The Sage who Understood but did not Understand

In a certain kingdom, in the court of the king, there was an enchanted bell of old bronze that rang only when a great tragedy had culminated.

One day it rang.  As it deep tones were still fading, two scribes of the court pressed a tuning fork to it.  The vibrations still in the bell set the tuning fork aquiver.  They then took the Book of the Bell and set forth.

Their task was to find the tragedy and record it in the book.  The tuning fork was their instrument to find it.  It rang truer in the direction they should go.

They came to a middling town in a middling region of the kingdom.  They followed the tuning fork until they came to a home on the outskirt something larger than a cottage but smaller than a manse surrounded by blossoming flowers (it was the spring).

They marched up to the front door and knocked.

They asked everyone within to assemble in the front room.  Once all were present they asked, what was tragedy?

The residents told them that the old man who was the head of their family in that house had just died.  Indeed, it seemed his death had occurred when the bell rang.  But what was the tragedy?  The man’s family thought it was a tragedy that he had died.  They loved him very much and though he was old he had not been very old.  He had been so full of live and love, they said.  But why their personal tragedy would have been a tragedy for the kingdom they didn’t know.  Perhaps the old man had some kind of hidden genius?  He had been very smart in some ways.

The scribes investigated more.  They interviewed each member of the family and spoke to associates of the old man throughout the town.  They even found a sibling or two who lived elsewhere to interview.  The old man had the normal mix of faults and gifts.  Some virtues, some vices.  On the whole he seemed pretty decent like many another.  The only thing unusual about him was that people said he sometimes seemed to have remarkable degrees of insight into people and their institutions.  He would say some amazing things.  But at other times when someone was explaining a social something to him he had a hard time getting it.  It seemed to take a great deal of brain power for him to work through what he was being told.

Now the Book of the Bell was known for the great insights in it that came from investigating tragedies.  But it was even more known for the great number of seemingly inexplicable incidents where no one was quite sure where the great tragedy lied.  The scribes at last wrote down what they found in a few terse sentences then returned home to the king.

What they never knew was the real nature of the tragedy.  This man had been born with levels of insight into people and organizations that if blossomed would have made a revolution in human affairs.  However, he was also trusting and naive.  When people explained their own assessments of situations to him those assessments were limited and false but he assumed the people knew so he underwent the great effort to understand what they were saying and adjusted his views accordingly.