Starship Troopers

by

Robert A. Heinlein

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Moral Decline and Discipline Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Militarism Theme Icon
Citizenship Theme Icon
Moral Decline and Discipline Theme Icon
Communism vs. Moral Individualism Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Starship Troopers, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Moral Decline and Discipline Theme Icon

Starship Troopers presents a vision of the future where humanity thrives in a stable, prosperous society organized by reason. By contrasting this futuristic society with the “history” of the late 20th century, taught by Mr. Dubois and Major Reid in their History and Moral Philosophy Classes, the novel suggests that the way to prevent moral decay is to instill moral sense by appealing to a person’s survival instinct though the threat of public, physical punishment. The novel critiques the moral decline of mid-20th century culture, which it sees as taking a soft-on-crime approach and emphasizing individual rights instead of personal responsibility. According to this perspective, the “softness” of people in the 20th century took many forms: a belief that physical punishment of children—spanking, essentially—caused permanent psychic damage; an excess of non-combatant officers in the military; commissioning officers who had never been in battle to lead the military; and an assurance that they had an inalienable right to vote, even if they didn’t have the wisdom to use that power properly. These were symptoms of a social failure to accept responsibility for one’s actions.

The Terran Federation is guided by a belief that moral sense is an extension of the survival instinct. While all humans have a survival instinct, it is only through education and discipline that a person can gain moral sense. This discipline is public corporal punishment. Parents “paddle” their children to teach them what to do and not to do, and likewise the instructors at basic training apply their canes to unruly recruits. Hendrick’s inability to follow orders earns him ten lashes with a whip in the sight of all of the recruits, while Johnnie Rico earns five for endangering his teammates; in the civilian world, lashes are also mandated for crimes like drunk driving. The novel follows Johnnie as his military training and career help him grow from self-interest and allegiance to a very small circle of others (his Father and Mother, his best friend Carl, and his crush, Carmen) to higher ideals and to a valuation of society as a whole. He matures from a recruit who doesn’t know how to take care of his own uniform to an officer candidate who is willing to get his hands dirty in the work of his platoon. Ultimately, he demonstrates his willingness to risk his life both for his platoon and for the mission of “Operation Royalty” on Planet P; in doing so, he demonstrates the internalized self-discipline that the novel holds up as an ideal.

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Moral Decline and Discipline ThemeTracker

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Moral Decline and Discipline Quotes in Starship Troopers

Below you will find the important quotes in Starship Troopers related to the theme of Moral Decline and Discipline.
Chapter 2  Quotes

“Son, don’t think I don’t sympathize with you; I do. But look at the real facts. If there were a war, I’d be the first to cheer you on—and to put the business on a war footing. But there isn’t, and praise God there never will be again. We’ve outgrown wars. This planet is now peaceful and happy and we enjoy good enough relations with other planets. So what is this so-called ‘Federal Service’? Parasitism, pure and simple. A functionless organ, utterly obsolete, living on the taxpayers. A decidedly expensive way for inferior people who otherwise would be unemployed to live at public expense for a term of years, then give themselves airs for the rest of their lives. Is that what you want to do?”

Related Characters: Johnnie’s Father (Mr. Rico) (speaker), Johnnie Rico
Related Symbols: Terran Federation
Page Number: 30
Explanation and Analysis:

Suddenly, he pointed his stump at me. “You. What is the moral difference, if any, between the soldier and the civilian?”

“The difference,” I answered carefully, “lies in the field of civic virtue. A soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life. The civilian does not.”

“The exact words of the book,” he said scornfully. “But do you understand it? Do you believe it?”

“Uh, I don’t know, sir.”

“Of course you don’t! I doubt if any of you here would recognize ‘civic virtue’ if it came up and barked in your face!”

