The Discipline of Freedom

The following is from the introduction to Robert Heinlein’s ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress’ found exclusively in the Virginia Edition Volume 30. and soon to be a major motion picture from 20th Century Fox.

The Virginia Edition - The Complete works of Robert A. Heinlein can be purchased at: https://www.heinleinbooks.com/book-store

“THE DISCIPLINE OF FREEDOM”

by Brad Linaweaver and William H. Patterson, Jr.

There are no McGuffins in good science fiction. In a properly constructed science fiction story, all the devices are integral to the plot. In science fiction (with apologies to Anton Chekhov), you cannot hang a Hydrogen Bomb on the wall without using it by the last act—just as you cannot imagine a self-aware, super-intelligent computer that doesn’t become a character as opposed to a mere problem.

And therein lies the tale.

What Robert A. Heinlein did in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress was revolutionary on so many levels that it’s still not fully appreciated. Mike is an artificial intelligence with the sly adult cunning of a master strategist (and the low sense of humor of a juvenile delinquent) but coupled with a respect for individual rights akin to the angelic good robots of children’s stories. In other words, Mike is the first artificial intelligence in the history of science fiction to be a philosophical libertarian aware of the implications of his own free will (and if you think the low sense of humor isn’t contingently necessary to being a philosophical libertarian aware of etc., etc., you may think again—but don’t stand in one place too long . . .).

No one is more pragmatic than a farmer—even when working a hydroponic cubic truly in the middle of nowhere, and the details of the rules of line marriage they work out to deal with the raw pioneer fact of two (or more) men to one women are just realistic, pragmatic (Paint Your Wagon on Luna!). The criminal classes from the dregs of American, Russian, and Chinese outcasts are not the stuff with which to build Utopia, and Utopia is not, in fact, what they built. More like Australia, with a little bit of the British Hong Kong Heinlein knew thrown in: he clearly had Botany Bay on his mind as well as the American Revolution, not to mention tactics borrowed from Lenin. The Earth dictatorship tellingly named “Authority” in this book—re-enacts English colonial Mercantilism, oblivious to how
very unpragmatic it is to bleed the kine that treads the grain.

The bad guys in this novel believe There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Market. The good guys in this novel believe There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. There is nothing more brutal than what one human is willing to exact from another in the name of survival or mere comfort.

Mike is beyond—not beyond good or evil—but he is beyond that kind of petty self delusion. In a completely disinterested way, Mike understands the laws of the free market, and therefore he has a better grasp of “the human condition” than—well, nine-tenths of humanity (at least). Mike’s “character arc” (to borrow a term from film writing) is an internal voyage of discovery: he is discovering the true meaning of a rational self—he is on the voyage of self-discovery that each one of us is on.

And if the Tree of Liberty must, from time to time, be watered with the blood of Patriots and Tyrants, Mike, himself, sheds some electrons in its defense. It is no accident that Mike, too darned god-like for anybody’s good, exits the scene after victory. The gods must get out of the way or freedom becomes empty rhetoric worthy of Republicans and Democrats. It is the rational choice—the only rational choice. Heinlein dedicated this book to his best Colorado friends and comrades-in-political-arms, Pete and Jane Sencenbaugh, who had worked with him to sweep mainstream Republicans out of American political life in 1964—which also suggests that Mike and this story maybe remotely descended from the corruption fighting,
practical-joke-playing sentient whirlwind of “Our Fair City.” Kitten never had a chance at self-actualization.

In a negative review in Analog (December 1966) P. Schuyler Miller had no sympathy for the book. He dragged in Bellamy’s Looking Backward to say of it, “The book was tremendously influential,” just so he could add, regarding Moon, “but I’m afraid this one won’t be.” He was wrong, of course—already visibly wrong by the time the review was printed. The isolated groups of college students who had already been re-discovering the American libertarian heritage through Albert J. Nock
and Henry George and reaching back to the mid-nineteenth century to embrace that notorious socialist crank, anarchist Josiah Warren (and Alexander Spooner and Prince Kropotkin and Proudhon) recognized instantly in 1966 the American individualist libertarian vision Heinlein had captured so brilliantly in the opening chapters of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. It became a formative book as that movement, social as much as political, took on shape and founded a political party that seems unable to hold its own vision in the rough-and-tumble of American politics . . . But we’re in the Twenty-first Century now. The State is more dishonest and devious
than ever. We are on our own.

The good news is that science marches on. If the human race moves beyond the cloying embrace of Mother Earth then our future lies off planet— even if the first step is only a cold and barren satellite. If the species has the courage for the last and greatest adventure then The Moon Is A Harsh
Mistress may yet be a work of prophecy.

But the “message” of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is not in the mouth of the don’t-tread-on-me snake that emblemized the American Revolution, or even, entirely, in the Brass Cannon that emblemized the Lunar Revolution. Heinlein was working in a larger frame than that. He had been working with these individualist themes for many years before they became explicit in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress—as American minarchist- individualist libertarian Bill Ritch notes:

“Heinlein’s juveniles—starting with my first, Have Space Suit—Will Travel—introduced me explicitly to science fiction and impliedly to libertarianism. The SF vine grew immediately but the other waited for my teenage years when the rich loam of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress brought forth the subtly planted libertarianism into full bloom.”

And that was exactly Heinlein’s intent: during his lifetime he was bemused by the complaints that Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress were so unalike they could not have been written by the same man—for, of course, they were, all three philosophical novels and all three—well, Heinlein hugged to himself a delicious
secret for the rest of his life, a secret out in the open and obvious to a very few who recognized the unity of what Heinlein was saying: Moon was the grand coda to a sequence, an extended meditation on themes as American as they are Emersonian. He left a 3x5" index card, handwritten, in a safety
deposit box, to be discovered after his passing:

“If a person names as his three favorites of my books Stranger, Harsh Mistress, and Starship Troopers (three Hugo winners—and not for $$), I then believe that he has grokked what I meant. But if he likes one—but not the other two—I am certain that he has misunderstood me, he has picked out points—and misunderstood what he picked. If he picks 2 of 3, then there is hope, 1 of 3—no hope.

All three books are on one subject:
(1) Freedom and Self-Responsibility
(2) Freedom and Self-Responsibility
(3) Freedom and Self-Responsibility

‘Thou Art God’ = No Santa Claus/Father in the sky = You must answer to You—you cannot divorce yourself from life. Philosophically, freedom is Self-responsibility. ‘Love’ is each man acknowledging and embracing ‘Thou Art God’ to include all the individual being of which you are a part.”

This understanding, communicated between the words of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress—and Starship Troopers—and Stranger in a Strange Land—is both the American heritage and America’s promise to the future, the best we have discovered, our contribution to the human legacy. That is what is worth fighting for—as Johnny Rico could tell us. That is what is worth loving for, as another Mike, Valentine Michael Smith, told us as his dying words. And that is Mycroft Holmes’ final benediction, his final gift to the Revolution he helped to make: both he and that other canny manipulator, Prof, removed themselves from the picture, so that the Loonie revolutionaries might have the greatest of all possible human goods (the one that Aristotle forgot to list among his “external goods”): self-determination.