Talk:The Roads Must Roll

Missing theme: entitlement and duty

One of the themes of "The Roads Must Roll" is the conflict between duty and entitlement.

The functionalist revolutionaries speak for entitlement: their view is that since the road engineers perform a function vital to society, they should receive greater status and rewards, and should stand up for their entitlement to those rewards. The opposing view, represented by the engineers' military-like culture, is that of duty: that the engineers must do whatever it takes to keep the roads rolling, and therefore that they do not have the right to down tools in protest.

Neither side of this conflict is presented as optimal or perfect. Heinlein shows the romanticism of duty by, for instance, inventing new lyrics for the Caisson Song ("The Army Goes Rolling Along") for the engineers. But this romanticism is shown to be manufactured by management ... and ultimately ineffective to prevent sabotage and disaster. Likewise, the protesting workers are shown to have some legitimate complaints, but take their protest too far under the leadership of an ambitious organizer.

Ultimately, the roads system is shown to be unstable. It is so demanding of maintenance that its workers apparently must be regimented in military fashion and taught an exceptional level of esprit de corps to be sufficiently vigilant to keep the roads rolling. But this same esprit de corps and exaggerated perception of their own importance feed directly into the functionalist notion of entitlement.

For a similar view of a maintenance engineer's duty towards his work, see Rudyard Kipling's "The Sons of Martha":

They do not preach that their God will rouse them 
    a little before the nuts work loose.
They do not teach that His Pity allows them
    to drop their job when they dam'-well choose.
As in the thronged and the lighted ways, 
    so in the dark and the desert they stand,
Wary and watchful all their days 
    that their brethren's day may be long in the land.

--FOo (talk) 21:28, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

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Functionalism

It has some resemblance to the Technocracy movement which would have been well-known to Heinlein's readers in 1940... AnonMoos (talk) 04:46, 9 June 2018 (UTC)