Revisiting some old SF stories I read as a young man. Came across this. To me it somehow seems appropriate for some followers of this site.

“...secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy...censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “this you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free...the most you can do is kill him.” Robert Heinlein

"no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free...the most you can do is kill him.”

Heinlein is wrong there. Many free men have given up freedom voluntarily. Fear, not force, is the best persuader. Usually an outside threat of some variety.

Yeah.

Someone to live for is a show-stopper.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Sometimes censorship is as simple as strongly hinting that a person's job may be on the line if they publicly express forbidden things. And it always helps to make examples out of a few people.

"As a private company, we have no obligation to employ people who say things we don't like." Or something like that.

The OP's quote was taken from "Revolt in 2100", which is the 1954 Robert A. Heinlein novel in which 3-short stories were hooked together. But the stories themselves date back to 1939 & 1940. The storyline follows the oppression wrought upon America by Protestant Christian fundamentalism, and the resultant heavy yoke placed on Americans by the prophet-President, Nehemiah Scudder, elected in 2012. Things become unbearable for those who won't 'convert' to the religion/law of the land and things build up and then comes the titled revolt in 2100 by, among others, los mormones! Yay! The word is that he rewrote the original short story to throw in the mormon component, so they, the mormons, could pal it up with the Jewish and Catholic rebels.

So the quote in the OP is addressing an overtly religious thematic naughtiness, so that the citizenry may not have been fearful of the cold-blooded villainy that was seen in blunt-force-trauma Russian communism and then in Nazism, etc. Heinlein was making a point about which he was apparently concerned, that religious fanaticism was not an idyllic solution to the cares of the world.


There, now I feel better.

Heinlein also uses Mormons in one of the stories in that wonderful The Past Through Tomorrow. There too they are an anti-authoritarian community of hillbillies who stand up to an overweening federal government.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Heinlein also uses Mormons in one of the stories
> in that wonderful The Past Through Tomorrow.
> There too they are an anti-authoritarian community
> of hillbillies who stand up to an overweening
> federal government.

Mormons are referred to in Starship Troopers. I think the bugs destroy a Mormon space colony called Joseph Smith or Brigham Young City.

The extended commercial slick paid tribute to this in slightly altered form:

https://starshiptroopers.fandom.com/wiki/Mormon

Orson Scott Card took the Heinlein's bugs, made them into Buggers (yes, he used that word) for Ender's Game, and then wondered why homosexuals were not down with it. They had to change the Buggers into Formics for the movie adaptation:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bugger

As Card says in Ender's Game:

"Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be."

And that:

"Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth."

The Grand Dame of Mormon space opera, however, is Battlestar Galactica.