This is awful, but as a writer who has attempted over the years to sell his fiction to sci-fi magazines, I'm not surprised. Yeah, sci-fi allows you to build worlds where 'your' morality and law prevail. Anyway, I have to save these old tired fingers for writing and not waste them on the smoldering anger I feel about being shut out of publishing. That said, the one aspect of this article and this case that infuriates me is the fact that this pervert and his 'partner' were allowed, evidently, to adopt two young boys. For how long will society continue this atrocity? Allowing to gay men to adopt little boys, is like giving the key to the fridge at the office where the donuts are kept until break time... to Netty, the 350 lb typist. Allowing two gay men to adopt would be like allowing Woody Allen to adopt a pretty little Asian girl of twelve. Only an amoral creep or a complete fool would allow any of this to go down. Someone said (Jesus, I believe) that people like this friendly 'gay' man, who hurt children, should have a mill stone attached to their necks and be thrown into the sea. I think that's a good example of 'let the punishment fit the crime.'
I've been suspicious of the SFWA as a whole for a long while... not just the outted perverts, but the whole shebang. I've learned more about it today. Particularly about Scalzi. I've never liked him. I like him less now.
I humbly beg to differ with you; as the child is the father of the man, so are the antecedent organization members who invited in, approved of, and then said nothing about the current lot of intrinsically corrupt.
It's about like the FBI: You want to know who's responsible for Comey? Go back a generation or two and look at the men who recruited, hired, and then trained him. As well as who looked the other way on his way up the org chart, and who evaluated and supervised his sorry ass.
These things emphatically do *not* come out of a damn vacuum. It's not like the SFWA was ever "pure and clean"; if you imagine that, you need to go back and look at the actual history of the founders. Asimov? Yikes... Sex pest, pure and simple. His son was let go by the Mueller who later investigated Trump, after having been caught with the largest cache of computer child port discovered in California to that point. We're talking ungodly amounts of it for the period, like damn near petabytes of storage per some reports.
There was never an era where this crap wasn't part of the background noise. Don't fool yourself.
I need to re-read JD Cowan's Last Fanatics. He links the SFWA with communists and the usual I-know-better academic types going back to the beginning I believe.
Oh, yeah... All of them were in that same intellectual ghetto. Read the biographies; absent the hard work they put in during WWII and their staunch rejection of Communism after the war, a lot of those ancient and hoary worthies would have been hard-pressed to overcome their youthful indiscretions. Asimov comes to mind...
You know people by their conduct and actions. Asimov was a well-known sex pest at conventions that everyone, even his victims, laughed at. His kid? Seriously? Do you expect anything different?
Solid writer of popularized science works explaining things. Everything else? Sus.
With Asimov, I was always a little set off by his fiction. Took me years to figure out why... Which boiled down to my innate suspicion of anyone demonstrating "control freak" behaviors or approving of them. Asimov is definitely on the side of the masters, not the slaves; he thinks he knows better than everyone else, and by God, he's going to do good by you doing what he knows is good...
To my eye, that attitude permeates his life and his fiction. When he's just trying to explain stuff, as in his popular works about science and technology? He's much better.
Those in Power will not declaim pedophilia as long as it supports their Power.
Official declamation of any activity is only practiced when it is endorsed by those currently in Power. The Current Order is not a political ideology, it is a political Theocracy headed by Men who would be gods, worshipping their own Power.
Power needs no direction, logic, or morals; a capricious god, their Power simply IS, and must be obeyed regardless of conflict. What they call Rules are not rules at all, but an ever-changing set of actions necessary to retain power at that moment. There is no litmus for thought, action, or belief... there is only the knowledge that those who hold Power must remain in Power -
Thank you Micheal- that shall take that as high praise, I hope! 🥰 I shall now go despoil it all by posting grammatically abominable "YaYs" with multiple exclamation points and emojis😄
Given Heinlein's written works that included massive "sexual liberation" and incest themes...?
His peripheral involvement around the whole Walter Breen situation?
