35-37 The Principle of Insufficient Cause

Ulrich's train of thought (as erratic as it may be) is once more derailed when he encounters "Bank Director Fischel," who has become flustered by "two little words" repeated several times in a circular he had received from Count Leinsdorf.  Those words being: "the true."

Fischel confronts Ulrich with three short questions: "What is really meant by 'the true patriotism,' 'the true progress,' and 'the true Austria.'" Ulrich's reply reflects his off-the-cuff philosophy regarding "The Principle of Insufficient Cause."  He says: "I give you my solemn word, . . . that neither I nor anyone else knows what 'the true' anything is, but I can assure you that it is on the point of realization."

Chapter 36 and 37 illustrate how the "Principle of Insufficient Cause" applies to the Parallel Campaign and makes it "a tangible reality before anyone knows what it is."

It seems it was all the fault of an "influential journalist:

 . . . who had heard that something was in the wind [and] quickly published two long articles in his paper offering as his own ideas everything he had guessed to be in the works. . . . He was really the inventor of the idea of the "Year of Austria" that he wrote about in his columns, without himself knowing what he meant by it but writing sentence after sentence in which this phrase combined with others as in a dream and took on new forms and unleashed storms of enthusiasm. 

This was in part what Count Leinsdorf had intended: "to let newsmen serve as the mouthpiece for his actual intention [regarding the Parallel Campaign] so as to be able to acknowledge or disavow them as circumstances might dictate."

But there is a problem:  "His Grace [Leinsdorf] had not reckoned with . . . the widespread need to improve the world . . . he had expected a great amount of patriotism but was not prepared for inventions, theories, schemes for world unity, and people demanding that he release them from intellectual prisons."

Once again poor Ulrich is dragged into the fray: "In this situation he [Leinsdorf] felt an increasing desperate need for Ulrich, who had been recommended to him as the very man for the occasion."

Who better to deal with a made up crisis than a man without qualities?