59. Who Will Feed the Donkey?
Nasruddin and his wife were arguing about whose turn it was to feed the donkey. Finally they agreed: whoever spoke the next word would have to go feed the donkey.
So, neither one spoke a word all day.
And neither one spoke a word all evening.
In the night, a thief came and broke into their house.
Nasruddin saw him carrying away their clothes, their furniture, everything, but he said nothing at all.
In the morning, his wife saw what had happened and yelled, “We’ve been robbed!”
Nasruddin laughed in triumph. “And now you have to go feed the donkey!”
This Tale is from “Tiny Tales of Nasruddin” by Laura Gibbs. The book is licensed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. © 2019-2022 Laura Gibbs.
I have quoted only a small portion of a very good article; a suggested read.
If you build your identity around fighting evil, after all, it’s safe to say that you’ll always make sure not to defeat it, so that it will always be there for you to fight.
It’s for this reason, to cite a timely example, that Donald Trump isn’t a has-been today. If American politics had followed its normal course, his election in 2016 would have been no big deal. Populists from outside the political system seize elective office in this country from time to time. What typically happens is that they have one not very successful term, whatever issues propelled them into office get taken up by professional politicians and absorbed into the system, and business as usual continues unhindered. In this case, by contrast, so many people became so obsessed with hating him that this process could no longer function.
That had several important effects. First of all, the political establishment was so busy shrieking its rage and hatred at Trump that it failed to do anything about the issues that brought him to power. This guaranteed, in turn, that the issues in question would become more pressing and draw even more support away from the political mainstream and toward Trump and those who aligned themselves with him. All that ecstasy of hatred poured out onto Trump also guaranteed that he would gain support; the more shrill it got, the more likely it was that everyone who was dissatisfied with the existing order of things, no matter how little they liked Trump personally, would rally around someone the defenders of the status quo hated so passionately. — The Man With The Moustache by John Michael Greer