I think we can safely rule out him riding his white horse to the rescue. I do not know what the hell was "really going on" with regards to Heinlein's sexual wiring or his lack of emphatic action around Breen's activities while he was involved in the organizations dealing with that crap, but there's enough there to make one suspect he might not have been the saint everyone presumes.
I honestly had the man on a pedestal, for a very long time. My reading of the works produced by MZB's victims, along with Walter Breen? That pedestal has been replaced with a dusty shelf, and I have to wonder what the hell the real deal is. There's enough ambivalence there with his various statements about "geniuses make their own rules about sex and love" over the years to make me suspect that where there was smoke, so too was there fire. Extent of said fire? No idea; don't know, don't care. I honestly don't care to go looking, having had enough of my illusions shattered.
There's an interesting article about how Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" and L. Ron Hubbard's "Dianetics" helped inspire the Manson Family. It mentions details like how Heinlein pressured other men to sleep with his wife.
Actually, the question "what would Heinlein do" was meant to illustrate the Moral Ambiguity that does not condemn, those who are proponents of their own personsl freedom at the expense of other's freedom. The question was designed to make us question our heroes under a clear light.💖
And you are correct in this, his writings themselves, like many mid-century libertarians, reveal a festering rats' nest of unbridled ideological exploration devolving into personal depravity. Breen and Zimmer are clearly in the wrong, and I find it disappointing in the extreme that Heinlein did not speak out. His later actions undermine his earlier works.
So too it shall be with us, if we do not speak out now.
Without a rock-solid moral compass, freedom for self becomes oppression for another; those who do not take a stand against child abuse are supporting it.
Morality is an often-ignored thing in our sadly diminished world. People don't think about it enough.
One of my biggest beefs with the way the US military handles preparation for combat is that nobody ever talks about anything "moral" when it comes to killing. If you try bringing it up, inserting it into training? Yeah; you're gonna get looked at as some weirdo
Yet, I'm convinced that a huge component of what leads to PTSD and soldier suicide stems from the failure to address the moral component in either training or combat preparation.
Something that can be documented simply by examining things like the US military Code of Conduct, which is centrally focused on what to do if you're ever captured. Not a damn word in there about "Hey, you're not supposed to kill civilians, or loot, or abuse prisoners..."
Contrast that with the Israeli Defense Forces "Purity of Arms" doctrinal structure that provides clear and emphatic guidance on soldier conduct and the morality of war. They integrate that whole thing into every aspect of peacetime training, and there are Israeli junior officers who're in prison because they failed to uphold those standards. The Israelis have fairly low rates of PTSD; ours are higher.
You have to address these things; if you don't, people break when they try to process them on their own. We avoid talking about them, hoping people will just muddle through. I think a lot of my worst PTSD cases would have been drastically improved if someone had simply told them before we deployed into a combat zone that war is ambiguous, and that there going to be mistakes made, ugly ones, that nobody wanted made. But, which were inevitable... One of my guys was forced to open up on an Iraqi van that was exhibiting every characteristic of being a VBIED and ignoring all warning measures. You don't want to know what an M240 can do to a van full of women and kids at 75m, and those images never left my guy's nightmares until he drank himself to death several years later. I think that if someone had prepared him for the potential of that happening, made him think about it, and then offered up real after-action support? He might have come through it. As it was, there's a decent soldier dead, a marriage ruined, and a couple of kids growing up with some really bad memories of their father.
Morality does not get the attention it deserves, anywhere in our society.
As a Military Family member who has witnessed three generations of PTSD, I understands so deeply what you are saying. Thank you for saying what must be said; Morality is the anchor of all true freedom. Without Morality, there can be no Freedom.
You also have to factor in his health; towards the end, he was suffering a lot of issues with blood circulation in his brain. That usually manifests as having one's internal censer ceasing to work properly.
You can see where they had the surgery, when you know what to look for in the very last books he wrote.
