…might just as well be called dominance management, because conflict usually arises when two parties can’t agree with each other. The most likely results are: (1) one party gives in rather than deal with the conflict; (2) one party forces the other to give in through greater force of some sort, physical strength, financial strength, political strength, strength of personality, sheer endurance, some combination of those, or the threat of those; (3) compromise of some sort; or (4) total disengagement, which can range from polite and cordial agreement to disagree to absolute and continued hostility, either concealed or overt.

Most people, I’ve discovered, don’t think of conflicts in that way, but from what I’ve observed that’s the spectrum of responses to ideological, political, financial, or physical conflicts.

What complicates such conflicts is usually, but not always, the assumption by one or both of the parties of some form of superiority, either moral, intellectual, or physical, which can make any form of real agreement difficult. And when one party is forced to agree to or to accept the terms of the other party, the result is almost inevitably anger and resentment, particularly when the party forced to agree believes fervently in his or her moral or intellectual superiority, which is all too often the case, or that they’ve been wronged in some fashion.

That also means when someone is coerced/forced into agreement against their will, such agreement will only last so long as the “superior” party can enforce their will.

All of which is a reason why the United States eventually “loses” wars and conflicts in places like Vietnam and the Middle East, because we don’t want to pay the price for continuing to enforce our desires on others, which is what is necessary when the belief structure of the majority of the people of a country is at odds with our belief structure. In places where we have “won,” it has taken generations of occupation to shift belief structures, and, in the case of our own southern states of the Confederacy, one could make the case that even 150 years later, those “old south” belief structures still persist in a large number of people.

That doesn’t mean the United States can always avoid using force, but if we don’t want to spend or bleed ourselves dry, most use of force should be restricted to simply stopping the worst of what we can stop, without attempting to force ideological/political change on other cultures.

On the domestic front, we’ll also end up locked in an exhausting and debilitating deadlock unless we return to the basics of the “civil society” envisioned by the Founding Fathers, that is, a society based on a compromise over what should be legal and what should not be, because with more than a fifth of the country now identifying themselves as non-religious, and with very differing core beliefs between evangelicals and other faiths, any attempt to impose religion-based strictures on the entire population will only fuel more conflict… and that’s the last thing any of us need in these troubling times.

Philosophers have debated what is a good or moral action for thousands of years, but from what I can tell, there’s one aspect of the problem that I’ve not seen often debated – and that’s what constitutes an act or action.

This might be illustrated by the “runaway trolley” dilemma. An empty trolley breaks loose and is heading down the track toward a group of five unsuspecting workers. A bystander sees a switch and realizes that she can throw the switch and divert the trolley onto another track, where there is only one worker. Should she turn the switch?

If she does, one argument goes, she has taken an action that will kill one person, and that death is by her act. If she does nothing, the trolley does what it would do, absent intervention, and kills five, but the bystander did not cause those deaths.

Now, speaking frankly, I think the reasoning here is absurd, but it’s clear that there’s a school of thought [the intentionalist school] that believes that it’s somehow less moral to throw the switch because that’s an affirmative act that causes a death. The results school of thought, of course, simply says that one death is preferable to five.

To my way of thinking, the problem with the intentionalist view is that it doesn’t recognize that the failure to act is in fact an action. Deciding not to act should be judged on the same grounds as acting is.

Yet more and more I see people deciding not to act, or not to get involved, because they see all courses of action, particularly in politics, as immoral or unethical. All too often, they’re correct about the perceived courses of action, but what I don’t think they’re correct about is that not acting, i.e., participating, discussing, voting, even running for office, is also an immoral action, because it abdicates responsibility for the outcome to those who are willing to dirty their hands, particularly since, in this day and age, those willing to speak out long and loudly, and vote, and persuade others to do so, seem to be those who represent the extremes in civil dialogue and politics.

Today, in a political sense in the U.S., we’re facing a form of the runaway trolley dilemma, and part of the dilemma occurred in the past when fewer and fewer non-extremists decided not to get involved in grass-roots politics, either through inertia or through the misguided belief that political involvement was immoral.

Failure to act is an act.

Currently, it appears as though terrorism is almost everywhere in the world in some form or another, and while Islamic/Jihadist terrorists seem to be the most visible and active, they’re certainly not the only ones.

What tends to get overlooked both in dealing with terrorists and terrorism is the long-term result of such activities. The immediate result is, of course, hundreds and thousands of deaths and injuries annually, and a great deal of anger and fear. For all of the so-called idealism or religious fervor of the Islamic terrorists, the goal of their terrorism isn’t to inspire the creation of some great Islamic state. It’s to disorganize and destroy civil society, to create chaos and unrest, and to demonstrate that civil society cannot cope with terrorism. Once such chaos exists, the only way to restore order is through absolute force – and in the Middle East in particular the only unified forces that exist are largely based on some version of Islam.

But what gets overlooked in all of this is that terrorist acts and murders don’t in themselves destroy civil society. Popular reaction to those acts does. Moreover, the popular reaction is almost always the strongest in countries and societies that already have the most authoritarian and repressive societies. It doesn’t matter that the Taliban might be even worse than the Afghan warlords; the warlords are so oppressive and corrupt that there’s already little love of the civil society, especially in a land that still remains tribally fragmented. It also doesn’t matter that ISIS is even worse than the Syrian government… and so it goes.