Related Characters: Johnnie Rico (speaker), Mr. Dubois (speaker)
Related Symbols: Terran Federation
Page Number: 32-33
Explanation and Analysis:

“I,” we each echoed, “being of legal age, of my own free will—”

“—without coercion, promise, or inducement of any sort, after having been duly advised and warned of the meaning and consequences of this oath—

“—do now enroll in the Federal Service of the Terran Federation of not less than two years and as much longer as may be required by the needs of the Service—

[…]

“I swear to uphold and defend the Constitution of the Federation against all its enemies on or off Terra […]

“—and to obey all lawful orders of the Commander-in-Chief of the Terran Service and of all officers or delegated persons placed over me—

“—and to require such obedience from all members of the Service or other persons or non-human beings lawfully placed under my orders—

“—and, on being honorably discharged at the completion of my full term of service […] to carry out all duties and obligations and to enjoy full privileges of Federation citizenship including but not limited to the duty, obligation, and privilege of exercising sovereign franchise for the rest of my natural life.”

Related Characters: Johnnie Rico (speaker), Carl (speaker), Mr. Dubois, Fleet Sergeant Ho
Related Symbols: Terran Federation
Page Number: 42-43
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

Now about these batons—They have two uses. First, they mark the men in authority. Second, we expect them to be used on you, to touch you up and keep you on the bounce. You can’t possibly be hurt by one, not the way they are used; at most they sting a little. But they save thousands of words. Say you don’t turn out on the bounce at reveille. 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. And so do I. Not that it matters what you or I think about it; this is the way we do it.

Related Characters: Captain Frankel (speaker), Sergeant Zim (The Sergeant), Ted Hendrick
Page Number: 87-88
Explanation and Analysis:

The Court does not permit you to resign. The Court wishes to add that your punishment is light simply because this Court possesses no jurisdiction to assign greater punishment. The authority which remanded you specified a field court-martial—why it so chose, this Court will not speculate. But had you been remanded for general court-martial, it seems certain that the evidence before this court would have caused a general court to sentence you to hang by the neck until dead. You are very lucky—and the remanding authority has been most merciful.

Related Characters: Lieutenant Spieksma (speaker), Ted Hendrick, Captain Frankel
Page Number: 95
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6  Quotes

But it appeared that Captain Frankel worked so hard that he skipped meals, was kept so busy with something or other that he complained of lack of exercise and would waste his own free time just to work up a sweat.

As for worries, he had honestly seemed to be even more upset at what had happened to Hendrick than Zim had been. And yet he hadn’t even known Hendrick by sight; he had been forced to ask his name.

I had an unsettling feeling that I had been completely mistaken as to the very nature of the world I was in, as if every part of it was something wildly different from what it appeared to be—like discovering that your own mother isn’t anyone you’ve ever seen before, but a stranger in a rubber mask.

But I was sure of one thing: I didn’t even want to find out what the M.I. really was. If it was so tough that even the gods-that-be—sergeants and officers—were made unhappy by it, it was certainly too tough for Johnnie!

Related Characters: Johnnie Rico (speaker), Sergeant Zim (The Sergeant), Ted Hendrick, Captain Frankel
Page Number: 108-109
Explanation and Analysis:

You are now going through the hardest part of your service—not the hardest part physically (though physical hardship will never trouble you again; you now have its measure), but the hardest spiritually … the deep, soul-turning readjustments and re-evaluations necessary to metamorphose a potential citizen into one in being. Or, rather I should say: you have already gone through the hardest part, despite all the tribulations you still have ahead of you and all the hurdles, each higher than the last, which you still must clear. But it is that “hump” that counts—and, knowing you, lad, I know that I have waited long enough to be sure that you are past your “hump”—or you would be home now.

When you reached that spiritual mountaintop you felt something, a new something. Perhaps you haven’t a word for it (I know I didn’t, when I was a boot). So perhaps you will permit an older comrade to lend you the words, since it often helps to have discrete words. 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.

Related Characters: Mr. Dubois (speaker), Johnnie Rico
Related Symbols: Terran Federation
Page Number: 114-115
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

There are a dozen different ways of delivering destruction in impersonal wholesale, via ships and missiles or one sort or another, catastrophes so widespread, so unselective, that the war is over because the nation or planet has ceased to exist. What we do is entirely different. We make war as personal as a punch in the nose. We can be selective, applying precisely the required amount of pressure at the specified point at a designated time—we’ve never been told to go down and kill or capture all left-handed redheads in a particular area, but if they tell us to, we can. We will.

