The Cat and the Rooster

Giday Gebrekidan 

In the fable “The Cat and the Rooster” the cat catches the rooster to devour it, the cat must have been planning and drooling for long before it got its hands on the rooster. Before devouring the rooster piece by piece the cat wants to do it in good conscience and looks for an excuse. Yes the cat did look for an excuse, it’s a fable.

The cat tells the rooster it has been a nuisance to men because it crowed at night and wouldn’t let them sleep and the cat is here to put an end to that. But the rooster had a good reply that made the excuse unacceptable. He is doing that only for the sake of men, to help them get up and do their daily business as usual. The cat was pissed off, it scowled and gave the rooster a stern look of surprise. There is another grievance the cat must address and accuses the rooster of a transgression against nature, by mating with its sisters and mother. The rooster replied it only does that to give men as much eggs as possible.

So finally the cat gives the rooster a sly smile and tells it that just because it always comes up with good answers it won’t help in anyway in escaping the cat’s justice. After such a logical discussion the story didn’t end happily for the rooster. The moral of the story is for whomever had any wrong doing hidden in its heart words and just reasoning will not change their evil resolve.

Men are creatures of principle so when they want to do evil, they come up with a reason or reasons. Any reason however unacceptable it may sound to others it helps them feel alright to be as evil as possible. Even those who do evil purely for the sake of being evil have reasons and excuses for being purely evil. That surely will be regarded as psychosis of some sort by others as in antisocial personality disorder and it will find its end somehow. 

In social relations things are different at micro and macro levels. What’s obviously wrong at individual level becomes acceptable with pressures from the majority crushing all logic and principles.

Solzhenitsyn says in Gulag Archipelago, “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he is doing is good… Ideology – that’s what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and other’s eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.”

What’s an individual to do in such a crushing situation? If the individual is an optimist like Solzhenitsyn was he would think he can help the people, he said in his Nobel Prize Lecture that, “I believe world literature has it in its power to help mankind, in these its troubled hours, to see itself as it really is, notwithstanding the indoctrination of prejudiced people and parties.”

But these hopes rely on one fundamental foundation that people would go the right way if they were to understand they are in the wrong. Would they? What if people embrace prejudices on purpose to fill the emptiness of their existence? People are afraid to look at the world by themselves; they rather crowd around prejudices and avoid facing the world.

It’s obvious for people to be reasonable nature and nurture are required, a genius and good study.   

In this time of ours with the novel social medias connecting people far-out and faster one would expect reason to reign but the opposite has become the rule. People are using social media to spread their brand of prejudices far-out and faster. For people as in our country where different prejudices reign supreme and strong, are good examples of this case. The stronger and more controversial the prejudices one spreads, the more people crowd around him. This makes you question if you can be as optimist as Solzhenitsyn was? What else can you do in an environment where unreasonableness rules supreme? Schopenhauer has an idea.     

“As a sharpening of wits, controversy is often, indeed, of mutual advantage, in order to correct one’s thoughts and awaken new views. But in learning and mental power both disputants must be tolerably equal: If one of them lack learning, he will fail to understand the other, as he is not on the same level as his antagonist. If he lacks mental power, he will be embittered, and led into dishonest tricks, and end by being rude.

“The only safe rule, therefore, is that which Aristotle mentions in the last chapter of his Topica:  not to dispute with the first person you meet, but only with those of your acquaintance of whom you know they possess sufficient intelligence and self-respect not to advance absurdities; to appeal to reason and not to authority, and to listen to reason and yield to it; and finally to cherish truth, to be willing to accept reason even from an opponent, and to be just enough to bear being proven to be in the wrong, should truth lie with him. From this it follows that scarcely one man in a hundred is worth your disputing with him. You may let the remainder say what they please, for everyone is at liberty to be a fool …” (Schopenhauer, Art of Controversy.)

Sure but in our information age it will be a fool that commands thousands of followers in social media in a way the one in hundred won’t. How many people would Schopenhauer have blocked in Facebook, if he was alive today?

March 17, 2016.