The Mechanics of Virtue #323: Iago's Gambit

323

Iago’s Gambit: Plain dealing does not appear intelligent.  It is simple arithmetic.  But this fact does not necessarily make intrigue the more intelligent option.  The man who is always scheming suffers from the delusion that he knows all when he only knows much.  He is quite different from that wiser sort which accepts a limit to the intellect.  The evil and the good, the schemer and the provident – in the day-to-day, these are two chess masters who play within a life sized board, and the one counts the pieces and the squares and proceeds shrewdly, confident in his arithmetic, while the other counts the pieces and the squares and trusts that beyond the horizon of his view exist other pieces and other squares: an ignorance for which no additional arithmetic can compensate.  He refuses confidence in calculating the next few moves with the same emphasis that he rejects astrology.  He now appears as simplistic as the simpleton who knows no arithmetic – he appears inferior to the shrewd as well, but his strategy is sound – and precisely where the shrewd has sacrificed probability with his smug belief in the certainty of the next few moves.

Iago plays this sort of chess game with the immediate world against the totality of the prevailing conditions.  He believes in an equation of mechanics which does not include accumulating repetition nor one’s necessary ignorance of the complex forces bearing down on every event.  Thus, he has a certainty ... a materialism which is really a complacency: he has a line of reasoning and a description of mechanical effects laid out as if the matter were as simple as a game of billiards. 

Time is not on the side of the Iagos and the Macbeths of the world.  Ultimately their method disperses that force which would otherwise have been accumulating in their favor.  They grab hold of a single “key” instance and believe they can then pull a preconceived chain of consequences out of their future, but in doing so they forfeit the advantage of that tendency which overcomes even the best of intentions, which is also to say that it can even overwhelm the hell of one's necessary ignorance.  A genuine but intelligent good accumulates its force from the tendency of instances; evil believes it can steal an instance out of its own tendency.