Given the family experience I had with this disease, I probably ought to cut him more slack than I do, but it's damn hard to untangle what is "RAH" from what might be "RAH's health issues..."
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
If I'm in power -- and I've been told my entire life that I'm special and my needs and my bliss come first -- then whatever I want is not just acceptable.
Science fiction and fantasy genre writers are naturally going to be more prone to these issues than any of us are comfortable with, for two reasons:
One, many are drawn to fantasy and science fiction because they're usually very high achievers on the various IQ tests, speaking to their intellectual capacities. They're also usually misfits in normal society, so they seek escape. As another result of their general misfittery with the "normies", their psychosocial development often goes off on some very weird tangents. As a result of this, along with the general encouragement they get to become "free thinkers", they're never properly socialized, they're alienated, and they then tend to take that out on others, resulting in things like MZB and Breen.
Two, the entire genre is almost designed to encourage this crap. I think back on all the weird shit I read coming up, and I'm really sort of embarrassed I kept at the genre. I can remember stuff like defenses of incest that were very well done, ample sexual deviancy and perversion written into the souls of the work, and on and on. A lot of it shouldn't have ever been left out in the open for the average kid to read, because of the ideas included. Some of that crap was outright grooming material.
Don't even get me started on the various slash fetish fanfic that's out there.
All this is baked into the genre, I fear. Goes back a long, long way, and I suggest you not go rooting around in the stacks for that stuff. You can't buy enough mind-bleach.
Another factor here is that the madness place seems to be a necessary component of the ability to produce art. I can't think of too many "artiste" types that could produce really outstanding work, who weren't demonstrably a bit nuts. Sane people tend to produce painfully sane writing and art, which does not seem to garner all that much in the way of appreciation and praise. It's just not entertaining.
If you've ever heard anyone expound on the "crazy/hot" ratio about dating? You have heard this theory applied outside the realm of "art". Sane doesn't produce good art, much as "sane" oftentimes does not create either attraction or "hot" when contemplating a partner's virtues.
Frankly, I think that if you want to have the "good stuff", then the only real way to get it is to police the ranks of the producers with all this in mind, and maybe take a f*cking look at what they're writing about. You re-read MZB's crap, these days, knowing what is now known? You can see it, very clearly. Same with Heinlein. WTF, RAH? What's with the incessant use of incest as a theme/component?
Of course, some writers use the genre as a means of expunging their demons; John Ringo is infamous for "that one series", and the phrase "Oh, John Ringo... No...."
Ain't accidental or unexpected. Just keep an eye on these folks.
Oh, there's a definite "thing" with organizations that the individual participants just don't "get", a lot of the time. Same way that fish don't realize that they're swimming in water, or people don't realize they're in air...
I became a definite student of them, while in the military. It was fascinating to me to observe the separate lives that organizations possessed, entirely separate from the members. I'm not sure how or why it happens, but there are definite characteristics and "personalities" that individual units or admin centers take on, ones that you can observe years apart and be able to identify as uniquely "them".
It's weird to go to a dysfunctional unit, work there for a period, depart on another assignment, and then come back to that same unit, years later, which has experienced several entire turnovers of personnel in the meantime... And, it's the same dysfunctional place, often with people you know from other assignments who were highly capable and competent, yet who're now "part of the problem" with the dysfunctional unit, despite their best intentions and desires... You see that a couple of times, and you really start to question the proposition that there aren't such things as separate unit identities.
You almost want to theorize a collective Borg-like intelligence that the participants are absorbed into, because that's exactly what it looks like.
Organizations have a separate life; they've also got separate life-cycles. They are initiated for particular purposes, almost always by carefully-selected people, and then they grow to solve whatever problem they were created to deal with. Then, if they persist in existing, they start being attractive to the wrong sorts of people, who seek to use and abuse the inherent power implicit to the organization, and the long process of corruption begins. Which continues until said organization either manages to kill itself or re-invent itself, shedding the parasites. In the military, it's a lot like a sine-wave; peaks and valleys of excellence interspersed with nightmarishly low standards and expectations. Few elements ever manage to remain in a static position of "good"; they all fall, they all reform, and if you're lucky, "good" will coincide with a war you need to win.
