This might be a good time to bring up something Heinlein wondered about for which I have found no resolution in the correspondence. On several occasions he mused through his fingers about wondering whether a technological civilization could be maintained at all without some degree of force.

I think about this periodically but can't get a handle on it. What is it about a technological civilization that especially requires force?

There is probably a simple and obvious response to this that just doesn't occur to me because of my own orientation.

This probably warrants a new thread. IMVHO.

My first kick around the block ranges from...

"technology multiplies the capability of the individual, necessitating more social/governmental force to hold things in check"

to...

The argument is specious. That is, every type of civilization requires some amount of collective force from the thugs in charge that is greater than any one individual. The multiplier may simply be greater in a technological society.

The assertion is ambiguous enough to be worthy of an Ericsonian hypnotist. I find myself unable to speculate on it without some clarification of what is meant by "technological society", "maintained", and "force".

No, I'm not being deliberately cute. Is a technological society one that uses technology, if so, when did it start, with the agrarian revolution, the industrial revolution, the information revolution, or at some point in the future when individuals have the ability to destroy civilization through widespread availability of devices such as genetic synthesizers (we're nearly there, the code for the Ebola virus is freely downloadable today)? Or does it mean a society that is focused more on technology than, say, social issues, like we were in the fifties when your average American boy had posters of rockets adorning his bedroom? Does "maintained" mean "kept from destroying itself" or "keeping the established system of government in place" or "kept from turning into a non-technological society"? Is the force military, judicial, legislative, economic, or psychological, and is it applied overtly or covertly, and directed by the government or a private entity? If a democracy or a republic votes for the force by a majority, does it still count?

Visions of "Brazil", "Blade Runner", "THX1138", and "Minority Report" dance through my head. I have no idea where to start.

Let me add a qualification here. I think the "technological civilization" of Heinlein's comments might have been intended to create an exception to the anthropological field studies of the Bushmen that started appearing in the 1950's. These studies created a challenge to the Hobbes fallacy ("Life in the state of nature is poor, nasty, brutish, and short"), because the studies revealed societies with some very desirable features -- an average individual working day less than 2 hours, a strong social and family structure, tolerance of individual eccentricity and personal freedom beyond anything observed in even the most liberal modern societies, near-total absence of stress-related diseases. This lifestyle is a direct descendant of the lifestyle for which Homo evolved, adapted for extremely harsh conditions.

(Parenthetically, they also posed a problem in wondering why hunter-gatherers adopted city living at all; the answer to that conundrum was that they were rationally trading freedom and leisure for certainty: food is much more abundant with a civil lifestyle, so you are no longer tied to the luck of what you can find in any given day).

So the way Heinlein formulated his comment avoids becoming embroiled in this particular discussion and assumes as a given that we have already made the choice to trade personal freedom for lifestyle benefits.