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Once a month, the Tortuga Society meets to argue about a book. For Starship Troopers the argument was led by Tom Kratman, author of the A Desert Called Peace.
Tom Kratman: “I spent about 32 years in the Army. I don’t deserve the vote under the Starship Troopers system because I had a good time. I enjoyed it.”
We want people with civic virtue, on average (they know it’s imperfect), to be voting and holding political office. You don’t get the vote in Starship Troopers as a reward, or payment, or tit for tat for service. The movie kind of said you did, but that’s because Verhoeven’s dishonest.
The book expressly says that civilians are just as smart as soldiers or sailors and, in many cases, smarter, because it isn’t about competence. It’s about civic virtue only. Civic virtue is the total belief that the whole is greater than any of its parts, and that the parts ought to be “humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live.”
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