It's present everywhere in every organization. Examples abound; US Navy Ordnance, for example? Consider their history with torpedoes, pre-WWII. Or, many other similar organizations, in other countries, under other circumstances.
Humans do not do organization well. At all. We would be far better served to simply go to a permanent sort of free-floating ad-hocracy, where you self-organize into elements to solve a problem, and then immediately disband once the problem is over with. Leave permanent structures in place, and they'll be co-opted by the parasite class, with the organization turned to outright self-aggrandizement and evil.
I'd say that whoever told you that wasn't much of an observer, then.
The subordination of self to a higher goal is what is actually going on, which is rough for some people that balk at ever giving of themselves to others. You often run into people in the military that don't "get" this, either.
Properly, individuality remains, and you find that it is one of the saving graces of the whole thing; you get to become a student of it, observing and enjoying the interactions of the varied personalities. When it is working properly, and everyone is in alignment with the overall purpose... When that isn't what's going on? Pure hell.
The assholes who're playing the careerist "King of the Hill" games are the ones I loathed; no selfless service, there. They're the parasite class I was talking about, the Courtney Massengales vs. the Sam Damon types.
Outsiders who don't live the life often miss all the nuances, all the ins and outs. A lot of military personnel don't notice it, either; all they know is that they're miserable working in one unit, and love it in another where the right people are in charge. It's a thing of fish and water; you have to really step outside yourself and *observe*.
This is awful, but as a writer who has attempted over the years to sell his fiction to sci-fi magazines, I'm not surprised. Yeah, sci-fi allows you to build worlds where 'your' morality and law prevail. Anyway, I have to save these old tired fingers for writing and not waste them on the smoldering anger I feel about being shut out of publishing. That said, the one aspect of this article and this case that infuriates me is the fact that this pervert and his 'partner' were allowed, evidently, to adopt two young boys. For how long will society continue this atrocity? Allowing to gay men to adopt little boys, is like giving the key to the fridge at the office where the donuts are kept until break time... to Netty, the 350 lb typist. Allowing two gay men to adopt would be like allowing Woody Allen to adopt a pretty little Asian girl of twelve. Only an amoral creep or a complete fool would allow any of this to go down. Someone said (Jesus, I believe) that people like this friendly 'gay' man, who hurt children, should have a mill stone attached to their necks and be thrown into the sea. I think that's a good example of 'let the punishment fit the crime.'
Good to see you, Paul! Yes, don't waste any tears over not having the approval of this crowd. Better to see it as a blessing.
I've been suspicious of the SFWA as a whole for a long while... not just the outted perverts, but the whole shebang. I've learned more about it today. Particularly about Scalzi. I've never liked him. I like him less now.
I look back fondly on my youthful glimmering hope to someday join SFWA and other sci-fi or fantasy organizations.
Don't know what the fuck I was thinking, really.
It was a very different organization,. once upon a time, though.
Was it?
I humbly beg to differ with you; as the child is the father of the man, so are the antecedent organization members who invited in, approved of, and then said nothing about the current lot of intrinsically corrupt.
It's about like the FBI: You want to know who's responsible for Comey? Go back a generation or two and look at the men who recruited, hired, and then trained him. As well as who looked the other way on his way up the org chart, and who evaluated and supervised his sorry ass.
These things emphatically do *not* come out of a damn vacuum. It's not like the SFWA was ever "pure and clean"; if you imagine that, you need to go back and look at the actual history of the founders. Asimov? Yikes... Sex pest, pure and simple. His son was let go by the Mueller who later investigated Trump, after having been caught with the largest cache of computer child port discovered in California to that point. We're talking ungodly amounts of it for the period, like damn near petabytes of storage per some reports.
There was never an era where this crap wasn't part of the background noise. Don't fool yourself.
