A Man of Weak Character

How the weak-minded reason themselves into trouble

One useful illustration of how fiction can, at times, be more illuminating with regards to the human condition can be seen in War and Peace, when a higher-status man advises his easily-influenced friend to avoid the company of his noble host, a notorious rake.

Prince Andrew looked kindly at him, yet his glance—friendly and affectionate as it was—expressed a sense of his own superiority.

"I am fond of you, especially as you are the one live man among our whole set. Yes, you're all right! Choose what you will; it's all the same. You'll be all right anywhere. But look here: give up visiting those Kuragins and leading that sort of life. It suits you so badly—all this debauchery, dissipation, and the rest of it!"

"What would you have, my dear fellow?" answered Pierre, shrugging his shoulders. "Women, my dear fellow; women!"

"I don't understand it," replied Prince Andrew. "Women who are comme il faut, that's a different matter; but the Kuragins' set of women, 'women and wine' I don't understand!"

Pierre was staying at Prince Vasili Kuragin's and sharing the dissipated life of his son Anatole, the son whom they were planning to reform by marrying him to Prince Andrew's sister.

"Do you know?" said Pierre, as if suddenly struck by a happy thought, "seriously, I have long been thinking of it.... Leading such a life I can't decide or think properly about anything. One's head aches, and one spends all one's money. He asked me for tonight, but I won't go."

"You give me your word of honor not to go?"

"On my honor!"

Weak-minded men of middle- and low-status tend to find it all too easy to give in to the negative influence of higher-status men; the problem is that whereas the higher-status man tends to be able to get away with his shenanigans, at least for a time, the lower-status men find themselves punished all the harsher for their lack of social status.

In the following passage, Tolstoy adroitly explores the thought processes of Pierre, and portrays the way he in which he rationalizes ignoring both the good advice of his friend and his promise in order to pursue his baser desires.

It was past one o'clock when Pierre left his friend. It was a cloudless, northern, summer night. Pierre took an open cab intending to drive straight home. But the nearer he drew to the house the more he felt the impossibility of going to sleep on such a night. It was light enough to see a long way in the deserted street and it seemed more like morning or evening than night. On the way Pierre remembered that Anatole Kuragin was expecting the usual set for cards that evening, after which there was generally a drinking bout, finishing with visits of a kind Pierre was very fond of.

"I should like to go to Kuragin's," thought he.

But he immediately recalled his promise to Prince Andrew not to go there. Then, as happens to people of weak character, he desired so passionately once more to enjoy that dissipation he was so accustomed to that he decided to go. The thought immediately occurred to him that his promise to Prince Andrew was of no account, because before he gave it he had already promised Prince Anatole to come to his gathering; "besides," thought he, "all such 'words of honor' are conventional things with no definite meaning, especially if one considers that by tomorrow one may be dead, or something so extraordinary may happen to one that honor and dishonor will be all the same!" Pierre often indulged in reflections of this sort, nullifying all his decisions and intentions. He went to Kuragin's.

This is where the complexity of multiple social hierarchies can easily trip a young man up. The different demands of the different Alphas often require a choice between hierarchical imperatives, and the consequent results can have serious ramifications for a man’s status in several of them at the same time.

Pierre Bezukhov’s middling status is evident from his Hollywood portrayal.