The Stomach And The Head

We Claim These Stars, CHAPTER XI.

Flandry reflects that an army "...needs information even more than food..." (p. 73) and therefore marches on its head, not its stomach. That latter statement has been attributed to Napoleon and Frederick the Great. See here.

Flandry says more than he knows. There is an argument that says that philosophy had been standing on its head and needed to be turned around to stand on its feet. Plato thought that "Ideas" existed not just in our minds but in a transcendent realm from where they are instantiated into particular things. Thus, the Idea of the Good preexisted and produced good things. More generally, idealist philosophers think that consciousness determines being, that people live as they do because of what they think, that the idea of kingship preexisted the first kingdom, whereas materialist philosophers argue that human beings had to eat before they could think, that material production generates sets of social relationships which then generate ideas to rationalize, justify and sanctify those relationships, that an economic surplus necessarily preceded the institution of kingship, that the slave trade preceded the idea of racial inferiority etc.

With food but without information, an army can act ineffectually whereas, without food, it cannot act.