exists between an expression of will and its execution by other people.
If we are to explain the conditions of that dependency, we must first of all reinstate the concept of the expression of will, but with reference to man rather than the Deity.
If we think of the Deity giving a command, expressing His will, the expression of that will, as ancient history relates, is timeless and uncaused, since the Deity has no connection with the event. But when we speak of commands as the expression of men's will, men existing in time and interacting, we must recreate two conditions if we are to clarify for ourselves the connection between command and event: (1) that of the occurrence in its entirety, the dynamic time-bound wholeness of the event itself and the person commanding it; and (2) that of the indispensable bond which links the person issuing the command with those who carry it out.
CHAPTER 6
Only the will of a timeless Deity could possibly affect a whole series of events occurring over years or centuries, and only a spontaneous Deity could by sheer will power direct the movement of humanity. Man acts within time, and is involved in events.
Reinstating the first condition - time - we perceive that no order can be carried out without an earlier order making its execution possible.
There is no such thing as a command that comes from nowhere or one that embraces a whole series of events. Every command flows from an earlier one, and never relates to a whole series of events, being always limited to a single moment within those events.
When we say, for instance, that Napoleon ordered his troops to go to war, we are bringing together under one word of command a whole series of subsequent commands, all of them interdependent. Napoleon couldn't have ordered the invasion of Russia, and he never did. All that happened was that one day he ordered certain documents to be sent to Vienna, Berlin and Petersburg, and the next day he issued one or two decrees and some instructions to the army, the fleet, the quartermaster service and so on and so forth - millions of orders coming together in a series of orders associated with a series of events which brought the French troops to Russia.
If it is true that Napoleon kept issuing orders throughout his reign for an expedition to England, and spent more time and effort on this than any other enterprise without ever carrying it out in the whole of his reign, though he did carry out an expedition against Russia (even though, as he emphasized on numerous occasions, this was a country that would make a useful ally) - all of this is due to the fact that in the first case his orders did not correspond with the course of events, and in the second case they did.
For an order to be properly carried out it is necessary for a man to issue an order that is capable of being carried out. But to know what is and what isn't capable of being carried out is impossible, not only in the case of Napoleon's campaign against Russia, involving millions, but even in the case of the simplest occurrence, since millions of obstacles can always get in the way of either of these. Every order carried out is always one of many that are not. All the impossible orders fail to engage with the course of events and don't get carried out. It is only the possible ones that do engage with the run of subsequent orders, do correspond with the course of events and do get carried out.
Our false impression that an order preceding an event is the cause of it is due to the fact that when an event has occurred and one or two orders out of a thousand issued have been carried out (the ones that happen to correspond with events), we forget those that were not carried out because they never could have been. Apart from that, our major source of error arises from the fact that in any historical account a whole series of innumerable, disparate and trivial events (say every single thing responsible for bringing the French soldiers over to Russia) are subsumed into the single end-result of that series of events, and the whole series of orders issued are correspondingly subsumed into a single expression of will.
We say: Napoleon chose to invade Russia and did so. In point of fact, we shall never discover in all that Napoleon ever did anything resembling such an expression of will. What we shall find is a series of commands or expressions of his will issued with maximum vagueness in a multiplicity of ways. From the incalculable series of Napoleon's orders that were never carried out, one series of orders for the campaign of 1812 was carried out, not because of any essential difference between these and the ones not carried out, but simply because this series happened to correspond with the course of events bringing the French soldiers into Russia, just as in stencil-work the eventual figure depends not on the direction or the working of the paint, but on the stencilled cut-out being filled in, in every corner.
So, when we consider the relationship between commands and events in real time, we find that no command is ever the cause of an event, though a definite dependency exists between the two. To understand the nature of this dependency it is essential to reinstate the second of the two forgotten conditions that accompany any order issued by a man rather than a Deity - that the man issuing the order is himself involved in the event.
This relationship between the person issuing an order and the person receiving it is the essence of what we call power. The relationship is made up as follows.
For the purpose of common action men always come together in certain combinations, in which, even though the goals of the common action may vary, the relationship between the participants always remains the same.
Men who come together in these combinations always form a special relationship whereby the greater number participate more directly, and the smaller number less directly, in the combined action for which they have come together. One of the best and clearest examples of such combinations of men coming together for concerted action is the army.
All armies are made up as follows: the rank and file, who always form the majority; the slightly higher ranks, corporals and non-commissioned officers, fewer in number than the common soldiers; even higher ranks, of whom there are fewer still; and so on, right up to the highest military authority, which is concentrated in a single person.
