Media Review: Starship Troopers
Lessons on leadership from sci-fi
I was in New York City a couple weeks ago to lead a retreat for my team at Dorm Room Fund. As part of my preparation, I reviewed some texts that affected how I thought about leadership when I was younger. One of them was Starship Troopers, by Robert A Heinlein, which I read for the first time during the summer after I graduated from high school.
Heinlein was one of the great science fiction authors of the mid-1900s, alongside Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey) and Isaac Asimov (Foundation). In the context of Heinlein’s bibliography, this book marks the conclusion of his juvenile period, when he wrote for younger people.
It has been critiqued for its attitude towards the military, as well as politics more generally. Those are important elements of the text and worth discussing, even criticizing, at length — but not why I reread it, and therefore not the focus of this review.
The book tells the story of a young man’s progression from a secondary school student to a commissioned officer in a multi-planetary illiberal democracy fighting for survival against an alien horde.
Unlike in Dune, the protagonist in Starship Troopers, Juan Rico, is presented as unexceptional. While the world surrounding him is different from our own, at the start of the book he is not so unlike an average high school student. He ends the book not as an everyman, but certainly as a competent man.
The book is fairly traditional in its narrative structure. It begins in media res, and follows a mostly linear chronology. But I wouldn’t recommend reading this book for the narrative as much as for the ideas it grapples with in social contract theory and political philosophy.
When I think about the events the author chose to emphasize in the text, the book feels like a series of vignettes about Rico’s development as a leader:
discussions with his academic and military instructors
encounters with good and impactful leaders
observations of failures in leadership
conduct in exercises during recruit and officer training — especially those in which he plays a leadership role
his first experiences in operational leadership roles
Rico’s development as a leader
Chronologically, we first encounter Rico as a follower in two juvenile contexts — in the classroom, and in conversation with his father. In these conversations, he’s the person in the middle: he comes to his History and Moral Philosophy with the ideas he absorbed at home, and he comes home with a head full of the ideas he’s picked up in class. Based on his decision to join the federal service, and specifically the Mobile Infantry — the unit of his History and Moral Philosophy teacher — it’s clear that the classroom content stuck with him more.
Over the course of the text, the reader watches Rico grow from a trainee, into a soldier responsible for himself, then a non-commissioned officer responsible for other soldiers, and finally a commissioned officer. Heinlein’s tracking of Rico demonstrates what might be considered a standard approach to developing leadership skills within a field.
There are a couple interesting elements of the progression.
First, in the Mobile Infantry, a leader fills every role on their way up. This ensures all leaders deeply understand the mindset and expected competencies of their followers. At the same time, every follower can ask their direct leader how to do their job. This is not always practical or even desirable in the real world, but when it’s done and it works, it’s incredibly powerful.
Second, Heinlein’s Mobile Infantry is very mission-driven. This is partly a function of the fact that it has entered a fight for survival; it’s do-or-die for humanity. But it shows that he thinks great leadership is developed in institutions that have an almost overpowering raison d’être. A thorough understanding of why an institution exists and the role that a person plays in it are prerequisites to this type of leadership. That understanding of the mission must deepen and become more nuanced as an individual becomes more senior. I’ve only worked in mission-driven organizations to date, so I can’t say for sure whether it’s the only way to get this kind of leadership — but it certainly can work like he tells it.
Essential Questions
The fundamental questions that I see Starship Troopers as asking are less about leadership and more about civic duty:
What are the responsibilities an individual has to their society — and that the society has to the individual?
Why are these responsibilities specifically the core of the social contract?
Rico explores these questions explicitly through dialogue with his superiors, as his role in the Mobile Infantry evolves, and he takes on leadership roles.
Mr. Dubois, Rico’s high school teacher in History & Moral Philosophy, points out that this is one way in which the system of the Terran Federation is not superior to old Earth — modern voters, who are all veterans of federal service, are not necessarily more informed or smarter than the electorate of the old society.
Perhaps not everybody is as informed as they ought to be both in the book’s future and that future’s past, but I have no intention of falling into that category!
One of my takeaways from Starship Troopers is that that what we owe to each other in the US at the very least is to be informed and educated citizens.
It’s not just important to me to be intentional about civic involvement like making informed voting decisions — but also for deciding how to spend the time that I allocate to learning about important issues of the day. I find that becoming informed about these things helps me better understand many of the founders I encounter and the problems they’re working on.
Furthermore, I’m intrigued by technical moats, and enjoy talking with engineers. When I reflect on why I like deep tech in the context of these issues Heinlein raises, the conclusion I come to is really that these are core elements not just of generational companies, but of startups that will advance humanity.
In my mind, that’s the core of what we owe to each other. All else equal (which it admittedly very rarely is) I would prefer to invest in a early-stage moonshots where the firm or its customers are making the world a better place.
Stepping back
Within the cannon of science fiction, Starship Troopers is probably most notable because it popularized powered armor.
But I liked it more as a case study in leadership; I enjoy considering leadership and issues in society in the context of science fiction.
Science fiction as a genre seems like it’s about the technology (and sometimes moves too far in that direction), but really what it does is provide a literary environment where the normal rules of life don’t apply. This lets the author test out new ways of living in a society of their own construction that remove extraneous customs or confounding behaviors.
Incidentally, this is very close to what Mike Maples seems to be talking about when he says that great founders are “living in the future” — it’s just that while authors describe it to inspire readers, early-stage founders start building it for future customers.
Key among these elements of society in science fiction is the ethics of the population. It defines how the society, and its characters, think and act. The easiest way to show, not tell, the reader what society believes is for its leaders to behave in a certain way. This makes sci-fi a great test lab to consider leadership in a context-free zone; the only constraints on action are those imposed by the author.
Just about the only rule authors have to follow is that at least some of these leaders and their actions are active; a sci-fi novella solely about characters who are passive or reactive wouldn’t be very interesting to read.
The activity of leaders in science fiction is what makes it useful to me in evaluating approaches to leadership. I don’t love the study of leadership from abstract theoretical texts because I view leadership first and foremost as a practical skill.
I’d say that I know great leadership when I see it — it’s almost idiomatic. I don’t think I’m particularly contrarian in this almost phenomenological perspective. After rereading Starship Troopers, my conclusion is that the theory of leadership is downstream, not upstream, of its practice.
My practical takeaway from this is that the best way of continuing to refine my approach to leadership, and growing the leadership skills of my colleagues at Dorm Room Fund, is to provide as many opportunities as possible for the entire team to take on appropriately scoped leadership roles.