We are the boys who go to a particular place, at H-hour, occupy a designated terrain, stand on it, dig the enemy out of their holes, force them then and there to surrender or die. We’re the bloody infantry, the doughboy, the duckfoot, the foot soldier who goes where the enemy is and takes him on in person. We’ve been doing it, with changes in weapons but very little change in our trade, at least since the time five thousand years ago when the foot sloggers of Sargon the Great forced the Sumerians to cry “Uncle!”

Related Characters: Johnnie Rico (speaker), Sergeant Zim (The Sergeant), Ted Hendrick
Related Symbols: Suits
Page Number: 125-126
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

I didn’t then know what a sadist was—but I knew pups. “Mr. Dubois, you have to! You scold him so that he knows he’s in trouble, you rub his nose in it so that he will know what trouble you mean, you paddle him so that he darn well won’t do it again—and you have to do it right away! It doesn’t do a bit of good to punish him later; you’ll just confuse him. Even so, he won’t learn from one lesson, so you watch and catch him again and paddle him still harder. Pretty soon he learns. But it’s a waste of breath just to scold him.”

Related Characters: Johnnie Rico (speaker), Mr. Dubois
Page Number: 145
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

In the past, armies have been known to fold up and quit because the men didn’t know what they were fighting for, or why, and therefore lacked the will to fight. But the M.I. does not have that weakness. Each one of us was a volunteer to begin with, each for some reason or other—some good, some bad. But now we fought because we were M.I. We were professionals, with esprit de corps. We fought because we were Rasczak’s Roughnecks, the best unprintable outfit in the whole expurgated M.I.; we climbed into our capsules because Jelly told us it was time to do so and we fought when we got down there because that’s what Rasczak’s Roughnecks do.

Related Characters: Johnnie Rico (speaker)
Related Symbols: Terran Federation
Page Number: 193-194
Explanation and Analysis:

Nevertheless, I had signed up in order to win a vote.

Or had I?

Had I ever cared about voting? No, it was the prestige, the pride, the status…of being a citizen.

Or was it?

I couldn’t remember to save my life why I had signed up.

Anyhow, it wasn’t the process of voting that made a citizen—the Lieutenant had been a citizen in the truest sense of the word, even though he had not lived long enough ever to cast a ballot. He had “voted” every time he made a drop.

And so had I!

I could hear Colonel Dubois in my mind: “Citizenship is an attitude, a state of mind, an emotional conviction that the whole is greater than the part…and that the part should be humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live.”

Related Characters: Johnnie Rico (speaker), Mr. Dubois, Carl, Carmen Ibañez , Lieutenant Rasczak
Page Number: 207
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12  Quotes

“Son, do you know about civilians?”

“Well…we don’t talk the same language. I know that.”

“Clearly enough put. Do you remember Madame Ruitman? I was on a few days leave after I finished Basic and I went home. I saw some of our friends, said goodby —she among them. She chattered away and said, ‘So you’re really going out? Well, if you reach Faraway, you really must look up my dear friends the Regatos.’

“I told her, as gently as I could, that it seemed unlikely since the Arachnids had occupied Faraway.

“It didn’t phase her in the least. She said, ‘Oh, that’s all right—they’re civilians!’” Father smiled cynically.

Related Characters: Johnnie’s Father (Mr. Rico) (speaker), Johnnie Rico, Madame Ruitman
Page Number: 218
Explanation and Analysis:

“The ruling nobles of many another system were a small group fully aware of their grave power. Furthermore, our franchised citizens are not everywhere a small fraction; you know or should know that the percentage of citizens among adults ranges from over eighty percent on Iskander to less than three per cent in some Terran nations—yet government is much the same everywhere. Nor are the voters picked men; they bring no special wisdom, talent, or training to their sovereign tasks. So what difference is there between our voters and wielders of franchise in the past? 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.”

Related Characters: Major Reid (speaker)
Related Symbols: Terran Federation
Page Number: 233
Explanation and Analysis:

Young man, can you restore my eyesight? […] 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 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 tribe, requires imagination—devotion, loyalty, all the higher virtues—which a man must develop himself; if he has them forced down him, he will vomit them out. Conscript armies have been tried in the past.

Related Characters: Major Reid (speaker)
Related Symbols: Terran Federation
Page Number: 236
Explanation and Analysis: