"Stanislaw Lem - One Human Minute" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lem Stanislaw)

99 percent of people, through actions that are measurable to the highest degree, and it would be a
mistake to assume high-mindedly that psychopaths, murderers, and pimps have any less psyche
than water carriers, merchants, and weavers.
So one cannot accuse the authors of misanthropy; at the most, one can point to the
limitations inherent in their method. The originality of One Human Minute lies in its being not a
statistical compilation of information about what has taken place, like an ordinary almanac, but
rather synchronous with the human world, like a computer of the type that we say works in real
time, a device tracking phenomena as they occur.
Having thus crowned the authors, the critic from Encounter proceeded to trim the laurels
he had bestowed as he took up the Introduction. The demand for truth, which the Johnsons wave
like a banner in order to defend One Human Minute against charges of obscenity, sounds fine but
is unworkable in practice. The book does not contain "everything about the human being,"
because that is impossible. The largest libraries in the world do not contain "everything." The
quantity of anthropological data discovered by scientists now exceeds any individual's ability to
assimilate it. The division of labor, including intellectual labor, begun thirty thousand years ago
in the Paleolithic, has become an irreversible phenomenon, and there is nothing that can be done
about it. Like it or not, we have placed our destiny in the hands of the experts. A politician is,
after all, a kind of expert, if self-styled. Even the fact that competent experts must serve under
politicians of mediocre intelligence and little foresight is a problem that we are stuck with,
because the experts themselves cannot agree on any major world issue. A logocracy of quarreling
experts might be no better than the rule of the mediocrities to which we are subject. The declining
intellectual quality of political leadership is the result of the growing complexity of the world.
Since no one, be he endowed with the highest wisdom, can grasp it in its entirety, it is those who
are least bothered by this who strive for power. It is no accident that in the chapter on mental
ability in One Human Minute there is no I.Q. information for eminent statesmen. Even the
ubiquitous Johnsons were not able to subject those people to intelligence tests.
My view of this book is undramatic. One can approach it in a thousand ways, as this
article shows. In my opinion, the book is neither a malicious satire nor the honest truth; not a
caricature and not a mirror. The asymmetry of One Human Minute, its inclusion of incomparably
more shameful human evil than manifestations of good, and more of the misery of our existence
than its beauty, I attribute neither to the authors' intention nor to their method. Only those who
still cherish illusions on the subject of Man can be depressed by the book. The asymmetry of
good and evil would probably even lend itself to a numerical comparison, though the Johnsons
somehow did not think of it. The chapters on vice, felony, fraud, theft, blackmail, and computer
crime* are far more extensive than the chapters devoted to "good deeds." The authors did not
compare such numbers in one table, and that is a pity. It would have shown clearly how much
more extensive evil is than good. Fewer are the ways of helping people than of harming them; it
is the nature of things, not a consequence of the statistical method. Our world does not stand
halfway between heaven and hell; it seems much closer to hell. Free of illusions in this respect --
for some time now -- I was not shocked by this book.

* This involves the manipulation of this electronic extension of intellectual work to bring unlawful profits to the
programmer. Recently it has expanded to include activities that, at the moment, are not recognized as crimes, on the
principle of nullum crimen sine lege: it is not criminal to use the huge processing power of computers to increase
one's chances of winning the lottery or in gambling. A couple of mathematicians showed that you could break the
bank in roulette by analyzing the movements of the ball, for no roulette wheel is completely random; that is, the
wheel deviates from theoretical chance, and the deviation can be determined and exploited by computer.