Chapter 6 Chapter Six

Only the expression of God's will, which is independent of time, can be related to a whole series of events of several years or centuries, and only God, who is not affected by anything, can determine the direction of human action by his own will ; but man acts in time and participates in events himself. Just by reestablishing the first neglected condition, the time condition, we can see that no command can be executed without the preceding command making the subsequent command executable. There is never an order that arises spontaneously, nor is an order applied to a chain of events; but every order comes from another order, never to a chain of events, but only to a certain moment of events.

For example, when we say that Napoleon ordered his troops to go to war, we are combining a series of successive, interrelated orders into one simultaneous order.Napoleon could not have given the order to go to Russia, nor had he ever given such an order.Today he orders such and such official documents to Vienna, Berlin, Petersburg; tomorrow he sends such and such instructions and orders to the Army, Fleet, Ordnance Department, etc., etc., the German-language publications of the German-French Almanac Marx and Ruge in Paris.Only in, wait--millions of orders, the many orders forming a series of corresponding orders leading to the chain of events leading to the entry of French troops into Russia.

During the reign of Napoleon, who ordered an expedition to England, and spent more energy and time on it than on any other project, yet in all the time of his reign there was never an attempt to carry it out, but invaded Russia, which he had repeatedly thought suitable for an alliance, and this happened because the former orders were inappropriate to the chain of events, while the latter were. For a command to actually work, it must issue a command that works.But it is impossible to know what can and cannot be done, not only in the case of Napoleon's attack on Russia, which was attended by millions, but even in the simplest case, because in the case of In both cases there are millions of obstacles.For every command that is executed, there are always a large number of unexecuted commands.All commands that cannot be executed are not related to the event, so they are not executed.Those orders that can be executed are carried out only if they are related to a consistent order and correspond to a series of events.

We think that the occurrence of an event is caused by its previous order. This wrong concept arises because we only see the event happened. Out of thousands of orders, only a few are related to the event. Linked orders have meaning and value only if they are executed.Advocates for a return to the "living world". , forgetting about the ones that were not executed because they couldn't be executed.Moreover, the chief cause of our confusion in this respect is that, in the historical record, a different series of innumerable and small events, such as those leading the French army to Russia, according to which The result of the command is reduced to an event, and in response to this reduction, the sequence of commands is reduced to a single expression of the will.

We said that Napoleon wanted to attack Russia, so he did.In fact, we find nothing like this expression of will in all of Napoleon's actions, but only a large number of the most complicated and vague orders, or expressions of his will.Of Napoleon's innumerable unexecuted orders, those concerning the campaign of 1812 were carried out, not because those orders were any different from the others, but because that series of orders was related to the The sequence of events that followed the entry of the French armies into Russia corresponded; just as the engraved templates were used to draw this or that figure, not on which side or in what way, but on all sides of the figure engraved on the template. .

Therefore, when we examine the temporal relationship between commands and events, we find that commands are not in any way the cause of events, but that there is only a definite relationship between them. To understand what this relationship is, it is necessary to recover the neglected condition of all orders not from God but from men, that condition is that the person who issued the order participated in the event himself. The relationship between the person who gives the order and the person who receives the order is what is called power.This relationship includes the following: Men form definite groups for common action, and in these groups the relations between the persons involved in the action are always the same, although the ends established for the common action are different.

Men combined into these groups always have such a relation to one another that when they unite for collective action the majority participates directly and the few indirectly. The military is one of the clearest and clearest examples of groups of people forming for collective action. Every army consists of lower military personnel—Privates, who are always in the majority; higher military personnel—Squad leaders and non-commissioned officers; their total number is less than that of privates; the total number of higher officers is even smaller, and so on. , until the supreme military leader with power concentrated in one person.

A military organization resembles a cone, the bottom of which has the largest diameter is composed of private soldiers; the section higher than the bottom is composed of higher-ranking military personnel; and so on, until the top of the cone is the commander-in-chief. The largest number of soldiers make up the bottom of the cone and its base.Soldiers go straight to stab, kill, burn, and plunder, and always receive orders for these actions from senior officers; they never issue an order themselves.Those non-commissioned officers (few in number) acted less than soldiers; but they gave orders.Officers acted less directly, but issued orders more.Generals just command troops, point out targets, and almost never use weapons.The commander-in-chief never took a direct part in the battle, but issued general orders concerning the movement of the masses.Such is the relation of men to one another in all associations in which men engage in common action—in agriculture, commerce, and all government.

Thus, without deliberately breaking down the parts of the connected cone--all the offices of an army, or the titles and positions from the lowest to the highest in any executive or public service--we can see a law , according to this law, those who take a joint action form the following relation: the more those who take a direct part in the action, the smaller their command and the more numerous they are; , the greater their command, the fewer their numbers; and in this way from the bottom to the last man, that man is the least directly involved in the action, and the most orders. This relationship between the commander and the commanded is the essence of the concept called power.

Recovering the temporal condition (under which all events occur), we find that a command is executed only if it is associated with a series of corresponding events.Recovering the necessary conditions for the relationship between those who give orders and those who execute them, we find that, by the nature of this condition, those who order are minimally involved in the event itself, their activity is merely giving orders.