I need to re-read JD Cowan's Last Fanatics. He links the SFWA with communists and the usual I-know-better academic types going back to the beginning I believe.
Oh, yeah... All of them were in that same intellectual ghetto. Read the biographies; absent the hard work they put in during WWII and their staunch rejection of Communism after the war, a lot of those ancient and hoary worthies would have been hard-pressed to overcome their youthful indiscretions. Asimov comes to mind...
You know people by their conduct and actions. Asimov was a well-known sex pest at conventions that everyone, even his victims, laughed at. His kid? Seriously? Do you expect anything different?
Solid writer of popularized science works explaining things. Everything else? Sus.
With Asimov, I was always a little set off by his fiction. Took me years to figure out why... Which boiled down to my innate suspicion of anyone demonstrating "control freak" behaviors or approving of them. Asimov is definitely on the side of the masters, not the slaves; he thinks he knows better than everyone else, and by God, he's going to do good by you doing what he knows is good...
To my eye, that attitude permeates his life and his fiction. When he's just trying to explain stuff, as in his popular works about science and technology? He's much better.
Those in Power will not declaim pedophilia as long as it supports their Power.
Official declamation of any activity is only practiced when it is endorsed by those currently in Power. The Current Order is not a political ideology, it is a political Theocracy headed by Men who would be gods, worshipping their own Power.
Power needs no direction, logic, or morals; a capricious god, their Power simply IS, and must be obeyed regardless of conflict. What they call Rules are not rules at all, but an ever-changing set of actions necessary to retain power at that moment. There is no litmus for thought, action, or belief... there is only the knowledge that those who hold Power must remain in Power -
and all who oppose their Power must be destroyed.
What would Heinlein do?
I've never met anyone who even their comments are akin to righteous eloquent sermons! You've been on quite a roll!
Thank you Micheal- that shall take that as high praise, I hope! 🥰 I shall now go despoil it all by posting grammatically abominable "YaYs" with multiple exclamation points and emojis😄
YaYYYY!!💖💕
Given Heinlein's written works that included massive "sexual liberation" and incest themes...?
His peripheral involvement around the whole Walter Breen situation?
I think we can safely rule out him riding his white horse to the rescue. I do not know what the hell was "really going on" with regards to Heinlein's sexual wiring or his lack of emphatic action around Breen's activities while he was involved in the organizations dealing with that crap, but there's enough there to make one suspect he might not have been the saint everyone presumes.
I honestly had the man on a pedestal, for a very long time. My reading of the works produced by MZB's victims, along with Walter Breen? That pedestal has been replaced with a dusty shelf, and I have to wonder what the hell the real deal is. There's enough ambivalence there with his various statements about "geniuses make their own rules about sex and love" over the years to make me suspect that where there was smoke, so too was there fire. Extent of said fire? No idea; don't know, don't care. I honestly don't care to go looking, having had enough of my illusions shattered.
There's an interesting article about how Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" and L. Ron Hubbard's "Dianetics" helped inspire the Manson Family. It mentions details like how Heinlein pressured other men to sleep with his wife.
https://web.archive.org/web/20171121122129/https://newrepublic.com/article/145906/charles-mansons-science-fiction-roots
Actually, the question "what would Heinlein do" was meant to illustrate the Moral Ambiguity that does not condemn, those who are proponents of their own personsl freedom at the expense of other's freedom. The question was designed to make us question our heroes under a clear light.💖
And you are correct in this, his writings themselves, like many mid-century libertarians, reveal a festering rats' nest of unbridled ideological exploration devolving into personal depravity. Breen and Zimmer are clearly in the wrong, and I find it disappointing in the extreme that Heinlein did not speak out. His later actions undermine his earlier works.
So too it shall be with us, if we do not speak out now.
Without a rock-solid moral compass, freedom for self becomes oppression for another; those who do not take a stand against child abuse are supporting it.
Morality is an often-ignored thing in our sadly diminished world. People don't think about it enough.
