I’ve been rereading as much Heinlein as I can find, including the more obscure stuff, and like Kirk it has been an interesting ride. “Admiral Bob” had a huge influence on me. I can say that in many ways he has had more influence on my attitudes than my parents and peers. I’ve always known this, so I’m less surprised at how much I find familiar if forgotten.

I would argue that Heinlein changed his attitudes less than you might think. All the way through there is a strong belief in individuals and individual liberty. He did appear to change political leanings as he learned more economics and as the political parties shifted around him. The economics in For Us, The Living and Beyond This Horizon are a crude social credit economic theory, which can be seen to be clearly unworkable once you read enough Hayek. In general Heinlein’s later work is far more literary and he took more space to examine issues that you really can’t cover in a juvie, particularly when Alice Dalgliesh is your editor.

He was also alway cognizant of he duty to entertain and that he was competing for the readers beer money. “He always gave good value for his money.” would have been considered a high accolade. That he made people think was a bonus.

I could talk about this for hours…but since the margins of this blogpost are too small for a proper exposition, some pointers.

As a general point Grumbles From the Grave and Expanded Universe cover a lot of ground in what his intentions were. If you want to understand Stranger in a Strange Land I recommend A Martian Named Smith by Patterson and Thornton. It is also worthwhile reading both versions side by side to see how closely it was edited. If you want to grasp what he was doing with Job: A Comedy of Justice read James Branch Cabell particularly Jurgen. I can’t recommend enough Take Back Your Government even as dated as it is, particularly the version with the forward by Jerry Pournelle. Time Enough for Love‘s subthemes center around thinking out what a “mature” human civilization might look like, particularly in the presence of very long life and solid genetic science and engineering. Starship Troopers becomes more comprehensible when you realize that the governmental form of the Federation was a warning, not a an endorsement. It is sort of the best he thought you could do given trends he thought he saw at the time of writing. I Will Fear No Evil is well, just look at this: https://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/works/novels/iwillfearnoevil.html

I’ll let Spider Robinson have the last word: Rah, Rah, R. A. H.!

I agree that his later stuff was…odd. Even so, in my humble opinion, everything he wrote was worth reading. And is worth re-reading in my dotage.

Heinlein is my favorite author.

It’s not just the military, or academia, or the Versailles-on-the-Potomac. I’ve seen this complete cluelessness over the years in, of all places, gaming. I was going to say “video gaming” but Gary Gygax was outmaneuvered by slick lawyers and MBA educated suits, and look what happened to TSR. You’d think they’d know better than to drive away the golden goose that invented the thing they’re trying to sell.

Similarly, Blizzard Entertainment has been making video games for 30 years now, and in my opinion everything started deteriorating when Big-Business Activision bought them out. Last year they re-released a game from nearly 20 years ago and the whole saga of this “re-release” is a laughingstock. By all accounts it was rushed out the door barely half-cooked, with over-hyped, underdeveloped promises and more bugs than an ant-hill. Fans not only angrily demanded refunds, they went over to official review sites and did everything possible to down-vote and negatively review the game until it was literally at the bottom. In the past Blizzard was famous for answering to pleas of “WHENZ IT DUN WE WANNA PLAY?!” with a calm “When it’s finished”. So why shove this abortion out the door? Anyone with a brain could and probably did point out just how not ready it was, but did the guys in charge care? Obviously not. That’s not even going into the whole sorry story of the Taiwanese Hearthstone champions who were kicked out because of obvious worrying about the Chinese market and what the PRC might say.

Many of the people who originally founded and ran Blizzard are long gone, and the Big Business people who replaced them obviously don’t have a clue, yet surely every last one of the executives possesses an MBA or something similar from one of the noblest universities in the land. They’re burning their credibility with fans who have been playing their games for decades, and for what? They spend millions of dollars developing games and writing stories with them that have entertained a generation, and they can’t be bothered or are too short-sighted to do it right.

This line has stuck in my head since Isegoria highlighted it. Probably because it goes with and so aptly supports my thesis (often stated on here) that most people running organizations like the military really have no idea how the hell things work within those organizations. Thus, the “policies without sources” that everybody acknowledge as senseless and ineffectual, yet everyone continues to support and follow.

