from
Revolt in 2100
by
Robert A. Heinlein

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN is probably the best story-teller in the science-fiction field today. If I were backed into a corner and forced to tell why in one sentence, I’d say, “Heinlein’s got a sense of proportion.” Well, how does one get a sense of proportion? By experience, I think. And there is only one kind of experience that counts as necessary to a competent writer: experience of mankind.

Literary and scientific techniques are very useful to a writer, but I don’t think the study of them is necessary. They are intellectual concepts. Man is also an emotional animal. And a good story must be about man—not man after a lobotomy, but about the irrational part of him as well as the rational. Sentimentality is no substitute; it degrades man instead of treating him with the respect that, God knows, he deserves.

Now Heinlein does something that is vitally necessary to good writing: he perceives people. He knows how they feel. He has felt that way himself. He has even bridged the difficult gap of realizing that people feel much the same way everywhere, allowing for constitutional differences.

He has accepted membership in the human race.

I don’t think you can be a good writer unless you do that.

West Point had suited me. Oh, I had joined in the usual griping among classmates, the almost ritualistic complaining common to all military life, but truthfully I enjoyed the monastic routine—up at five, two hours of prayers and meditation, then classes and lectures in the endless subjects of a military education, strategy and tactics, theology, mob psychology, basic miracles. In the afternoon we practiced with vortex guns and blasters, drilled with tanks, and hardened our bodies with exercise.

I did not stand very high on graduation and had not really expected to be assigned to the Angels of the Lord, even though I had put in for it. But I had always gotten top marks in piety and stood well enough in most of the practical subjects; I was chosen.

“God wastes not. Right?”

“That’s sound doctrine.”

“God requires nothing of man beyond his strength. Right?”

“Yes, but—”

“Shut up. God commands man to be fruitful. The Prophet Incarnate, being especially holy, is required to be especially fruitful. That’s the gist of it; you can pick up the fine points when you study it. In the meantime, if the Prophet can humble himself to the flesh in order to do his plain duty, who are you to raise a ruction?”

It seemed to me that, in this business, someone was continually making me face up to facts, instead of letting me dodge unpleasant facts the way most people manage to do throughout their lives. Could I stomach such an assignment? Could I refuse it—since Master Peter had implied at least that assassins were volunteers—refuse it and try to ignore in my heart that it was going on and I was condoning it?

Master Peter was right; the man who buys the meat is brother to the butcher. It was squeamishness, not morals . . . like the man who favors capital punishment but is himself too “good” to fit the noose or swing the axe. Like the person who regards war as inevitable and in some circumstances moral, but who avoids military service because he doesn’t like the thought of killing.

Emotional infants, ethical morons—the left hand must know what the right hand doeth, and the heart is responsible for both.

Successful revolution is Big Business—make no mistake about that. In a modern, complex, and highly industrialized state, revolution is not accomplished by a handful of conspirators whispering around a guttering candle in a deserted ruin. It requires countless personnel, supplies, modern machinery and modern weapons. And to handle these factors successfuly there must be loyalty, secrecy, and superlative staff organization.

I had trouble at first in admitting the possibility of what I read; I think perhaps of all the things a police state can do to its citizens, distorting history is possibly the most pernicious. For example, I learned for the first time that the United States had not been ruled by a bloodthirsty emissary of Satan before the First Prophet arose in his wrath and cast him out—but had been a community of free men, deciding their own affairs by peaceful consent. I don’t mean that the first republic had been a scriptural paradise, but it hadn’t been anything like what I had learned in school.

“For pity’s sake! What is this? Don’t the brethren trust me? Here I risk my neck—”

He cut in on me in a much more conciliatory manner. “No, no, it’s not that at all. It’s for your protection.”

“Huh?”

“Doctrine. The less you know that you don’t need to know the less you can spill if you are ever captured—and the safer it is for you and for everybody. For example, do you know where you are right now? Could you point it out on a map?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. We don’t need to know so we weren’t told.”

