Stranger in a Strange Land

by Robert A. Heinlein

“The answer is still ‘No.’ ” “Not that question.” “Oh, you know another one? Tell me.” “Later. I want you softened up first.” “Real steak? Not syntho?” “Guaranteed. Stick a fork in it and it will moo.” “You must be on an expense account, Ben.” “That’s irrelevant and ignoble. How about it?” “You’ve talked me into it.” “Roof on the medical center. Ten minutes.”

dear, I used to think I was serving humanity . . . and I pleasured in the thought. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it. So now I do what pleases Jubal Harshaw.”

Besides that, he was tickled at the notion of balking the powers-that-be. He had more than his share of that streak of anarchy which was the birthright of every American; pitting himself against the planetary government filled him with sharper zest than he had felt in a generation.

All, as is always the case, were infected with that oddity of distorted entropy called life;

Harshaw had the arrogant humility of a man who has learned so much that he is aware of his own ignorance;

They might be doing that, too! Government! Three-fourths parasitic and the rest stupid fumbling—oh, Harshaw conceded that man, a social animal, could not avoid government, any more than an individual could escape bondage to his bowels. But simply because an evil was inescapable was no reason to term it “good.” He wished that government would wander off and get lost!

“to write an article on the compulsive reading of news. The theme will be that most neuroses can be traced to the unhealthy habit of wallowing in the troubles of five billion strangers. Title is ‘Gossip Unlimited’—no, make that ‘Gossip Gone Wild.’ ”

Now let’s get something straight: you are not in my debt. Impossible—because I never do anything I don’t want to. Nor does anyone, but in my case I know it. So please don’t invent a debt that does not exist, or next you will be trying to feel gratitude—and that is the treacherous first step toward complete moral degradation. You grok that?”

Though I’ve never understood how God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion by faith—it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe.

the unceasing rush of human existence came not from mathematical necessities of time but from the frantic urgency implicit in human sexual bipolarity.

the importance of a personage could be told by the layers of flappers cutting him off from the mob. They were known as executive assistants, private secretaries, secretaries to private secretaries, press secretaries, receptionists, appointment clerks, et cetera—but all were “flappers” as each held arbitrary veto over communication from the outside. These webs of officials resulted in unofficials who flapped the Great Man without permission from official flappers, using social occasions, or back-door access, or unlisted telephone numbers. These unofficials were called: “golfing companion,” “kitchen cabinet,” “lobbyist,” “elder statesman,” “five-percenter,” and so forth. The unofficials grew webs, too, until they were almost as hard to reach as the Great Man, and secondary unofficials sprang up to circumvent the flappers of primary unofficials. With a personage of foremost importance the maze of unofficials was as complex as the official phalanxes surrounding a person merely very important.

The Universe was a silly place at best . . . but the least likely explanation for it was the no-explanation of random chance, the conceit that abstract somethings “just happened” to be atoms that “just happened” to get together in ways which “just happened” to look like consistent laws and some configurations “just happened” to possess self-awareness and that two “just happened” to be the Man from Mars and a bald-headed old coot with Jubal inside.

Was there any basis for preferring any sufficient hypothesis over another? When you did not understand a thing: No! Jubal admitted that a long life had left him not understanding the basic problems of the Universe. The Fosterites might be right. But, he reminded himself savagely, two things remained: his taste and his pride.

There was one field in which man was unsurpassed; he showed unlimited ingenuity in devising bigger and more efficient ways to kill off, enslave, harass, and in all ways make an unbearable nuisance of himself to himself.

“Yes,” said Duke, “I’ve decided that what Mike eats is his business.” “Congratulations! A desire not to butt into other people’s business is eighty percent of all human wisdom.”

Duke got glasses; Jubal poured and raised his own. “Here’s to alcoholic brotherhood . . . more suited to the frail human soul than any other sort.”

it’s well to look at the new rascals before you turn your present rascals out. Democracy is a poor system; the only thing that can be said for it is that it’s eight times as good as any other method. Its worst fault is that its leaders reflect their constituents—a low level, but what can you expect?

