Comparing Millet's Pills And Starships

The ideal state of government is in perpetual conflict with forces who aim to corrupt it. In the novel Pills and Starships, Millet exemplifies the essentiality of governance independent of avaricious aspirations through the depiction of the socio-economic, cultural, and environmental hardships culminating from the corporate exploitation of the governing body. Corruption of the political process for the sake of profit leads society down a path of instability; and through the dystopian reality presented in the novel, Millet demonstrates how the misappropriation of government power produces a self-defeating reality.
The ideal role of government is the promotion and construction of social and economic justice; it acts as a unifying agent in order
The laws which outline the acceptability of action are obligated to promote the best interests of society, or else government would prove adverse to social cohesion. Self-aggrandizement by individual legislators, through affluent corporate donors, is contradictory to these principles. People willing to acquire money without making a contribution to society fail to recognize, or selfishly disregard, that profit exists as a social construct to reward and incentivize the contributions which have been deemed valuable to society. Willingness to ignore this is the product of a culture wherein the accumulation of private capital is misconstrued as the ends of its own existence. The division of the social classes reflects the cultural perception that the capital worth of an individual is tied directly to the immaterial value of one’s humanity, this is most prominently showcased when LaTessa contrasts her life with those who live in the First, “I had the life most people have… hunger and being sick and weak and doing whatever you gotta do to get through the day with all your digits intact… The First isn’t a place kid. It’s just a way of living when you have money. The First is just wealth” (261). Given the extreme difference between those who live in the First and those who do not, LaTessa’s clarification that
The difference in methodology of execution between the rich and poor highlights the finality of capitalistic extremism, wherein mankind has been completely dehumanized and is equated to a good which can be harvested for profit, “In the poor parts there’s no money to be made off dying people. Because no one has money except the corporates… There are no contracts there, because there don’t have to be” (220). The willingness to undermine the purpose of government for the acquisition of material wealth serves only to facilitate a self-destructive environment where suboptimal decisions are made for the sake of profit. The ‘profit’ attained is not a reflection of the benefit provided to society by a good or service since the profit is acquired via subterfuge; it instead represents the dangers of free market capitalism wherein those who control the means of production use their power and influence to monopolistically envelop all other sources of power and influence to establish absolute control over the social body. Because present day society exists on the precipice of the calamities present in the novel, Pills and Starships acts as a cautionary tale, hoping to reinforce social