One of my biggest beefs with the way the US military handles preparation for combat is that nobody ever talks about anything "moral" when it comes to killing. If you try bringing it up, inserting it into training? Yeah; you're gonna get looked at as some weirdo
Yet, I'm convinced that a huge component of what leads to PTSD and soldier suicide stems from the failure to address the moral component in either training or combat preparation.
Something that can be documented simply by examining things like the US military Code of Conduct, which is centrally focused on what to do if you're ever captured. Not a damn word in there about "Hey, you're not supposed to kill civilians, or loot, or abuse prisoners..."
Contrast that with the Israeli Defense Forces "Purity of Arms" doctrinal structure that provides clear and emphatic guidance on soldier conduct and the morality of war. They integrate that whole thing into every aspect of peacetime training, and there are Israeli junior officers who're in prison because they failed to uphold those standards. The Israelis have fairly low rates of PTSD; ours are higher.
You have to address these things; if you don't, people break when they try to process them on their own. We avoid talking about them, hoping people will just muddle through. I think a lot of my worst PTSD cases would have been drastically improved if someone had simply told them before we deployed into a combat zone that war is ambiguous, and that there going to be mistakes made, ugly ones, that nobody wanted made. But, which were inevitable... One of my guys was forced to open up on an Iraqi van that was exhibiting every characteristic of being a VBIED and ignoring all warning measures. You don't want to know what an M240 can do to a van full of women and kids at 75m, and those images never left my guy's nightmares until he drank himself to death several years later. I think that if someone had prepared him for the potential of that happening, made him think about it, and then offered up real after-action support? He might have come through it. As it was, there's a decent soldier dead, a marriage ruined, and a couple of kids growing up with some really bad memories of their father.
Morality does not get the attention it deserves, anywhere in our society.
As a Military Family member who has witnessed three generations of PTSD, I understands so deeply what you are saying. Thank you for saying what must be said; Morality is the anchor of all true freedom. Without Morality, there can be no Freedom.
You also have to factor in his health; towards the end, he was suffering a lot of issues with blood circulation in his brain. That usually manifests as having one's internal censer ceasing to work properly.
You can see where they had the surgery, when you know what to look for in the very last books he wrote.
Given the family experience I had with this disease, I probably ought to cut him more slack than I do, but it's damn hard to untangle what is "RAH" from what might be "RAH's health issues..."
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
If I'm in power -- and I've been told my entire life that I'm special and my needs and my bliss come first -- then whatever I want is not just acceptable.
It's needed.
Thus, what we see today.
See, here's the overall thing that's going on.
Science fiction and fantasy genre writers are naturally going to be more prone to these issues than any of us are comfortable with, for two reasons:
One, many are drawn to fantasy and science fiction because they're usually very high achievers on the various IQ tests, speaking to their intellectual capacities. They're also usually misfits in normal society, so they seek escape. As another result of their general misfittery with the "normies", their psychosocial development often goes off on some very weird tangents. As a result of this, along with the general encouragement they get to become "free thinkers", they're never properly socialized, they're alienated, and they then tend to take that out on others, resulting in things like MZB and Breen.
Two, the entire genre is almost designed to encourage this crap. I think back on all the weird shit I read coming up, and I'm really sort of embarrassed I kept at the genre. I can remember stuff like defenses of incest that were very well done, ample sexual deviancy and perversion written into the souls of the work, and on and on. A lot of it shouldn't have ever been left out in the open for the average kid to read, because of the ideas included. Some of that crap was outright grooming material.
Don't even get me started on the various slash fetish fanfic that's out there.
All this is baked into the genre, I fear. Goes back a long, long way, and I suggest you not go rooting around in the stacks for that stuff. You can't buy enough mind-bleach.
Another factor here is that the madness place seems to be a necessary component of the ability to produce art. I can't think of too many "artiste" types that could produce really outstanding work, who weren't demonstrably a bit nuts. Sane people tend to produce painfully sane writing and art, which does not seem to garner all that much in the way of appreciation and praise. It's just not entertaining.
