A Technical Solution to a Technical Problem

Recently I was personally insulted over social media by being dismissed as a pedant.

A pedant is defined by Webster's dictionary on-line as:

a: one who is unimaginative or who unduly emphasizes minutiae in the presentation or use of knowledge

b: one who makes a show of knowledge

c: a formalist or precisionist in teaching

This is not good, to be an unimaginative show-off.

But what happens when one human's minutiae is another human's root cause analysis of a fundamental failure of institutional accountability?

Minutiae are details that don't really matter to common sense.

Root causes are technical problems that require technical solutions to rectify our common sense when we have lost our sense of what is happening in a world in which things are not happening the way we expect that they should.

How do we distinguish minutiae that do not matter from technical details that matter very, very much?

It's a serious problem.

Consider our world today.

We expect that more quantities of money will also always mean a better quality of life. And yet we are seeing more that is better going to fewer and fewer, leaving less that is less for the rest.

With extreme concentrations of wealth we see equally extreme concentrations of power, even though we are taught to expect that money does not matter, and that all conditions in society are the direct result of individual merit and personal morality: people who have more money have more merit (and better morals). We are taught to believe that it's not the money that matters. It's their merit. And their morality.

And yet, at the same time, there is also this truism of folksy wisdom: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. If power comes from money (which we all know that it does), then doesn't that mean that money must corrupt also?

So which is it? Does money come from merit and morality? Or does the power that corrupts come from money that corrupts also?

Is it pedantic to speak about money and merit and morality and power and corruption?

Or is it an exercise of expertise by a technician with a technical solution to a technical problem of institutional accountability for the exercise of authority to direct the flow of money true to purpose, to purge the corruption by correcting the code of institutional agency and authority?

This question is itself very technical, and therefor more than a little bit difficult.

Does that make it pedantic?

Or, is it, more truly, catalytic?