“Do you seriously expect to start a rebellion with picayune stuff like that?”

“It’s not picayune stuff, because it acts directly on their emotions, below the logical level. You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic. It doesn’t have to be a prejudice about an important matter either.”

“I certainly see how it could work on other people. But personally, I guess I’m immune to it. Those taboo words don’t mean a thing to me—except that I’m reasonably careful not to offend other people. I’m an educated man, Zeb—‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, et cetera.’ But I see how you could work on the ignorant.”

Now I should know better than to drop my guard with Zeb. The good Lord knows he’s tripped me up enough times. He smiled at me quietly and made a short statement involving some of those taboo words.

“You leave my mother out of this!”

I was the one doing the shouting and I came up out of my chair like a dog charging into battle.

“All I said, in fact, was that you were the legitimate offspring of a legal marriage. Right? What is insulting about that?”

“But—” I stopped and ran over in my mind the infuriating, insulting, and degrading things he had said—and, do you know, that is absolutely all they added up to. I grinned sheepishly. “It was the way you said it.”

“Exactly, exactly! To put it technically, I selected terms with high negative indices, for this situation and for this listener. Which is precisely what we do with this propaganda, except that the emotional indices are lesser quantitatively to avoid arousing suspicion and to evade the censors—slow poison, rather than a kick in the belly.”

“Haven’t you gotten it through your head yet that the whole ‘pariah’ notion is this tyranny’s scapegoat mechanism that every tyranny requires?”

“Yes, but—”

“Shut up. Take sex away from people. Make it forbidden, evil, limit it to ritualistic breeding. Force it to back up into suppressed sadism. Then hand the people a scapegoat to hate. Let them kill a scapegoat occasionally for cathartic release. The mechanism is ages old. Tyrants used it centuries before the word ‘psychology’ was ever invented. It works, too. Look at yourself.”

“From my point of view, a great deal of openly expressed piety is insufferable conceit.”

“Huh?”

“Not every case—I’ve known the good and the humble and the devout. But how about the man who claims to know what the Great Architect is thinking? The man who claims to be privy to His Inner Plans? It strikes me as sacrilegious conceit of the worst sort—this character probably has never been any closer to His Trestle Board than you or I. But it makes him feel good to claim to be on chummy terms with the Almighty, it builds his ego, and lets him lay down the law to you and me.”

“You say the doctrines are a matter of logic?”

“You’ve explained the logic to me yourself. It’s a perfect, consistent structure.”

“So it is. Johnnie, the nice thing about citing God as an authority is that you can prove anything you set out to prove. It’s just a matter of selecting the proper postulates, then insisting that your postulates are ‘inspired.’ Then no one can possibly prove that you are wrong.”

What is it about the body of a human woman that makes it the most terribly beautiful sight on earth? Is it, as some claim, simply a necessary instinct to make sure that we comply with God’s will and replenish the earth? Or is it some stranger, more wonderful thing?

I found myself quoting: “How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights!

“This thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of grapes.”

Then I broke off, ashamed, remembering that the Song of Songs which is Solomon’s was a chaste and holy allegory having nothing to do with such things.

“Free men aren’t ‘conditioned!’ Free men are free because they are ornery and cussed and prefer to arrive at their own prejudices in their own way—not have them spoonfed by a self-appointed mind tinkerer! We haven’t fought, our brethren haven’t bled and died, just to change bosses, no matter how sweet their motives. I tell you, we got into the mess we are in through the efforts of those same mind tinkerers. They’ve studied for years how to saddle a man and ride him. They started with advertising and propaganda and things like that, and they perfected it to the point where what used to be simple, honest swindling such as any saleman might use became a mathematical science that left the ordinary man helpless.” He pointed his finger at Stokes. “I tell you that the American citizen needs no protection from anything—except the likes of him.”