If you've ever heard anyone expound on the "crazy/hot" ratio about dating? You have heard this theory applied outside the realm of "art". Sane doesn't produce good art, much as "sane" oftentimes does not create either attraction or "hot" when contemplating a partner's virtues.
Frankly, I think that if you want to have the "good stuff", then the only real way to get it is to police the ranks of the producers with all this in mind, and maybe take a f*cking look at what they're writing about. You re-read MZB's crap, these days, knowing what is now known? You can see it, very clearly. Same with Heinlein. WTF, RAH? What's with the incessant use of incest as a theme/component?
Of course, some writers use the genre as a means of expunging their demons; John Ringo is infamous for "that one series", and the phrase "Oh, John Ringo... No...."
Ain't accidental or unexpected. Just keep an eye on these folks.
Oh, there's a definite "thing" with organizations that the individual participants just don't "get", a lot of the time. Same way that fish don't realize that they're swimming in water, or people don't realize they're in air...
I became a definite student of them, while in the military. It was fascinating to me to observe the separate lives that organizations possessed, entirely separate from the members. I'm not sure how or why it happens, but there are definite characteristics and "personalities" that individual units or admin centers take on, ones that you can observe years apart and be able to identify as uniquely "them".
It's weird to go to a dysfunctional unit, work there for a period, depart on another assignment, and then come back to that same unit, years later, which has experienced several entire turnovers of personnel in the meantime... And, it's the same dysfunctional place, often with people you know from other assignments who were highly capable and competent, yet who're now "part of the problem" with the dysfunctional unit, despite their best intentions and desires... You see that a couple of times, and you really start to question the proposition that there aren't such things as separate unit identities.
You almost want to theorize a collective Borg-like intelligence that the participants are absorbed into, because that's exactly what it looks like.
Organizations have a separate life; they've also got separate life-cycles. They are initiated for particular purposes, almost always by carefully-selected people, and then they grow to solve whatever problem they were created to deal with. Then, if they persist in existing, they start being attractive to the wrong sorts of people, who seek to use and abuse the inherent power implicit to the organization, and the long process of corruption begins. Which continues until said organization either manages to kill itself or re-invent itself, shedding the parasites. In the military, it's a lot like a sine-wave; peaks and valleys of excellence interspersed with nightmarishly low standards and expectations. Few elements ever manage to remain in a static position of "good"; they all fall, they all reform, and if you're lucky, "good" will coincide with a war you need to win.
It's present everywhere in every organization. Examples abound; US Navy Ordnance, for example? Consider their history with torpedoes, pre-WWII. Or, many other similar organizations, in other countries, under other circumstances.
Humans do not do organization well. At all. We would be far better served to simply go to a permanent sort of free-floating ad-hocracy, where you self-organize into elements to solve a problem, and then immediately disband once the problem is over with. Leave permanent structures in place, and they'll be co-opted by the parasite class, with the organization turned to outright self-aggrandizement and evil.
I'd say that whoever told you that wasn't much of an observer, then.
The subordination of self to a higher goal is what is actually going on, which is rough for some people that balk at ever giving of themselves to others. You often run into people in the military that don't "get" this, either.
Properly, individuality remains, and you find that it is one of the saving graces of the whole thing; you get to become a student of it, observing and enjoying the interactions of the varied personalities. When it is working properly, and everyone is in alignment with the overall purpose... When that isn't what's going on? Pure hell.
The assholes who're playing the careerist "King of the Hill" games are the ones I loathed; no selfless service, there. They're the parasite class I was talking about, the Courtney Massengales vs. the Sam Damon types.
Outsiders who don't live the life often miss all the nuances, all the ins and outs. A lot of military personnel don't notice it, either; all they know is that they're miserable working in one unit, and love it in another where the right people are in charge. It's a thing of fish and water; you have to really step outside yourself and *observe*.
Delany? I admit I’ve never read Hogg and never mean to. Got through Dahlgren, mostly. Really the only book of his I like is Heavenly Breakfast