out about the Bugs by noting the grief the Chinese Hegemony gave the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance;
• And Father would never have goofed in Basic the way I had—no lashes for him. He was probably spotted as non-com material before he ever finished Basic. The Army needs a lot of really grown-up men in the middle grades; it’s a paternalistic organization.
• I had at last found out what was wrong with me.” He stopped, then said very softly, “I had to perform an act of faith. I had to prove to myself that I was a man. Not just a producing-consuming economic animal . . . but a man.”
• I’ll state the obvious: Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage. <> “And that is the one practical difference.” <> “He may fail in wisdom, he may lapse in civic virtue. But his average performance is enormously better than that of any other class of rulers in history.”
• “Because revolution -- armed uprising -- requires not only dissatisfaction but aggressiveness. A revolutionist has to be willing to fight and die -- or he’s just a parlor pink. If you separate out the aggressive ones and make them the sheep dogs, the sheep will never give you trouble.” <> “Nicely put! Analogy is always suspect, but that one is close to the facts. Bring me a mathematical proof tomorrow.
• “You would find it much easier than to instill moral virtue—social responsibility -- into a person who doesn’t have it, doesn’t want it, and resents having the burden thrust on him. This is why we make it so hard to enroll, so easy to resign. Social responsibility above the level of family, or at most of tribe, requires imagination -- devotion, loyalty, all the higher virtues -- which a man must develop himself;
• It was one of those bush wars that hared up on the edges of the Napoleonic wars. This young officer was the most junior in a naval vessel -- wet navy, of course—wind-powered, in fact. This youngster was about the age of most of your class and was not commissioned. He carried the title of temporary third lieutenant’—note that this is the title you are about to carry. He had no combat experience; there were four officers in the chain of command above him. When the battle started his commanding officer was wounded. The kid picked him up and carried him out of the line of fire. That’s all—make pickup on a comrade. But he did it without being ordered to leave his post. The other officers all bought it while he was doing this and he was tried for ‘deserting his post of duty as commanding officer in the presence of the enemy.’ Convicted. Cashiered.”