Lessons from Stranger in a Strange Land
I read Stranger in a Strange Land when I was 17, probably my first adult book. It was my “confirmation bias” to justify my adolescent decision to leave Christianity.
To briefly recap this popular science fiction literature, an Earth-to-Mars expedition fails, with the Earth colony succumbing to the harsh climate of Mars. Twenty years later, Earth tries to colonize Mars again. When the astronauts reach the former colony , they find a 20-year-old man, Michael Smith. Michael is the byproduct of a romantic relationship of two of the previous astronauts.
Somehow, Michael was raised to adulthood by Martians. They allow him to return to Earth, and he learns English quickly. He brings his Martian philosophy to Earth. He uses the word “grok” a lot.
“Grok” is never defined in the novel. To get that definition, I had to read the book a second time. My understanding is that “grok” is an instinctual understanding which is different than a technical understanding. At least, that is what I think it means.
As Michael is teaching Earth his Martian philosophy, he is attracting earthly enemies. Eventually they assassinate him, and the novel leaves us with the assurance that Michael’s mission has been strengthened. Stranger in a Strange Land is a parody of the life of Jesus Christ.
But to introduce a non-English word to English readers — and not really define it — was a masterful piece of English literature. Without this new word, this famous work would have just been another space western for its author, Robert A Heinlen. Stranger moved him into the realm of serious thinker.
I always thought “grok” should be a bona fide English word, even if my definition might not be what Heinlein had in mind.
A New English Word
I have been following Paolo Calvi on Medium. He is much better versed in economics, philosophy, history, political science, geopolitics, and most other topics than I. I am amazed that he spends any time communicating with me. And he has written two articles related to my Tiered Democratic Governance (TDG). His TDG thoughts are quite profound, at least to me.
Democracy as an Architectural Problem: The TDG Case
Beyond Layered Governance: Toward a Democracy of Distributed Intelligence
Paolo has left his Medium work open to the public. These links should work.
Paolo has taken a current English word and given it a new definition: “structure.”
I kind of understand his definition, kind of not. I might have to read more of Paolo’s works to get more handle. The problem with “structure” is that it has already has several definitions to it. And those definitions seem to be interfering with the new definition Paolo wants to convey. For me, “structure” means a deliberate plan with a deliberate construction. But methinks this is not Paolo’s “structure.”
For now, I have defined his “structure” as underlying forces that force us into predetermined outcomes. We may believe that we can change things by acting in certain ways, but the structure will take us to the same place it was going to go anyways. But I could be wrong here.
So where’s the conflict, Dave?
Before my Medium days, I was promoting the TDG on various political groups on G+, a Facebook clone but run by Google. I was not making much progress. But one contributor, Richard Gillespie, suggested that I write some fiction about people working in a TDG environment.
“What a stupid idea,” I thought, “I have not written fiction; I have no intention of writing fiction; I don’t have the skills to write fiction.”
But slowly, a setting, some characters, and a plot came to me.
“I can tell this story,” I thought a few months later.
But I knew I needed some help. I had met novelist Mark R. Hunter on Writerbeat. This internet forum had a unique approach to social media, which contributed to strangers building a little community where we shared our lives to each other. I grew to know Mark somewhat well. When I asked him to help me, he agreed. And he did this for free!
To quickly summarize Mark’s teachings, he said that good stories (1) use dialogue to show the story, not tell it, and (2) stories need to have conflict to be interesting.
I wasn’t quite sold on Teaching #1. But when I tried it out, I could see how dialogue gives a story a human touch. I also saw the disadvantage: it takes five times as many words to tell the same story with dialogue than my more efficient “technical writing” style.
Teaching #2 was more problematic. You see, the TDG is about people getting along. Too much conflict within the TDG would mean the TDG is not any better than our current state of politics. So, in the TDG, there really is not a protagonist combating an antagonist, resulting in winners and losers.
When I sent my second draft of Diary of a Future Politician to Mark, he made a profound comment on a story arc about 2/3 the way through the manuscript. This arc had two early TDG builders who, after a year of working together on the TDG, discover they have been on opposites sides of an environmental issue. They had to somehow reconcile their differences.
“Now, you have some conflict,” wrote Mark. But I think that was his way of telling me that there was not enough conflict to make Diary an interesting enough story to be on the bestsellers’ list.
Being on the bestsellers’ list with lots of conflict would only prove the TDG could not work. So I stuck to my guns. The three TDG novels show how we can approach the world without a conflictive nature driving the discussion and decisions. My stories are good examples of collaboration.
Back to Structure
Politics has lots of conflict. Much of that conflict comes from overly ambitious people competing for power. Competing political ideas. Competing political parties. Competing within the parties. Competing media grabbing eyeballs to indirectly or directly pay for the media. All this conflict is necessary for democracy to work as well as it has worked for the past two centuries. I think most readers reaching this part of this article grok this structural conflict. Like readers to a good novel, we political watchers are attracted to that conflict, even when our favorite side is losing.
Political scientists have a different perspective. They claim that the conflict forces the societal issues more out in the open. With all this conflict, citizens will pay more attention. The citizens watch the conflict unfold, they gain more insights into the issues, and determine who is better to address those issues. Then at the end of the political play, we citizens express our will at the ballot box on election day.
If the conflict were not there, there would be less interest. We would be making worse decisions than we are now. So say the political scientists.
I contend that the political conflict is natural in how western democracy is structured. When political players are forced to compete against each other for the right to govern, they use conflict as their main tool to win votes. They are not trying to open up the discussion — unless it somehow serves their vote-getting objective.
Conflict is not something deliberately engineered by the early political scientists of western democracy. Today’s political scientists have only rationalized a natural result of the western democratic model.
Conclusion
There are structural forces that are moving us in a certain direction. I will give my hypothesis of those forces in a future article. Paolo might have a different concept.
Conflict is natural in human affairs. There are good ways and bad ways to handle it. But if the actors in the political theatre adopting too many of the good ways, these actors will find themselves “unelectable.” Hence, the conflict serves itself.
Mark R. Hunter, with his stories of much more conflict than my stories, is selling more books than I am selling.
We humans are indeed drawn to conflict. If we could only grok the implications . . .
The TDG is about consultation, collaboration, and consensus. It is not about conflict, contention, and contempt. There will be a different structure when we learn and implement the TDG’s collaborative ways.
Published on Medium 2026
