12 April 04

The Failure of Logic in the Hands of the Illogical

Once up on a time I was a normal human being.

I was in my late teens at the time, just coming out of high school and preparing for my post secondary education. I had no real goals save to complete my education, land a decent paying technical job, and live out my life in relative peace and contentment. If the Gods were willing then I would find a mate to settle down and raise a child or two with.

We all recognize these goals. The whole time we were growing up our parents grilled into our heads the idea that the purpose behind education is so that you can land the really good jobs so that you can pay your bills and support your family. Dreams and aspirations are essentially meaningless unless they directly result in the acquisition of monetary wealth sufficient to pay for your chosen standard of living. You will work and you will work until the powers that be tell you that you can’t work any more and force you to retire. That is your life in a nutshell. Welcome to it.

For most people that kind of future is perfect. For a time I thought I was one of those people. Now I know that if I had succeeded in earning that future for myself it would simply have been an exercise in futility, for I don’t think I would ever have been really happy. I’ve come to the conclusion, especially in the last couple of years, that I really am not fit to work for other people. The only reason I bother to hold down a job is because I need one to keep me alive. Were it not for that I would spend my days before the computer pumping out fiction in search of that elusive publication deal, just like I am now. The difference is I would be doing more of it.

Back in those days I was something of an idiot. I was just young enough and just arrogant enough to believe in my own infallibility and my own immortality. I believed that there was nothing that the fates could do to stop me, and I was just dumb enough to saunter my way through the world with the blissfully ignorant comfort that comes from wearing blinders. I enrolled in a local technical school and set myself to the task of becoming a computer engineer.

I passed my first semester with (reasonably) flying colors, but in the second semester I allowed myself to get burned out, and as soon as that happened my performance spiraled into the toilet. I passed two out of five courses and earned the sheer and utter contempt of the dean of my department. Well done, Mike.

The reason I failed so miserably was two-fold. First of all, the technical school that I went to was trying to compress a four year engineering program into two years, with the inevitable end result that students were forced by a rather merciless faculty to either sink or swim. I had been warned that this would be the case, but I had not listened. The other reason I failed was because I was holding down a job at the time, and working not only took time away from my studies but also took away my precious energy reserves. By the end of the second semester I was a walking zombie, suitable for employment as a paperweight. How fortunate that I became a freight handler as a result.

Besides the purely sadistic math course that we were forced to take (which was taught by a wee little fellow about half my height who believed very strongly that we should intuitively understand what he was trying to teach us, with the inevitable result that he had no tolerance for questions of any kind), the one thing that sticks out in my mind about that second semester is the fact that we were required to take not one, but two programming courses. We had taken Pascal the first semester, and in the second semester we took C and Assembly.

Pascal is a very beautiful language which is very heavily structured. The purpose behind this structure is to encourage good programming habits, get you to a point where you don’t think of them anymore. The nice thing about Pascal is that, properly written, a person with no programming experience can look at a page of source code and puzzle together a vague understanding of what’s going on. The same cannot be said for either C or Assembly, both of which are ugly languages with next to no structure that allow you to fall into rotten habits in the name of getting your code written and functional in the shortest amount of time possible.

The structured nature of Pascal is beautifully logical. There is a reason for the existence of each element. It’s a wonderful language to work in and I was somewhat saddened when Borland announced that it was no longer going to be marketing a Pascal compiler. Of course, they later turned around and put out Delphi, which is Pascal with extensions, but that’s another story.

Besides a certain amount of structure, a good program needs good solid logic. You need to be able to map out the exact sequence of events that you need to follow with your code in order to perform the tasks you need to accomplish. The process that we were taught for doing this was astonishingly simple: you sit down with a piece of paper, break the process you need to follow down into chunks, and outline the steps you need to follow in order to get through each chunk. This is very close to the same process that I follow today for outlining the plot lines for the stories that I write.