This kind of scenario is scarcely new. In a way, the Russian revolution followed a similar path, as did China, and much of southeast Asia… and the groups that had already gathered and mustered a monopoly on force were the ones who ended up governing.

A strong civil society is the greatest bulwark against the long-term effects of terrorism, but for a civil society to remain strong requires that the great majority of people support it. In turn, the greater the degree of oppression, perceived inequality and discrimination, and the greater the perception that there is no hope of advancement and improvement for most people, the more likely terrorism will be effective in fragmenting a society… which is the first step to revolution or social chaos and break-down.

Does that sound at all familiar?

The other day I realized something that probably should have been obvious, but that I’d never thought much about. There are millions of readers in the world, but there are very few characters in books who actually read books. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t recall a book I’d read – except my own – where a character reads a book or mentions one or quotes from one. It could be that my memory was faulty; so I went to my bookshelves and looked at all the books lined up there, and tried to think of a single one that mentioned reading or writing books, and I finally found one – Joe Haldeman’s The Hemingway Hoax – and recalled another one – Gene Wolfe’s The Borrowed Man.

Now, I’m certain there are others out there, but I’m willing to bet that the percentage of F&SF books that have characters who actually read or write books is less than five percent. I’m not talking about reading or writing books as the focus of novels, but just as a mention of part of the character’s lives.

Yet biographies of great people usually mention books in some fashion or another. Almost every biography of Lincoln has the story of the borrowed book that he had to replace, and Jefferson’s love of writing and books is certainly renowned. Patton read the classics, and Churchill won a Nobel Prize in literature. Scores of famous people mention the Bible or quote from it, but seldom do authors depict the equivalent in F&SF.

Likewise, almost every human culture has some form of music, and while a larger percentage of F&SF books mention/show music, the percentage is small compared to the field as a whole, despite the ubiquity of music in history and life.

Then there is the issue of family. Families play a part in everyone’s life, and whether immediately present or not, definitely influence actions and motivations. Again, there are more books that show this than there are novels that depict books…but comparatively few F&SF books use familial interactions and pressures.

Just a few thoughts on what’s often not there.

Way back in the middle of the seventeen hundreds, the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau came up with the idea of “the social contact.” The simplified concept is that government represents a tacit contract between the people effectively to be governed and behave in order to escape the “natural state” [which Rousseau tacitly admits never existed, but that’s another story].

One of the interesting facets of his concept was that the social contract tended to break down if the income inequality between the rich and the poor became too great, which in fact is exactly what happened with the French Revolution several decades later in the last years of the century, and after Rousseau’s death. In point of fact, it’s rather interesting to note that in the more than 300 years since Rousseau made that observation, there have been more than a few revolutions and a great deal of social unrest in times of great income inequality.

At present, the United States is in one of those periods. According to Rousseau, the popularity of either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump should scarcely be surprising, given that income inequality in the United States has now surpassed the income inequality of the previous period of greatest inequality in the 1890s, which was, of course, the time during which William Jennings Bryan ran for President as a fundamentalist/pro-silver/anti-big-money Democrat. After three years of economic depression, in 1896, Bryan carried 22 of the 45 states at that time and took almost 47% of the vote, despite being outspent by a five to one margin by McKinley.

Today, what is interesting is that the “establishments” of both major U.S. political parties are being challenged by those within the respective parties who feel economically and/or politically threatened or disenfranchised by the current political system. And, no matter how the next election turns out, the problem of income inequality isn’t about to disappear.

The greatest danger is, in fact, is if people think that the election resolves the problem, because then, nothing effective will be done, and most likely both income inequality and economic conditions will worsen.

Why?

It’s fairly simple. Right now, corporations and other institutions are literally sitting on close to a trillion dollars in uninvested dollars. These dollars are not invested because those holding them do not see a market for the goods or services that could be produced with them. The reason for this is that too many Americans are too poor to purchase anything but the basics. The idea that low taxes on high earners makes more money available to create jobs is, like a lot of simplistic “solutions,” half-right. It does make money available, but no one is going to use that “excess capital’ to create that many new jobs in the U.S. if a huge percentage of the population can’t afford the goods and services created by those jobs.

This is where a massive government-funded infrastructure development program would help, provided it’s designed right, and not merely a subsidy to the construction and technology industries. We have hundreds of thousands of unsafe and/or rapidly decaying bridges and tunnels, unsafe municipal drinking water systems, an air-traffic control system that verges on the obsolete and inefficient, a power grid that could be destroyed by a solar flare, thousands of miles of highways that are crumbling, national parks that have billions of dollars of delayed and deferred maintenance… and we do nothing about any of this, while nearly a trillion dollars of uninvested capital sit largely idle because unemployed or underemployed workers haven’t the money to buy anything except the extreme basics – if that.

Yet, as I’ve argued, and as have others, in the end, those ultra-high earners, the one tenth of one percent, could likely make even more money if they were taxed a bit more and those taxes put to work in improving infrastructure.

Will it happen?

I have my doubts. I suspect it won’t until the social unrest and economic stagnation become even worse, which they will, unless matters change in the mindset of the American political system. The problem is that, if matters get too much worse, we may face a revolution, rather than an evolution. I could be wrong, I’ll be the first to admit, but right now, the odds are in favor of pessimism.