"If you read Tolstoy's War and Peace, he has some wonderful descriptions about how battles which look very clear to military historians never seem that way to the people involved in them, that when you're actually in the smoke and the roar of the cannons, you have no idea what's happening. Even the generals have no idea what's happening."
Tolstoy intended these passages as a parable of society as a whole, to show there's no vantage point from which to get the big picture.