Nor do I regard that wealth as ‘his’; he didn’t produce it. Even if he had earned it, ‘property’ is not the natural and obvious concept that most people think it is.” “Come again?” “Ownership is a sophisticated abstraction, a mystical relationship. God knows our legal theorists make this mystery complicated—but I didn’t dream how subtle it was until I got the Martian slant. Martians don’t own anything . . . not even their bodies.”

“Of course. He can’t manage property because he doesn’t believe in its mystique—any more than I believe in his ghosts.

important word in the language—and I expect to spend years trying to understand it. But I don’t expect to be successful. You need to think in Martian to grok the word ‘grok.’ Perhaps you have noticed that Mike takes a veering approach to some ideas?”

in the first place. Big money isn’t hard to come by. All it costs is a lifetime of devotion. But no ballerina ever works harder. Captain, that’s not your style; you don’t want to make money, you simply want to spend money.”

Then suddenly, with grokking so blinding that he trembled, he understood money. These pretty pictures and bright medallions were not “money”; they were symbols for an idea which spread through these people, all through their world. But things were not money, any more than water shared was growing-closer. Money was an idea, as abstract as an Old One’s thoughts—money was a great structured symbol for balancing and healing and growing closer.

“My dear, religion is a null area in the law. A church can do anything any organization can do—and has no restrictions. It pays no taxes, need not publish records, is effectively immune to search, inspection, or control—and a church is anything that calls itself a church. Attempts have been made to distinguish between ‘real’ religions entitled to immunities, and ‘cults.’ It can’t be done, short of establishing a state religion . . . a cure worse than the disease. Both under what’s left of the United States Constitution and under the Treaty of Federation, all churches are equally immune—especially if they swing a bloc of votes.

‘Piffle!’ I said. Jill, of all the nonsense that twists the world, the concept of ‘altruism’ is the worst. People do what they want to, every time. If it pains them to make a choice—if the choice looks like a ‘sacrifice’—you can be sure that it is no nobler than the discomfort caused by greediness . . . the necessity of deciding between two things you want when you can’t have both. The ordinary bloke suffers every time he chooses between spending a buck on beer or tucking it away for his kids, between getting up to go to work or losing his job. But he always chooses what hurts least or pleasures most. The scoundrel and the saint make the same choices on a larger scale.

But Jill was not sure that Mike would refuse a pass, say, from Duke—fortunately Mike’s male water brothers were decidedly masculine, just as his others were very female women. Jill suspected that Mike would grok a “wrongness” in the poor in-betweeners anyhow—they would never be offered water.)

“Mmmm . . . on Mars, when we needed to know anything, we asked the Old Ones and the answer was never wrong. Jill, is it possible that we humans don’t have ‘Old Ones?’ No souls, I mean. When we discorporate—die—do we die dead . . . die all over and nothing left? Do we live in ignorance because it doesn’t matter? Because we are gone and not a rack behind in time so short that a Martian would use it for one long contemplation? Tell me, Jill. You’re human.”

I’ve found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts . . . because it’s the only thing that’ll make it stop hurting.”

“I had thought—I had been told—that a ‘funny’ thing is a thing of goodness. It isn’t. Not ever is it funny to the person it happens to. Like that sheriff without his pants. The goodness is in the laughing. I grok it is a bravery . . . and a sharing . . . against pain and sorrow and defeat.”

On Mars there is never anything to laugh at. All the things that are funny to us humans either cannot happen on Mars or are not permitted to happen—sweetheart, what you call ‘freedom’ doesn’t exist on Mars; everything is planned by the Old Ones—or the things that do happen on Mars which we laugh at here on Earth aren’t funny because there is no wrongness about them. Death, for example.”

