The real world — It’s full of complexities, ambiguities, unknowns, trade-offs, risks, and evils that we would prefer not to acknowledge. Perfection can be sought and approached, but nothing close to perfection can be achieved.
And then there’s the world that we can imagine in our minds. In that world, we can ignore the complexities and ambiguities and the rest. Achieving perfection can be imagined as just a matter of overcoming a few simple obstacles. I often write about the musings of people who conjure in their minds imaginary scenarios of perfection that are inconsistent with anything that can be achieved in the real world. The most important example is a socialist economic system of perfect justice and fairness. Another example is an energy system that produces always-available electricity in infinite amounts from the intermittent wind and sun.
Consider now another example: the crime found in fiction versus the crime found in the real world.
In my younger days I became a fan of crime fiction, examples being the novels of Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) and Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot). In the iconic Agatha Christie plot, a group of upscale friends gathers at a country house, and then suddenly one of them turns up dead by violent means. Hercule Poirot coincidentally appears and starts interviewing the guests. All of them submit willingly to questioning, the murderer being supremely confident that his plot is so devious that he will never be discovered. All of the guests/suspects repeatedly tell Hercule that none of them could possibly be the murderer, and they insist that the criminal must be some outsider or intruder. But of course Hercule persists, and sure enough he figures out that one of the guests committed the crime, along with all the details of how and why that occurred.
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