“This is ridiculous,” Stokes snapped, his voice rather high. “You wouldn’t turn high explosives over to children. That is what the franchise would be now.”

“The American people are not children.”

“They might as well be!—most of them.”

Winters turned his eyes around the hall. “You see what I mean, friends? He’s as ready to play God as the Prophet was. I say give ’em their freedom, give ’em their clear rights as men and free men and children under God. If they mess it up again, that’s their doing—but we have no right to operate on their minds. [...] We can’t make the world safe for children, nor for men either—and God didn’t appoint us to do it.”

A trained observer might have detected a trace of dismay breaking through the mask of indifference with which the young man had faced his trial. Dismay was unreasonable; in view of his offence, the sentence was inevitable—but reasonable men do not receive the sentence.

“What is there left today? Cautious, compromising ‘safe’ weaklings with water in their veins. You’ve planned your whole world so carefully that you’ve planned the fun and zest right out of it. Nobody is ever hungry, nobody ever gets hurt. Your ships can’t crack up and your crops can’t fail. You even have the weather tamed so it rains politely—after midnight. Why wait till midnight, I don’t know . . . you all go to bed at nine o’clock!

“If one of you safe little people should have an unpleasant emotion—perish the thought!—you’d trot right over to the nearest psychodynamics clinic and get your soft little minds readjusted. Thank God I never succumbed to that dope habit. I’ll keep my own feelings, thanks, no matter how bad they taste.”

The revolutionists wished to establish maximum personal liberty. How could they accomplish that to a degree of high mathematical probability?

First they junked the concept of “justice.” Examined semantically “justice” has no referent—there is no observable phenomenon in the space-time-matter continuum to which one can point, and say, “This is justice.” Science can deal only with that which can be observed and measured. Justice is not such a matter; therefore it can never have the same meaning to one as to another; any “noises” said about it will only add to confusion.

But damage, physical or economic, can be pointed to and measured. Citizens were forbidden by the Covenant to damage another. Any act not leading to damage, physical or economic, to some particular person, they declared to be lawful.

Since they had abandoned the concept of “justice,” there could be no rational standards of punishment. Penology took its place with lycanthropy and other forgotten witchcrafts. Yet, since it was not practical to permit a source of danger to remain in the community, social offenders were examined and potential repeaters were given their choice of psychological readjustment, or of having society withdraw itself from them—Coventry.

Early drafts of the Covenant contained the assumption that the socially unsane would naturally be hospitalized and readjusted, particularly since current psychiatry was quite competent to cure all non-lesional psychoses and cure or alleviate lesional psychoses, but Novak set his face against that.

“No!” he protested. “The government must never again be permitted to tamper with the mind of any citizen without his consent, or else we set up a greater tyranny than we had before."

He stared after her, mouth open, then borrowed from his remotest ancestor by observing to himself that women are hard to figure out.

The first of these unwritten stories, The Sound of His Wings, [...] would have recounted the early life, rise as a television evangelist, and subsequent political career of the Reverend Nehemiah Scudder, the “First Prophet,” President of the United States and destroyer of its Constitution, founder of the Theocracy.

The second story, Eclipse, [...] is concerned with the colonies on Mars and on Venus becoming self-sufficient and politically mature and breaking away from Mother Earth, followed by almost complete cessation of interplanetary travel.

The Stone Pillow [...] was to have been concerned with the slow build-up of a counter-revolutionary underground.

Space travel in the near future is likely to be a marginal proposition at best, subsidized for military reasons. It could die out—then undergo a renascence through new techniques and through new economic and political pressures. I am not saying these things will happen, I do say they could happen.

As for the second notion, the idea that we could lose our freedom by succumbing to a wave of religious hysteria, I am sorry to say that I consider it possible. I hope that it is not probable. But there is a latent deep strain of religious fanaticism in this, our culture; it is rooted in our history and it has broken out many times in the past.

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics. [...] The custodians of the True Faith cannot logically admit tolerance of heresy to be a virtue.