[Dragaera] Is Kelly foolish?

[Scott Schultz]

Kelly may be foolish, but if it's true, it's because you can't fight the
Cycle over the long term. He doesn't acknowledge or probably even understand
the true position of the Lords of Judgement in relation to the Empire. 

It isn't really clear what effect the Cycle or the Gods have in areas
outside of the Empire, like Greenaire and Elde Isle or the East. Other than
being considered a bit exotic, it isn't really clear that Easterners are
looked upon with the same kind of disdain by the Greeneaireans or the Elde
Islanders as they are by citizens of the Empire. It might be that Kelly
simply has to catch a ship to Elde in order to achieve his dream. But, I
digress...

Kelly is an idealist and a revolutionary. Such men achieve their goals by
inspiring people to believe that they can prevail against overwhelming odds
and effect change. You might as well ask whether Osama bin Ladin is foolish.
It doesn't matter, as long as he has a vision and the ability to communicate
it effectively.

Kelly is NOT foolish, in the sense that he has grasped one of the
fundamental truths about the sort of society he lives in - The nobility need
peasants to do the grunt work that they can't or won't do. They will kill
them to prevent an uprising but otherwise they aren't going to outright
destroy them all.  They can't do that without hurting themselves in the
process. This nullifies much of the advantage of having superior sorcery or
whatever. In the end, the peasants have numbers on their side.

Verra implies that Kelly has been exposed to some Marxist writings or
something similar that, while they may actually have revealed some
inconvenient truths to him, those truths are inappropriate to Dragaera where
there actually IS a grand design behind things and reigion (or what passes
for it) involves actual congress with the Gods (whether or not it might also
be the opiate of the masses).

Despite some of his more extreme rhetoric, Kelly seems to be mostly
concerned with making things better for the lower classes. His stance is not
"let's burn the palace" so much as "let's stand up and tell them that we're
not going to take these injustices any more". In that sense, he's as much
Martin Luther King, Jr. as he is Karl Marx. The riots happen because of
outside interference. Kelly's goal was to show the Easterners and the Tekla
that they had more power than they had been trained to believe they had. He
didn't really want to overthrow the Empress, but he DID want to face her
down and make  her flinch. 

Was that a foolish dream? Yes and no. As you point out, the Empress could
have simply burned out the brains of every Tekla in Adrilankha, and then the
Guard and the Warlord could have swept in and murdered every Easterner.
Kelly banked on her NOT doing that because it would be self-destructive.
Only a despot who cared only for power and revenge would do such a thing,
and Zerika is not such a ruler. He understood that the Empire needs it
underclasses, and it needs them to be relatively satisfied with their lot in
life in order to function. That was the source of his power and it was the
lesson he was trying to teach the people of South Adrilankha, Eastern and
Tekla alike. From that standpoint, he was not foolish at all and Verra was
justly vexed by him.

Kelly's real foolishness that the Cycle trumps all. By Iorich, everything in
South Adrilankha is more or less back to business as usual. If Kelly
effected any lasting change, it isn't apparent.