In our family, the old tales were told about “The Wise Men of Chelm.” It seemed that when the Creator was creating the world, the animals and plants and human beings, Creator also made villages surrounded by forests and mountains. Into each village, Creator placed a wise man and a wise woman and also one fool. However, by the end of creation, Creator had quite a few fools left over, and thus put all the leftover fools into one village, called Chelm. And thus the stories unfold about the ‘wise men of Chelm.’
In our time, though, witnessing the bank bailouts, and the early ka-jillion dollar parachutes given executives in insurance and banking for bailing before the animal offal hit the windmill… watching the many men who covered, dodged and feinted with deals and ‘creative book-keeping” that would make the find-the-rabbit optical illusion books look simplistic… watching especially the rush to not bank the real fires burning us all down… covering the fact that our country and the world is literally bankrupt in more ways than one… literally adding more fuel to the fire…
literally seeing all that, and being unable to talk sense into any official with even a modicum of power… I thought of one of the stories about the Wise Men of Chelm my Old Country immigrant father used to tell.
….There was a fire at the central barn in Chelm, and since all the fools of the universe lived in Chelm, but considered themselves the wisest of the wise, they all rushed to the fire debating what to do. The walls of the wooden barn were falling in, the poor animals within were crying out in all the smoke and blaze.
‘Well, too late to rescue the barn,’ said the wise men. ‘We could have brought hoses long enough to reach the well, but this is the first fire we’ve ever had, and that would have been a wasteful spending of money on hoses to carry water to put out fires when there was to be only one fire in our future.’
‘Well, we could mount a bucket brigade, but that wouldn’t work because the buckets might need to be used for something truly useful and if we use the buckets to put out the fire, then the buckets won’t be available for their best use.’
‘Yes, yes, hear, hear,’ said all the other wise man. Suddenly one wise man spoke up with great assurance.’ I know what we must do: Bring all your bales of hay from your barns and we will cover over the fire in this barn. If the flames cannot be seen, they can harm no one.’
And thus all the wise men ran off helter skelter to hitch their wagons and bring all their bales of dry hay to the burning barn. They forked the hay so thickly over the fires on the floors of the barn, that the fire was hidden beneath and merely smoking madly.
“See?” the wise men congratulated themselves. “The fire is gone.” And they all went home to drink and eat.
But, no. The fire gradually ate through the hay and again, even more greedy than before, licked at all the barn posts and drove up the collapsing walls to the ridgepole.
‘Aha,’ said one of the wise men of Chelm, ‘we must keep the fire from spreading, because otherwise our entire village could go up in flames’.
But no, the wisest amongst them said, ‘No, we must pull the fire out of the barn and spread it around the entire village. That will dilute the fire and it will burn with much less heat.’ And so…
the men pulled out the burning beams and the ember-blazing walls and dragged them through the town, leaning them up against all the wooden hovels, the dry wooden slats of the corrals and…
and…
and…
that night all the wise men of Chelm and their families sat huddled on the hill above their once village below now laying in a gray ashen moulder. And the wise men of Chelm said to each other and their shivering children and old ones… ‘It is good that everything burned down, because before there was some envy between neighbors and some worked harder than others and others hardly worked at all, so now, see how wise we are? We are all exactly the same: we all have absolutely nothing!’
And so went the wise men of Chelm. The deal about the wise men of Chelm was that they could not see nor imagine their own time-wasting, treasure-wasting, and fatuous ideas.
Hopefully, we do NOT go the same ways.
I’d suggest some who speak for what is called the Tea party, be listened to, that their words be seen and weighed especially about bailouts past and bailouts planned without careful line by line and full accounting. Many tea party protesters appear to reason it’s not a good idea to try to stifle the burning flame with more precious resource. Some members of the Tea party hold that spreading the fire out to the entire village is an extreme foolishness that destroys, rather than creating parity and opportunity.
Who’s the fool and who is not, may be the final determinant of whether we live with as much parity among people as reasonably possible, or whether we sit on the hill rationalizing how good it is to eat ashes.
Purposeful Burning Down of Others? Golman Sachs:
UPDATE: As this is reviewed this morning: The S.E.C. Accuses Goldman Sachs of Fraud on Mortgage Deals
Goldman Sachs, which emerged relatively unscathed from the financial crisis, was accused of securities fraud in a civil
suit filed Friday by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The suit claims the bank created and sold a mortgage investment
that was secretly devised to fail.The move marks the first time that regulators have taken action against a deal that helped investors capitalize on
collapse of the housing market. Goldman itself profited by betting against the very mortgage investments that it sold to
its customers.
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CODA
I have wondered why people on one side of most any political fisticuffs are nowadays only portrayed as saying ‘me me and mine, and no one else ought be cared for,’ vs the claims on the other side of ‘you wealthy bustars only got that way not through hard work’. I wonder if that slovenly argument is only misdirection while some other wool is being pulled. I wonder that some keep feeding the fire of the flame wars that go on destroying the barn and the creatures trapped within it… while others add precious resources to this kind of fire that will be forever voracious, and yet others try to drag that greedy utterly reductive fire into every sector of culture…
It seems it would be truly wise and non-Chelm like… to differentiate with common sense the difference between feeding a fire that warms all, versus moving to starve a fire that not only threatens but is guaranteed to burn the whole village down.
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Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés is a post-trauma specialist, a diplomate psychoanalyst in clinical practice for forty years, and President of La Sociedad de Guadalupe Heritage Institute. She is the author of ‘Women Who Run with the Wolves,’ a New York Times bestseller for 144 weeks and published in 37 languages, including Farsi and Mandarin. Her online audio event premiere of the manuscript ‘The Dangerous Old Woman, Myths and Stories of the Wise Woman Archetype’ is being broadcast on Tuesday evenings at SoundsTrue.com through April and May 2010.