A future age when organized crime legalizes itself

The Syndic
A novel of a future age when organized crime legalizes itself--and turns America into a utopia!
by C.M. Kornbluth (1953)

p. 9. "Astronomers quail at the three-body problem and throw up their hands in surrender before the four-body problem. Any given moment in history is a problem of at least two billion bodies.

"Attempts at orderly abstraction of manipulable symbols from the realities of history seem to me doomed from the start. I can juggle mean rainfalls, car-loading curves, birthrates and patent applications, but I cannot for the life of me fit the recurring facial carbuncles of Karl Marx into my manipulations—not even, though we know, well after the fact, that agonizing staphylococcus aureus infections behind that famous beard helped shape twentieth century totalitarianism."

p. 10. "Am I, then, saying that history, past and future, is unknowable; that we must blunder ahead in the dark without planning because no plan can possibly be accurate in prediction and useful in application? I am not.

"I am expressing my distaste for holders of extreme positions, for possessors of eternal truths, for keepers of the flame. Keepers of the flame have no trouble with the questions of ends and means which plague the rest of us. They are quite certain that their ends are good and that therefore choice of means is a trivial matter.

"The rest of us, far from certain that we have a general solution of the two-billion-body problem that is history, are much more likely to ponder on our means...."