There really is no “science of organization”, or even real studies of such things going on. We don’t even have the language to discuss them properly, or an awareness that we need such things. Organizational issues are like the weather–Everybody talks about them and bitches about them, yet nobody really understands them or knows how to properly manipulate them. They exist in this real yet entirely unreal meta-world we all participate in on a daily basis, yet remain utterly oblivious to, as if we were fish entirely unaware of water, yet swimming in it.

There is this vast chaosium we live and work in, every day, but which we really don’t understand because it exists in a place outside/beneath our awareness. Dysfunction is recognized, but we don’t know what to do about it, mostly because we’re unable to understand and diagnose what is going wrong in order to take action. We’re like mechanics working without manuals or wiring diagrams, trying to figure out what is going wrong and then correct or work around the broken bits without real knowledge of what we’re doing or where the side-effects are likely to pop out of the woodwork.

Forget fusion; this is probably a more important and yet unlikely to be “solved” issue, mostly because it isn’t studied or even documented. Go look for a manual at Lockheed telling an executive how to set up another successful internal division like Kelly Johnson’s Skunkworks. There won’t be any such thing, because nobody knows how the hell it was done in the first place. It wasn’t something that happened out of intent; from the standpoint of the executive class, it’s like magic; it just happened, and they have no more idea what went into it or how to replicate than they have of how to transform dross into gold.

This is possibly the most important thing in the world for us to study and understand, and yet most of the human race operates in a haze of obliviousness when it comes to all this. Nobody recognizes their role in perpetuating the stupidity or enabling the better aspects of an organization they’re a part of to function; we just get up, interact with our little family work-groups, go to work, interact with those bits of the organization we’re members of, and go home to do more with our families, never pausing to think about what it is that’s going on, or how to really do things within the environment we’re immersed in. Dysfunction is baked in, because most of us just accept things as they are, and never bother to consider the potential for just fixing that which doesn’t work and annoys us. Indeed, most of us let things spiral out of control to the point where the only thing we can do is either divorce, throw the kid out of the house, quit the job, or murder someone before we go mad ourselves.

“Military policy is like cancer: Nobody knows where it comes from but it can’t be ignored.”

Substitute just about anything involving working and living with other people for that phrase “military policy”, and you’ve got the major issue confronting people in groups since we came down out of the trees into the savannahs. And, yet… Nobody pays the slightest attention to it all, or really is even aware of the thing as a whole. It’s like we’re looking at the world around us and thinking it’s all inexplicable magic, without trying to systematize or codify it so as to actually fix what doesn’t work. We’re stuck in a perpetual “alchemy” phase of something we should have long since turned into either an acknowledged art or a fully realized and codified science.

Which is just maddening for someone like me, who can see the outlines and ley lines of it all, yet can’t get anyone else to even recognize that there are such things. Alfred Korzybski said that “…the map is not the territory…”, and he was absolutely right. What we need to internalize is that the organization chart is not the organization; the written rules and formal structure we’ve created and assigned these entities are also only symbolic skeletons, merest frameworks that we flesh out on a daily basis in utter unawareness of what it is we are doing as we do it.

This should be down to a science, by now. How long have we been putting together teams? Since the earliest days down out of the trees, building hunting parties and foraging groups. Yet, we never, ever think about those things. Someone sat down and figured out how to knap flint, turning it into tools and passing that knowledge down. Yet, from the indications, nobody ever had the insight to realize that a hunting party was as much a tool as the stone, or that such a thing needed as much work to be effective as a flint does to be turned from dull rock to razor-sharp cutting tool.

He always gave good value for his money. I don’t think there’s a single work of his that I’ve read that didn’t make me think fairly deep thoughts–Even if they were “WTF? Just… WTF?!?!?”.

Key comment made there was that a writer writes for money, and writes anything that pays–And, there were a lot of “old shames” in that guy’s history. I suspect that he had a few of his own, like that last POS they published from his scrap-pile “never to be published” trunk.

Of course, even that’s a lot more entertaining than about half the crap I see coming out of name-brand publishing houses, these days. Quality entertainment ain’t easy to find…