“So? Point to the shortest direction around the universe. It doesn’t matter where you point, it’s the shortest . . . and you’re pointing back at yourself.” “Well, what does that prove? You taught me the true answer, Mike. ‘Thou art God.’ ” “And Thou art God, my lovely. But that prime fact which doesn’t depend on faith may mean that all faiths are true.”

Rodin died about the time the world started flipping its lid. His successors noted the amazing things he had done with light and shadow and mass and composition and they copied that part. What they failed to see was that the master told stories that laid bare the human heart. They became contemptuous of painting or sculpture that told stories—they dubbed such work ‘literary.’ They went all out for abstractions.” Jubal shrugged. “Abstract design is all right—for wallpaper or linoleum. But art is the process of evoking pity and terror. What modern artists do is pseudo-intellectual masturbation. Creative art is intercourse, in which the artist renders emotional his audience. These laddies who won’t deign to do that—or can’t—lost the public. The ordinary bloke will not buy ‘art’ that leaves him unmoved. If he does pay, the money is conned out of him, by taxes or such.”

I want praise from the customer, given in cash because I’ve reached him—or I don’t want anything. Support for the arts—merde! A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore!

The gist was a sort of pantheism . . . one parable was the oldy about the earthworm burrowing through the soil who encounters another earthworm and says, ‘Oh, you’re beautiful! Will you marry me?’ and is answered: ‘Don’t be silly! I’m your other end.’ You’ve heard it?’ “ ‘Heard it’? I wrote it!” “Hadn’t realized it was that old. Mike made good use of it. His idea is that whenever you encounter any other grokking thing—man, woman, or stray cat . . . you are meeting your ‘other end.’ The universe is a thing we whipped up among us and agreed to forget the gag.” Jubal looked sour. “Solipsism and pantheism. Together they explain anything. Cancel out any inconvenient fact, reconcile all theories, include any facts or delusions you like. But it’s cotton candy, all taste and no substance—as unsatisfactory as solving a story by saying: ‘—then the little boy fell out of bed and woke up.’ ”

‘Love’ is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”

“Mostly. Ben, the ethics of sex is a thorny problem. Each of us is forced to grope for a solution he can live with—in the face of a preposterous, unworkable, and evil code of so-called ‘Morals.’ Most of us know the code is wrong, almost everybody breaks it. But we pay Danegeld by feeling guilty and giving lip service. Willy-nilly, the code rides us, dead and stinking, an albatross around the neck.

If a man swore on his own Bible that he refrained from coveting his neighbor’s wife because the code forbade it, I would suspect either self-deception or subnormal sexuality. Any male virile enough to sire a child has coveted many women, whether he acts or not. “Now comes Mike and says: ‘There is no need to covet my wife . . . love her! There’s no limit to her love, we have everything to gain—and nothing to lose but fear and guilt and hatred and jealousy.’

Age does not bring wisdom, Ben, but it does give perspective . . . and the saddest sight of all is to see, far behind you, temptations you’ve resisted.

Man is so built that he cannot imagine his own death. This leads to endless invention of religions.

“Oh, yes, I grok marks, Jubal. At first I did preach free. Didn’t work. We humans have to make considerable progress before we can accept a free gift, and value it. I never let them have anything free until Sixth Circle. By then they can accept . . . and accepting is much harder than giving.”

“But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.”

“That’s what sexual union should be. But that’s what I slowly grokked it rarely was. Instead it was indifference and acts mechanically performed and rape and seduction as a game no better than roulette but less honest and prostitution and celibacy by choice and by no choice and fear and guilt and hatred and violence and children brought up to think that sex was ‘bad’ and ‘shameful’ and ‘animal’ and something to be hidden and always distrusted. This lovely perfect thing, male-femaleness, turned upside down and inside out and made horrible.

No matter what I said they insisted on thinking of God as something outside themselves. Something that yearns to take every indolent moron to His breast and comfort him. The notion that the effort has to be their own . . . and that the trouble they are in is all their own doing . . . is one that they can’t or won’t entertain.”