19. A Story About Humanity

A man called Ahmad who was on his way to another city, had to stop a few days in a city called Tisoid. He noticed that the people in this city were somewhat deformed and rather stunted in stature and mind. They were immature with a mental age of about ten. Intrigued by this he decided to investigate. He discovered that the problem was in their diet. A certain Vitamin Q was missing. So he wrote out a recipe for how to manufacture it and add it to the food intake and gave it to the people he was staying with. They kept it in a purple folder. He then continued on his journey.

Several years later, Ahmad again had occasion to stop in this city. It had changed for the worse. There was much conflict between several groups. Many things were neglected and fell into dereliction and much wanton destruction had also been done. His investigations showed that the reason for this was that each of these groups wished to dominate and corner the limited resources. Though there would have been enough to satisfy all needs if they had cooperated, each wanted more than that, fearing that the others might take things away from them. This of course, reduced the resources. Indeed, the fear itself created the very situation they feared. It created the very behaviour that proved their fear. They were trapped in a vicious circle.

But why, Ahmad wondered, did these divisions occur in the first place. Why did they divide themselves into rival groups when, in fact, within the group they showed that they could cooperate. On inquiry he discovered that the problem was the recipes he had himself left them. Many copies of it had been made, but they were put into different coloured folders - mainly red ones and blue ones, but others of different shades of pink and blue. Accordingly, the different groups were called the Reds, the Blues and so on.

Among the entire population of this city there were only two or three people who had grown into tall, handsome and mature people. The others it seems had firm but different ideas about what the recipe was all about, and none qualifies their speculations with Inshallah.

Ahmad gathered some of the leaders together and addressed them thus :-

"O people! The cause of your troubles is this that you worship the form and forget the essence. Therefore, you have misunderstood the Recipe. You must study it and apply it, then it will relieve you of all your troubles."

Then he went on his way.

Though some rejected this assertion outright as pure nonsense, some of the people of Tisoid pondered these words for some time, then debated and argued about them.

Some practical people examined the Recipe and decided it was no good for building houses, or gardens, or roads or factories, or farms, and rejected it as useless. Some thought that perhaps Laws could be based on it and this might improve matters, but others found it wanting in the sphere of organization and politics in the modern world. Some artistic types thought it was good for decoration in certain places and times but not in others, while others thought the aesthetic value could be improved if the sentences were re-arranged and made to rhyme. Or extracts were made to suit various tastes.

The scholars of Tisoid also gathered to discuss the matter. Some made a grammatical analysis of the Recipe and told others about certain unusual features they had discovered but could not think of a good reason for these, other than the incompetence of the author. Some counted the number of different words and made a study of their relative frequency and patterns. Others compared the later copies with the original and drew wise inferences from the variations. Some could not understand the ingredients and their properties and changed them for different ones. Others thought the recipe was very old and, therefore, obsolete. Others looked at the language and thought that some sentences did not make good sense to them but certain other words or phrases would have been more appropriate. For instance, when they came across the word "bottle" they thought it meant a bottle of whiskey or wine rather than a container. They assumed that the contents had the properties familiar to them and failed to admit the possibility of unfamiliar ones. Some took metaphor literally or vice versa. Some mistook instructions for statements of fact or vice versa. Some thought it was a work of poetry and should be criticized accordingly, while others thought it was a work in philosophy or history, or science, or mythology, or law, or politics and so on. Some did not approve of the way the ideas were expressed and suggested several other ways of saying things. Some objected to the ideas because they contradicted the ones they held, though equally untested. Some thought the ideas in it resembled those of the philosopher Plato or Aristotle or some Alchemist they knew about, or some other person and regarded it as their works, though corrupted. Some of them recognized certain words and phrases as resembling those in other ancient manuscripts and decided they must be copies of those. They found, for instance, that the phases of the moon were mentioned, which was also mentioned in an ancient Chinese document. Some thought that some passages were constantly repeated though presented in an altered form, and decided that this must be the work of several authors.

Some foreign people, not being able to comprehend, feared those who held the recipe, became suspicious and invented all manner of paranoid fantasies, mounted propaganda campaigns and persecution against them, accusing them of all the vices they themselves suffered from, but wished to hide. They provoked and killed many, but when retaliated against took that as a confirmation of their suspicions.

They wrote learned thesis on how the Recipe was based on a misunderstanding of the works of these people, and obtained fame and honour for themselves, and even a job for life. A number of them speculated about the motives of the author and judged the recipe by their interpretation of what they knew of his life while he stayed in the city. Many projected their own motives, fantasies, desires, phobias, fears and prejudices onto the recipe. Most of these scholars, as is their wont, concentrated their attention on one or two features only, isolating them from the wholeness of the system which they destroyed even as the living animal is killed by dissection.

Some of the people, fewer than before, continued to belong to the sects of the Reds, the Blues and so on, and this allowed the Sceptics to take control and the material conditions to improve. But the dereliction and the chaos was transferred to the social and psychological sphere.

Among the entire population of this city there were only two or three additional people who had grown tall, handsome and mature. At first the antics of the various "wise scholars" seemed highly amusing to them, but soon it turned out that there were often malicious motives behind these efforts. These were used to instigated persecutions and bloody wars between the Reds and Blues which caused much destruction, deaths, mutilations, torture and general misery, which, of course, they blamed on each other.

This is a true story. But will you understand and believe it?

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20. Adaptability.......... Content