A military organization can be accurately represented by a cone, with a base of the largest diameter consisting of the rank and file, a higher section with a smaller base for soldiers of higher rank, and so on right up to the apex, the point of which will be the commander-in-chief.
The common soldiers, who are the largest number, form the lower sections of the cone and its base. It is the soldier who does all the stabbing and hacking and burning and pillaging, orders for which he receives from above, and he never gives an order himself. The non-commissioned officer (and there are fewer such people) sees less direct action than the soldier, but he does give orders. The commissioned officer sees even less action, but gives a lot more orders. The general does nothing but issue instructions to the army and hardly ever uses a weapon. The commander-in-chief is never allowed into the action; all he does is make general arrangements for the movements of the masses. This same kind of interrelationship exists in every combination of men who come together for concerted action - in agriculture, business and all administrative departments.
And so, without slicing these cones artificially from the bottom up into various sections, ranks, titles and grades in whatever department or common enterprise, a law emerges, by which men coming together for concerted action always form a relationship which guarantees that the ones most directly involved in the action give the fewest orders and exist in the greatest numbers, while the ones least directly involved in the action give most orders and exist in the smallest numbers, rising thus from the lower strata right up to one last man at the top, with the very least direct involvement in what is going on, and maximum devotion of his effort to the issuing of orders.
This is the relationship that exists between those involved in the giving and receiving of orders, and it constitutes the essence of the concept known as power. With the time condition reinstated, since all events occur within time, we have found that an order gets carried out only when it corresponds to a relevant sequence of events. And by reinstating as an essential condition the link between people giving and receiving orders, we have found that by their very nature the people giving the orders have the least involvement in any action, their energies being directed exclusively to the issuing of orders.
CHAPTER 7
When an event takes place various opinions and desires are expressed about it, and as the event evolves out of the concerted action of many men, one particular version of the opinions or desires expressed is bound to be fulfilled, if only approximately. When one of the opinions expressed is fulfilled, that opinion becomes enshrined, by association, as the order that preceded the event.
Some men are hauling a log. Each of them speaks out and says where and how it should be hauled. The log is hauled away and it ends up just as one of them had said it would. So he gave the order. This is command and power at their most primitive.
The man who did most of the manual labour must have been able to think least about what he was doing and give least consideration to the possible outcome of the collective endeavour or any issuing of orders. The man who issued most of the orders was so busy with his verbal activity that he must obviously have had less time for the manual labour. In a bigger group of people directing their efforts towards a particular goal, the category of those less involved in the actual labour because they are more involved in the issuing of orders stands out even more clearly.
When a man is acting alone he always carries in his mind a particular set of presumptions that seem to have governed his actions in the past, justify his present activity and govern his thinking about any future projects.
People in groups act in just the same way, except that they leave it to those least involved in the action to think up any presumptions, justification or future projects for their collective endeavour.
For various reasons known and unknown, the French set about butchering and destroying one another. And with the event comes a corresponding justification in the expressed will of certain men who believe it to be necessary for the good of France, or in the interests of freedom or equality. The butchery stops, and along comes a corresponding justification of this event in terms of the need to centralize power, resist Europe and so on. Men march from west to east, murdering their fellow creatures, and this event is accompanied by fine words about the glory of France, the vileness of England, and so on. History shows that these forms of justification are no less nonsensical and contradictory than, for instance, murdering somebody as a declaration of his human rights, or murdering millions in Russia in order to take England down a peg or two.
But these justifications are very necessary at the time, shifting moral responsibility away from the men who produce the events. These short-term measures operate like brushes on the front of a train clearing the rails ahead: they sweep away men's moral responsibility. Without this kind of justification there would be no answer to the simplest question that arises the moment you start to examine any historical event: why do millions of men commit crimes collectively, murdering, fighting wars and so on?
Under the present complex forms of political and social life in Europe, can you imagine any event that was not predetermined, decreed or ordered by some sovereign, minister, parliament or newspaper? Is there any form of concerted action that could not be justified in terms of political unity, patriotism, the balance of power or the advancement of civilization? No, every event that occurs inevitably coincides with some desire that has been expressed, soon acquires its own justification and comes to be regarded as the result of the will power of one or more persons.
Wherever a moving ship decides to go you will always see a stream of divided waves ahead of it. For those on board the flow of those waves will be their only sensation of movement.
Only by carefully observing the movement of that stream, from moment to moment, and comparing it with the movement of the ship, shall we learn that every surge through the flow is due to the forward movement of the ship, and it was a false impression that led us to believe we were the ones who were moving along imperceptibly.
