The late SF author Jack Vance enjoyed employing the footnote, the aside, and the citation to fill in the background of his many books; but the fact that he (and others, such as Frederik Pohl, who has also used the device) is a fiction author doesn’t suggest any old filler would do. Consider this, the lead-in of Chapter 3 of The Book of Dreams:
From Life, Volume I, by Unspiek, Baron Bodissey:
… I often reflect upon the word “morality,” the most troublesome and confusing word of all.
There is no single or supreme morality; there are many, each defining the mode by which a system of entities optimally interacts.
The eminent entomologist Fabre, observing a mantis in the act of devouring its mate, exclaimed: “What an abominable custom!”
The ordinary man, during a day’s time, may be obliged to act by the terms of a half-dozen different moralities. Some of these acts, appropriate at one moment, may the next moment be considered obscene or opprobrious in terms of another morality.
The person who, let us say, expects generosity from a bank, efficient flexibility from a government agency, open-mindedness from a religious institutions will be disappointed. In each purview the notions represent immorality. The poor fool might as quickly discover love among the mantises.
This ties right in with the behavior of our President-elect, a man who doesn’t seem to understand that different standards of behavior apply when operating in a different sector of society. Why is this a problem? Because each sector has different goals, such as making things (or, for the less subtle of thought, profit), justice, feeding the unfortunate, and each sector’s goal necessitates different behavior patterns in order to optimize our path to the goal.
Unfortunately, these simple observations and conclusions are no longer widely understood. The decades-long push to minimize government had, as its side effect, the minimization of the importance of expertise when running government, to the point where many people believe expertise in some other sector will transfer right over into government.
Thus, Trump.
Given the private prisons debacle, and the recent push (and collapse, sometimes literally) of schools for profit, we need to begin to re-examine the importance of sector expertise in society, and why it actually matters that you understand why we’re not going to give nuclear technology to South Korea, or Japan, or how to run a government bureaucracy, where the rules matter, vs a business bureaucracy, where the rules are quite different – and the goals are different.
In the meantime, hopefully the world will realize that we have a functionally impaired leader and will compensate for it. Which, in a way, I kind of regret since we’re less likely to learn from this mistake – but the alternative is probably too messy to really contemplate.
