So I’m reading — for the seventh or eighth time–Robert Heinlein’s Friday. I’ve reviewed it before, 13 years gone. This time, I’m struck by some of the events portrayed against the background of a pseudo-dystopian future. They’re all too… familiar to a reader in 2025 America.

Heinlein was a very perceptive social critic. He could see past the conventional wisdom of the times he was living in and caught some trends and developments most people didn’t. That vision made him fairly prophetic. In Friday, he predicted multinational corporations taking ownership of whole countries and becoming nations themselves. Surely as American billionaires have re-launched the space race, once the province of nation states only, we can see that next step as plausible.
Corporate nations, he points out, would be hard to fight in a war; because, while their corporate headquarters may be in Delaware, their industrial apparatus may be in the asteroids, and their data centers on the Moon.
Friday also depicts the activities of terrorist groups attempting to control the world’s governments via mass violence and, particularly, assassinating powerful people, bringing to mind the names Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Luigi.
Describing an event called, “Red Thursday,” in which unknown agents rain down worldwide violence, Heinlein relates an all-too historically accurate portrayal of the end-product revolutionary spirit. This happens in future Chicago, but the story has been played out too many times in too many places:
Democrats were being rounded up, sentenced by drumhead courts-martial (provost’s tribunals, they were called) and executed on the spot – laser, gunfire, some hangings… They were sentencing them down to the age of fourteen – we saw one family in which both parents, themselves condemned, were insisting that their son was only twelve.
The President of the court, an Imperial Police corporal, ended the argument by drawing his side arm, shooting the boy, and then ordering his squad to finish off the parents and the boy’s older sister.
How would we, the civilized people of 2025, so much more sophisticated than our ancestors, get here? The two-part formula is horrifyingly simple.
1 – The populace works up a belief that “they,” who aren’t like “us,” are evil and thus disposable
2 – Revolutionary spirit pervades, people become desperate for change (“tear it all down”) and we destroy or allow the destruction of the infrastructure with absolutely no plan for its replacement.
I belong to the Heinlein Forum on Facebook. It’s run by friends of mine, who are responsive and responsible administrators. They have one rule that sometimes gives users gas: No discussion of living, national political figures. Personally, I don’t agree with that rule. If I were an admin, I would want to change it. But I am emphatically not an admin for the Forum, and thus do not have to deal with the flame wars and the reports of ad hominem attacks, threats and libel that may result if the Forum members start talking about Trump and Harris. So it doesn’t matter that I don’t agree.
The rule in question started to actively sting some of us when Elon Musk became a “national political figure.” As head of DOGE, the man who is a proponent of electric cars and private space travel, to some a living embodiment of the spirit of Heinlein’s pivotal character, D.D. Harriman (“The Man Who Sold the Moon”), is not available to be discussed by this group of Heinlein fans.
So a friend of mine started an alternate group where Heinleiners could vent their spleens about politics. Her group, too, has rules, but it allows the “hot” topics of the day. I joined to see what might happen. The other day, I answered a question shared by a fellow user. The question was, “Why do liberals think all Trump supporters are stupid?”
The original post included an answer from a site called “American News X,” which, no surprise based on the site’s name, suggested that Trump supporters need to take their pick between stupid or being evil; because, based on a laundry list of bad acts shared in the answer, you had to be one or the other to support him.
I provided an alternate answer, one not about President Trump at all:
“… because human beings all tend to believe that they as individuals are in the highest percentile intellectually. So everyone else must be stupid, and that’s a convenient excuse for any behavior we don’t care for. Politicians are a necessary evil. But that doesn’t mitigate their evil, and it does mean we are literally supporting evil sometimes as a political expedient.”
I won’t rehash the ensuing conversation, except to say that one Heinleiner repeatedly insisted that the 77.3 million Americans who voted for Trump are all bigoted, racist and evil.
And herein lies behavior #1, described above. It’s the precursor to behavior #2 getting a foothold, and it’s the one we need to beware. You will never convince me that the belief described above differs from the belief that all Muslims are out to destroy America, or that all Jews are part of a conspiracy to control the world’s finances.
If you can write people off as “evil,” then you’re very likely to be at least hard-hearted towards them. You won’t have much sympathy toward their misfortunes–you might even laugh at them. You might even laugh–and many do–if they’re killed. And then you might nod your head and say, “Well, I didn’t want that to happen to them, but if they hadn’t been so (fill in your own adjective), it wouldn’t have happened.”
You might refuse to be friends with such people, or even to speak to them. You might, in very mature fashion, go on social media and give laundry lists of beliefs and behaviors that will result in “immediate unfriending” if discovered. (No, I’m not talking about you… or you… or you there in the back. I’m talking about all of us, because I’m sure I’ve done that too.) You might even turn your back on family members because they don’t have the correct philosophical pedigree.
In time, these people stop being people in your eyes and become things.
And now you’re well along the path that leads to 12-year-old boys being shot and whole families being executed.
No, I’m not saying that, you are responsible for the horrors of Stallin, Hitler or Pol Pot. I’m saying that you’re leaving yourself open to being desensitized. The revolutionary nightmares of the past and the revolutionary nightmares Heinlein describes in Friday all begin with someone saying, “They’re not really like us.”
The important question is, where do you go from there? Do you then say, “So they shouldn’t be allowed here?” or do you say, “So maybe we should try to understand them and their differences? And I’ll bet, if we do that, we’ll find a lot of similarities too.”
Robert Heinlein, from his first story, “Life-Line” to his final novel, To Sail Beyond the Sunset, never failed to remind his readers that most people are basically good. It’s just that, when assembled in groups, they can talk themselves into doing horribly evil things… By playing “Us” and “Them.” I take from that that it’s up to us as individuals to watch our own behavior and not let it contribute to bad groupthink.
And please… if you agree with what I’m saying, and you’re nodding your head… check yourself. Are you following that up with, “That’s what I’m talking about! That’s what they do!”
‘Cause, if you are, you’re completely missing the point.