Finished Hunter S Thompson's latest, "Hey Rube" the other day and, as expected, it blew me away. His own exclusive brand of journalism seemed to owe much to his early wish to write fiction, indeed journalism was initially just a way to pay the rent for him until he became a successful novelist. He often said, quoting someone else I think, something like 'fiction is the highest form of truth.'

Reflecting on this I am reminded of a collection of Asimov stories I also read recently. Being the granddaddy of science fiction, he knows his technical stuff inside and out and creates entirely believable futuristic or alien worlds. Within these beautifully constructed abstract worlds however, lies some pretty incisive and biting social commentary.

It occurred to me that a crippling handicap of trying to make a point through non-fiction is that everyone else has an infinite wealth of experience in of the real world that can get in the way. With fiction on the other hand, the reader only experiences what the writer writes. The wood is isolated for viewing since the pesky trees of the real world are neglected.

While it may seem counter intuitive, the hypothetical is perhaps the most powerful tool we have in order to determine the truth of a situation. The ability to entertain purely abstract ideas is surely the key to our development and achievements. It is interesting then that the people who run our societies, politicians and big businesses, appear thoroughly terrified of hypotheticals.

If hypotheticals help bring about change then it is perhaps understandable that those in power avoid them like the plague, after all any significant change is likely to alter their own personal situation for the worse. There is also the fact, of course, that these people would rather not offer any kind of concrete opinion on anything at all, so as to be able to run as many U-turns as they like in future.

In fact the language of the powerful, when speaking to us plebs, has developed into a kind of fiction in itself. They have developed speaking without really saying anything into an art form. Politicians in particular have created what I like to call, for reasons of puerile humour alone, the Abstract/Specific System, or ASS.

The ASS works like this: if asked a general, (abstract,) question of principle, answer in terms of a specific example which makes you look good; if asked a specific question about a particular situation, give an abstract answer of broad principles, that makes you look good. Watch out for the ASS in any interview or press conference situation, it's easy to spot.

But what about fiction being the highest form of truth? Well, although these suit wearing ASS mongers have spent a great deal of their time and our money working out this way to talk to us without saying anything HST's maxim cannot be avoided. The truth about them is simply what the very existence of the ASS itself tells us: they have nothing to say to us.