Elaboration 37

Often, I have maintained that in our universities, the required so-called handbooks for social science could well be done away with. They teach only nonsense, trivialities, at the most some insight in physics or biologic physics. I would propagate for social scientists, the study of, first of all, the old ones like Xenophon, Aristotle, Plato. Herodotus, Tacitus, Polybius, Plutarch, etc., etc. but also the 'good' science fictions that are written by clever thinkers in social affairs. John Wyndham e.g. is such a one (and Hoyle, Forester, Wells) (64.1). He shows us society in ruins, and the normal nature of man coping with it. This is far more effective for learning social science, the core of man-typical mental science than biology. But the Reader beware of trash writers. This is why we should not merely advise students to take to sc. fic. , but we mention specific books and authors. I myself have some of the pulp writers. They cannot paint reality, except by means of military (low grade, lower deck) expressions, always sexual. No such expressions are found in e.g. Wyndham or Forester, Wells, Hoyle. They need no vulgarity in order to sham capability, to promote sales. Naturally there are ideation experts, the 'real' social scientific eminents, like Locke, etc. very much worth studying, but these are decidedly not vital in contemporary social science (but Seneca, Epictetus, Cicero, etc. are). Coué, Baudouin, Satow, Tietjens and the like, remain basic material for ideation. Then, of course, there is the 'Utopia' form as method of teaching how a 'socio' might be run. There are plenty of them (from Plato onwards), most sc. fic. are such. I have encountered only one, who seriously stated the scientific truth, that a 'good' Utopia cannot but be a mondial one (Wells' 'A Modern Utopia'). One is not in a very good Utopiatic island when a hundred kilometers to windward, people explode atomic bombs. Nor is one's Utopia very gratifying when it uses to pollute the sea and air, damages the Ozone layer, for us all.