From Isaiah Berlin’s wonderful Hedgehog and the Fox:
People were preoccupied by personal interests. Those who went about their ordinary business without feeling heroic emotions or thinking that they were actors upon the well-lighted stage of history were the most useful to their … community, while those who tried to grasp the general course of events and wanted to take part in history … were the most useless… because “nowhere is the commandment not to taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge so clearly written as in the course of history. Only unconscious activity bears fruit, and the individual who plays a part in historical events never understands their significance. If he attempts to understand them, he is struck with sterility.”
…
Tolstoy’s bitterest taunts, his most corrosive irony, are reserved for those who pose as official specialists in human affairs … these men must be impostors, since no theories can possibly fit the immense variety of possible human behaviour, the vast multiplicity of minute, undiscoverable causes and effects which form that interplay of men and nature which history purports to record.