If This Goes On-

"Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
(That's how the light gets in)"

Leonard Cohen - Anthem


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Spoilers follow for the story by the same name. Like most things Heinlein, it's definitely worth enjoying without prejudice the first time through, so go. Peruse. It's a relatively short novella.
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Robert A. Heinlein's If This Goes On- in at least one respect reminds me of Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed. Granted, the two were written decades apart (1940 and 1974, respectively) and address different sub-divisions of the power / freedom thematic milieu, but both remain more uncomfortably self-aware than their target audience would likely have preferred them.

If This Goes On- being obviously intended for an earlier, pulpier mid-20th-century audience, it is also the more action-packed, from the cloaked laser-daggering and a daring jet-powered skydiving escape to the final play-by-play denouement from inside a tank. Were the characters to follow in tune, they'd be plucky underdogs taking on their resident evil empire while armed with nothing but one-liners and righteous indignation. By 1940, space operas had long since dragged SF plots down to power fantasies about the mythical archetype of the lone crusading hero. Heinlein subverted such expectations in more than one way.

Instead of getting the girl at the end, the hero gets a Dear John letter halfway through, and the irrationality of romantic enforced monogamy is immediately contrasted to the freedom of open relationships. Which might sound only slightly edgy today... until you remember, once again, that Heinlein managed to get this published in 19-fucking-40, smack dab in the middle of Hays Code moral repression, testament to John W. Cambell's critical influence on Science Fiction and modern countercultures.

Instead of attributing all menace to some conveniently insidious foreign infiltration, he recognized the growing threat of home-grown American Protestantism to Americans' free thought. Written one year before America would enter WWII, If This Goes On- was obviously inspired by the observed success of fascist propaganda campaigns. Yet Heinlein seems among the first to notice the easy marriage between the supposedly secular cults of personality of the modern televised era and traditional messianism. This, sixty years before Christopher Hitchens would shock my generation by drawing attention to Stalin, Kim Il Sung and others' appropriation of convenient religious iconography.

Instead of toppled against all odds by a rag-tag band of misfits or a lone farm boy filled with dreams of freedom, the evil empire must also be countered by a commensurate opposing force. Or at least one within an order of magnitude of adherents, material resources and training. That the revolutionary movement centers on Masonic lodges might shock modern readers, but makes perfect sense in the context of Heinlein's theocratic premise.

Instead of some inhuman hyper-technological show of force, the evil empire comes to power through all too human means. It uses psychological manipulation, mass-media inundation and the masses' own willful ignorance to crush all resistance. The hoi polloi believe in the lies fed to them by hoi oligoi because they want to believe, because it's easier to be lulled into slavery by big lies than to think critically. Almost inevitably, the heroes' final victory is by no means complete, with the masses being at every turn temped to turn back to the comfort of totalitarian messianic thinking.

Whether all of these elements were present in the 1940 version or added to the revised 1953 version, Heinlein was at least half a century ahead of his time in even his simpler ideas, and in some respects was writing for post-humans.