The problem in those days wasn’t that I was incapable of doing it, but that I wasn’t particularly logical. I was very intelligent and reasonably learned, but I was not accustomed to logical thought. Sure, I had learned the basics of problem solving just like every other student, but for some strange reason the lessons in logical thought that this process was supposed to teach just went over my head. As a result my performance in programming classes was best described as mediocre, as was my performance in life in general.

I mention the above because something occurred to me as I was reading the news today: Most of the key decision makers in the American government apparently suffer from the same handicap, because while they certainly claimed to have nothing but the best intentions where the invasion of Iraq is concerned, their stated overall objective and the methods that they are using to achieve that stated objective make me wonder if they really thought things through as much as they should have.

Let’s set aside for a moment the issue of whether or not American and Allied forces should be in Iraq. Instead let’s focus on the stated intention of the Bush Administration to bring Democracy to Iraq. It makes perfect sense that they would want to do this. After all, they liberated Iraqis from the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein, why would they not want to live the same free, Democratic life as their liberators?

I will give them credit for the laudable nature of this objective, but I offer into the record the following logical arguments intended to establish the proposition that their mission is doomed to failure:

First of all, the nations of the Middle East are not accustomed to democratic rule, so the odds are that they won’t know what to do with it because they’ve never had it. Arab nations in the Middle East have always been ruled by Monarchies or Religious Dictatorships, by a small group of people who have made the sovereign claim to leadership. And once they do figure out what to do with their newfound freedoms the first thing that they will do is figure out ways to improve the standard of living for their constituents through the application of government funds without actually requiring elements of the population to contribute to the process, thus creating a bankrupt welfare state. Of course, the touchstone of democracy is the God Given Right to sink or swim as you please, but the good news is that because everyone is equal when you go down you’ll take the entire state with you.

Secondly, the real key to democracy is rule by the middle class, those wonderful hard working people who make enough money to support their standard of living plus a little extra, are comfortable with their lives as they are, and don’t really posses the kind of fixation with the acquisition of material goods that seems to pervade modern society. Iraq doesn’t have a middle class and hasn’t had a middle class for decades. In Iraq you were always either a member of the ruling class or a serf. Creating a stable middle class in Iraq is a task that is roughly comparable in size and scope to the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza, or the discovery and raising of the lost city of Atlantis.

Here’s the real kicker, though. Iraq is basically a network of tribes and clans, and the only way Iraq will ever see a stable government of any kind is through uniting the clans. Despite all the rotten things that Saddam did we can look back and honestly say that at least he was able to unite the clans and keep some measure of peace, and we can even say it with a straight face if we’re willing to overlook the fact that he did it by using biological and chemical weapons against his own subjects.

The tribe and clan system is the key to the peaceful governing of Iraq, and even George W. May have been able to set up a stable governing council had he not ordered the firing of all the former police and military personnel, thus breaking the American’s first and most important promise of the invasion, that the police and military, if they laid down their arms and returned to their homes, would have an honorable part in the governing and rebuilding of a new Iraq. This is not a good way to conduct the business of nation building.

I suspect that somewhere in the Bush cabinet there is someone, or even a host of someones, who understands all this and tried to tell George W. And his Neo-Conservative Rat Pack that they were making not just one but several horrible mistakes. I also suspect that the Neo-Cons paid him no mind because they were convinced that they had Iraq’s best interests at heart when really they only had their own best interest’s at heart. Doubt me? Ask the CEO of Halliburton.

I’ve always regretted my failure to do better on the subject of logic when I was in school, and I think that certain elements of what I do now would be a lot easier for me if I had. I believe that it is an inherent failure of our education system that Logic is not a required course, and the American educational system is even worse off than ours. It’s that failure that allows a man like George W., who clearly believes, for good or ill, that he is doing the right thing but is horribly ham-handed in the execution of his objectives, to rise to a position of power where his every word and thought can have such a profound impact on the everyday lives of so many people, and create a situation where, by and large, that impact is more to their detriment than their benefit.