Destroy the earth? I could not help myself....

After spending more than a day in a convening with social impact investors, social entrepreneurs, eco-scientists, alternative currency people, hip hop artists, a cinematographer, a college student who has created a socially conscious endowment fund at her college, a woman working on an Indian Reservation, and a cadre of investment bankers, in a lovely bank conference room, in NYC, I came away recalling a fable by Aesop about collaboration among two species, the well-meaning, quite reasonable frog and the scorpion who knows his own long term best interest but....  Have you read it?

Comments

[Jon Husband]

A parable about the current structure and dynamics of the majority of the western world ?

[Phil Cubeta]

Agreed, our system and its host, our planet.

[Geoff]

I'm glad you enjoyed the meeting. I wonder if people with such diverse and divergent world-views were able to understand each other. I can just imagine you helping to break through these barriers with your wonderful ironic wit. Still, I wonder whether those who don't appreciate irony may sometimes feel confirmed by it in their outrageous positions.

[cspa]

The scorpion's journey is a narrative of progress. The running river symbolizes a competing narrative trajectory to the scorpion's progressive path. That sets the tension.

Frogs tend to live in ponds and lakes and swamps, not flowing rivers - if then only in the backwaters and side channels. Their narratives are circular, not linear.

In the typical hearing of the fable, the injustice gathers its force from the interruption of the scorpion's progress, and the assumption that progress is a shared value among scorpions and frogs - not from the betrayal of a contingent agreement between the two ontologically and topologically distinct creatures.

If the scorpion had waited until reaching the other side to act "according to his nature", one can imagine that the typical response would be that the stupid frog deserved it.

In this manner, to the typical listener, the fable is sort of about how liberals are confounded by the fascist death-drive. "But we both believe in progress!"

But that is a total misunderstanding of the frog's world.

[Phil Cubeta]

I just listened. "First do no harm," particularly to oneself.

[Phil Cubeta]

I see the point about the far side of the river. "Useful idiots" serve their purpose and are then ingested.

[cspa]

Yes, "useful idiots," a phrase often attributed to Lenin, but only traceable to von Mises.

[Phil Cubeta]

Lenin, I hope, was more courteous.

[cspa]

Clever, but in another possible reading, the frog is the communist, the scorpion the liberal, and the river the fascist.

[Enrique]

According to new insights from the Rockefeller Foundation, the frog, the river, and the scorpion are inextricably linked.

[Phil Cubeta]

In rigor mortis.