We can see the same thing happening if we observe the movement of historical figures from moment to moment - that is, if we reinstate the inevitable condition that applies to every occurrence - the continuous flow of time - and provided we never lose sight of the inevitable link between historical figures and the masses.
As long as the ship keeps going in one direction you will always see the same divided stream ahead of it, but when it starts to weave about, the flowing stream up front will keep changing. But wherever it turns there will always be a flowing stream ahead, anticipating the ship's movement.
Whatever happens, the outcome will always seem to have been foreseen and preordained. Whichever way the ship turns, the boiling waves will surge ahead of it, neither directing the vessel nor speeding its progress, though from a distance that stream will seem to be moving on its own and even responsible for the ship's forward movement.
Historians have tended to study expressions of will by historical figures only in terms of the relationship between orders and events, and they have jumped to the conclusion that the events were dependent on the orders. But our analysis of the events themselves and the link between historical figures and the masses has shown that historical figures and the orders they give are dependent on events. We have incontrovertible proof of this in the fact that, however many orders are given, the event will not take place if there is no other cause to produce it. But the moment an event does take place, whatever it may be, among all the expressions of will by all sorts of different people there will always be some that happen to coincide in meaning and time so that events correspond to orders given.
With this conclusion in mind, we can give straight and positive answers to two of history's crucial questions: (1) What is power? (2) What is the force that determines the movement of peoples?
(1) Power is a relationship between a given person and other persons by which the less directly a person participates in a collective enterprise the more involved he is in expressing opinions and theories about it and providing justification for it.
(2) The movement of peoples is determined not as historians have supposed, by the exercise of power, or the intellect, or both together, but by the actions of all involved; all the people who come together in such a way that those who participate most directly in the activity assume the least responsibility for it, and vice versa.
In moral terms power is the cause of the event; in physical terms it is those who are subject to that power. But since moral activity is inconceivable without physical activity, the cause of the event is actually found in neither of them, but in a combination of the two.
To put it another way, the concept of cause does not apply to the phenomenon under review.
In the last analysis we come to the circle of infinity, the furthest limit to which the human intellect must come in every realm of thought if it is not toying with its subject matter. Electricity produces heat; heat produces electricity. Atoms attract; atoms repel.
On the subject of the relationship between heat and electricity, and atoms, we cannot say why things happen like this, so we say they do it because anything else is unimaginable, it has to be, it's a law. The same applies to historical phenomena. Why do wars or revolutions happen? We don't know. All we know is that for either of these to happen men must come together in a particular combination with everybody taking part, and we say that this is so because anything else is unimaginable, it has to be, it's a law.
CHAPTER 8
If history dealt with external phenomena all we would have to do is state this simple and obvious law and our argument would be at an end. But the law of history relates to man. A particle of matter cannot tell us that it doesn't feel bound by laws of attraction and repulsion and it thinks they are wrong. But man, the subject matter of history, makes no bones about it: 'I am free,' he says, 'and therefore not subject to any laws.'
The problem of man's free will may often remain unarticulated, but it is felt at every step in history.
All serious-minded historians are inevitably confronted with this question. All the inconsistencies and uncertainties of history, and the wrong path taken by historical studies, can be attributed to this problem and the lack of any solution to it.
If every man enjoyed free will - in other words, if every man could do what he wanted - the whole of history would be a tissue of sporadic accidents.
If one man in millions once in a thousand years had complete freedom of action, freedom to do anything he wanted, it is obvious that any act of free will performed by that man in defiance of all laws would deny the possibility of any laws at all for humanity. Conversely, if there is any one law that controls the actions of men, free will cannot exist, because men's will would have to be subject to that law.
This contradiction embodies the whole problem of free will, which has occupied the best minds from time immemorial, and from time immemorial has stood out as an issue of tremendous importance.
The problem is that, taking man as a subject for observation from any angle - theological, historical, ethical, philosophical - we find him subject to a universal law of necessity just like everything else that exists. But looking at him from within ourselves, looking at our own consciousness, we feel free.
This consciousness is a separate source of self-awareness independent of reason. Through reason man can observe himself, but he knows himself only through consciousness. Without consciousness, no observation or application of reason is conceivable.
In order to understand, observe and draw any conclusions a man must first of all be conscious of being alive. A man's sense of being alive derives from his yearning, which means being conscious of his own will. But there is only one way that man becomes conscious of his will, the very essence of his being - he conceives of it as free will.
If during self-observation a man sees that his will always operates by the same law (whethe