Starship Troopers Outline

Starship Troopers (Robert A. Heinlein)

Alex van der Mout

Thesis: In line with Robert A. Heinlein’s ‘controversial classic of military adventure’ Starship Troopers, man is unique in that we are savages hidden under layers of conditioning, yet ‘human’ enough to stand as an united front.

Reason: Humans are savages hidden under eons of built up social conditioning, needing a set of rules to live their lives according to.

Example: “Man is what he is, a wild animal with the will to survive, and (so far) the ability, against all competition. Unless one accepts that, anything one says about morals, war, politics – you name it – is nonsense. Correct morals arise from knowing what Man is – not what do-gooders and well-meaning old Aunt Nellies would like him to be.” (Heinlein, 186)

Example: “Train up a boy in the way he should go; and when he is old he will not depart from it. – Proverbs XXII: 6” (Heinlein, 108)

Example: “He shall rule them with a rod of iron. – Revelations II: 25” (Heinlein, 41)

Example: “I do not understand objections to ‘cruel and unusual’ punishment. 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? […] As for ‘unusual,’ punishment must be unusual or it serves no purpose.” (Heinlein, 115)

Reason: Man is ruled by their false pretense of morality.

Example: “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 tired to live by it […], 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 lead them astray. You see, they assumed that Man has a moral instinct. […] You have a cultivated conscience, a most carefully trained one. Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it […]. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard swear of the mind.” (Heinlein, 117)

Example: “What is ‘moral sense’? It is an elaboration of the instinct to survive. The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it. […] But the instinct to survive […] can be cultivated into motivations more subtle and much more complex than the blind, brute urge of the individual to stay alive” (Heinlein, 118)

Example: “But all moral problems can be illustrated by one misquotation: ‘Greater love hath no man than a mother cat dying to defend her kittens.’ Once you understand the problem facing the cat and how she solved it, you will then be ready to examine yourself and learn how high up the moral ladder you are capable of climbing.” (Heinlein, 118)

Example: “The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to group that self-interest has to individual. […] Society […] told them endlessly about their ‘rights’. The results should have been predictable, since a human being has no natural rights of any kind.” (Heinlein, 119)

Reason: Humans are unique in that once one of our members is in danger; all join in the ‘fight’ to save that one.

Example: “Our behavior is different. How often have you seen a headline like this? – TWO DIE ATTEMPTING RESUCE OF DROWNING CHILD. If a man gets lost in the mountains, hundreds will search and often two or three searchers are killed. But the next time somebody gets lost just as many volunteers turn out.

Poor arithmetic . . . but very human. It runs through all our folklore, all religions, all our literature – a racial conviction that when one human needs rescue, others should not count the price.

Weakness? It might be the unique strength that wins us a galaxy.” (Heinlein, 223)

Example: “How think ye? If a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and go-eth into the mountains, and seek-eth that which is gone astray? – Matthew XII: 12” (Heinlein, 261)

Other:

“What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly . . . it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. – Thomas Paine” (Heinlein, 78)