--- In [email protected], "Buck" wrote: > > > > > > upcoming US elections. From a Jyotish perspective, > > it matters little who has the best image, policy, > > strategy, funding, etc., as in the end, karma must > > dictate who will win or lose on election day. > > > > More than karma, > Deservability. > Right now, your presence in the Domes will have a major effect on our > national deservability and the quality of leadership we elect to national > office. > -Buck >
We know so much more now. War and Peace was an elaboration and extension of the theme that what happens is "what no one wills." That is the common ground from which Hegel and Tolstoy both start. It was not widely accepted before the nineteenth century, and even then, people scrambled harder than usual to get on God's side of whatever "progress" was foreseen. The rule of unintended consequences seems to be something which some people need periodically to be reminded of. Hegel and Tolstoy also agreed that patriotic and benevolent aims were not the main factors in the making of history. Hegel observed that "good designs" seemed especially likely to lead to violence and evil. He thought "passions, private aims, and selfish desires" to be the main energies in human history. The aims and desires of the great men were simply in line with the actual tensions of the time, and based on an understanding of those tensions. 21 Hegel recognized the abundance of "essential accident" and "contingency," giving the example that rain happens to water crops, without intention. He saw this factor as significant, but merely material, and so temporary in the very long run, as "spirit" would eventually re-form all matter. 22 Tolstoy applies this obscurity of the connection between will and result to the most intimate, taken-forgranted activities, and to the shortest, simplest links between cause and effect. To Tolstoy, though these specific causes are hardly traceable, we can perceive tendencies produced by natural laws. For example, an army without direction will tend to move towards a source of food, and an abandoned city of wooden buildings will probably burn. 23 Seeing the knowability of causation dwindling to infinite smallness, he proposed seeing history as differential calculus, rather than the analysis of discrete steps. Thus he would try to gauge the sums and ratios of the infinitesimal movements of average people. Tolstoy claims that the higher up someone is, the more helpless he or she is -- that all decisive momentum and inertia are in the mass. This seems calculated perversely to invert Hegel, who saw more form, and more will, in the more highly placed individuals and structures, who work out their ideas on the materialistic masses. Like a materialist, Tolstoy sees most effective power in those who actually do the work of history. But he also sees these common people as closer to the working of spirit, of God, as they presumably don't clutter up their minds with fanciful plans and theories. Thus Napoleon, wrapped up in the expression and promotion of his self, in ubiquitous busyness, is prtrayed as the most helpless and material of men. Tolstoy's idea of General Kutuzov, and of the typical peasant, indeed, of any Russian who goes about his assigned business, is of one who knows and trusts a few laws and facts of nature, who can take stock of others without imagining that he can manipulate them completely. Tolstoy's Kutuzov, though he understands some of the forces behind events, still cannot control them. At Tarutino he is forced to give battle, though he knows it is unnecessary, as the end of a chain of events begun when a common soldier shoots a hare. He is nearly as helpless as Napoleon, but, to his advantage, he knows it.
