There once was a boy who cried, “Wolf!” Everything he thought, he got, though there was never enough of the stuff to fill him up, no matter how much he tried. There was a hollow place inside him that nothing could fill. It confused him greatly until the day when he learned how easy it was to manipulate others, as if they could fill this ego gap. But the gap was a trap. His ideas, how grand, swirled around in his head. Sure, trouble always followed, but there were those who bailed him out of every jam, every time. He was learning.
This was all he knew. It was an imaginary world where he would be king, played out in real time. What he did not know was how to be honest and true, neither to himself, nor others. Truth was what he made it out to be. He lived in a pretend world of his own making. He learned fast how others would follow his lead in any direction he wanted to go. If he beckoned to anyone, they would come running, since there was always a reward. The problem those around him soon discovered, was that there was also a punishment for not jumping at his every command. He was learning.
He just had to create a façade, something contrived yet plausibly believable. It was ingenious how this plan worked for him, time and again. He tested it often, crying out, “Wolf!” to see who would come running. But come running they all did. He was learning.
What he did not know was what he was doing to himself, to his mind, to his body, to his spirit, to his very soul. He was changing from an innocent boy into a caricature of the human puppet he wished to be. He was like Pinocchio in reverse, a real boy turning into a puppet performing for others on the world’s stage. Something was being born in him he did not recognize, but it was fun for him to think that he could pull the strings of others. Some called it narcissism, perversion, and some even called it malevolent, the birth of a sociopath, so deep was his disassociation from reality. He was learning.
In his world, somehow different from the world everyone else lived in, his reality was what he made it. He garnered a flock of admiring pigeons around him, eating from the crumbs that fell to the floor. They loved it, gobbling up every seed that was sown. He was learning.
He noticed that more and more pigeons came to his beck and call. He thought himself popular. After all, no one else had as many pigeons as he had. He even learned from the pigeons, how they could strut and puff up their own feathers. He was learning.
But the seed was expensive, so he went back to feeding them crumbs from his leftovers. He decided that, since they were believing everything that he was telling them, that he would just tell them, that the crumbs were better for them. Obviously, crumbs were cheaper since they were free. He figured out it was easier to lie than to be bothered with all the problems of him telling the truth. After all, they were only pigeons. He was learning.
Interestingly, the pigeons bought the lie and started telling other birds of all kinds that the crumbs from the boy were the best, tastiest, healthiest morsels they had ever tasted. Other birds believed the pigeons. They traded their high-quality seeds for the crumbs of the boy. The pigeons did not want to be without food. Fear grabbed their bird brains, the pigeons and many of the other birds, and they all willingly dumbed down to the point where they believed the lie was the truth. Now all the pigeons and other birds passed this knowledge on to their children. The plan was working great. The boy was learning.
Then the day arrived when the owls came to see what all the fuss was about, crumbs over seeds. The owls listened and tasted the crumbs. While it did fill them up, the crumbs did not taste as good as the seed did. The owls tried to tell the pigeons the truth of the matter. The pigeons refused to listen. They reasoned, “What did the owls know anyway?” The owls never met the boy, nor heard these words from his mouth. They did. The boy continued to learn.
Season after season the lies were handed down as truth, fiction replacing fact. Slowly the pigeons began dying. The baby pigeons were dying too. They blamed their fate on the owls who showed up rather than on the truth of the matter, that there was no nutrition in the crumbs from the boy, only more lies. Some of the pigeons came to their senses and realized that they felt so much better with the good seed they used to eat. It took time to convert the other bird brains into changing their belief that the seed would make them healthy again. Slowly, one by one, more pigeons gradually came over to the seed side of healthy bird life. The boy learned and became sacred.
How in the world was he going to control the pigeons and all the other birds now that the truth was uncovered? Failure was not an option. He stopped feeding crumbs to the pigeons who changed allegiances. That would teach them a lesson. If they died, that was no concern to him. That was their decision. His narcissism and sociopathy grew with his every breath. He had no feeling for the pigeons that died. He had no feelings at all, except those that fed the bottomless pit of his monstrous ego. He stopped learning.
The pigeons and owls began to flourish, even when he said they would not. The bird brains learned they had to think for themselves. They corrected the errors they had passed onto their children, in order that they could also live better and longer. In time, all the pigeons and owls valued fact over fiction, and good seed over crumbs. They continued learning.
The boy’s mind started playing tricks on him. He had lost control of his ego, which now dominated his every thought, word, and action. When things did not go his way, he knew no way out. He screamed at the pigeons and the owls. He had temper tantrums. How sad it was to see him refuse to grow up when all the time he could choose to recognize that he could be better. He could apologize to the pigeons and owls but somehow that seemed impossible. He did not want to take personal responsibility for the death of all those pigeons. Forgiveness, one way or the other, escaped his understanding. He cried, “Wolf!” one last time, but no one came running. He stopped learning.
The moral of the story is: Truth always comes out in the end. Better to stand by yourself in the truth than in a flock of pigeons who choose ignorance over intelligent knowledge. Decide not to be anyone’s puppet ever again. Forgiveness is always possible, for yourself and others.
God Bless Everyone Everywhere