The Parable of the Drowning Man: Communist Version
What a communist parable actually teaches
We were having an interesting discussion on my FB wall about free will because I made the observation that even God left Man free will, whereas Man would definitely not and it segued into some comments about Christianity. If you read my previous Pretending to Sleep posts about coming to America, I wrote a little bit about my relationship with religion, particularly organized religion (i.e. I am not a fan or a practitioner). Nevertheless, I do have an appreciation for the Great Clockmaker (as my friend Justin dubbed it) and my religious friends with whom I apparently have more in common than not (weird, I admit).
There is a Christian story involving a flood, called the “Parable of the Drowning Man.”
The parable of the drowning man, also known as Two Boats and a Helicopter, is a short story, often told as a joke, most often about a devoutly Christian man, frequently a minister, who refuses several rescue attempts in the face of approaching floodwaters, each time telling the would-be rescuers that God will save him. After turning down the last, he drowns in the flood. After his death, the man meets God and asks why he did not intervene. God responds that he sent all the would-be rescuers to the man's aid on the expectation he would accept the help.—Wikipedia
The version I was taught is a little different. Now, do keep in mind that I’m paraphrasing, not quoting, and that there are probably variations of this, as there often are (Ivan and the Goat comes to mind for example):
A boyar (large landowner) and a peasant escape a sudden flood and somehow end up in a tree. The flood sweeps everything away, so it’s just the two of them. The boyar filled his pockets with gold; the peasant with bread.
Time passes and the boyar offers the peasant some of his gold in exchange for the bread, at which point the peasant speaks truth-to-power and lectures the boyar on his choices (something which happens only in parables and revisionist fantasies).
Weak with hunger, the boyar falls out of the tree and drowns. Sustained by the bread, the peasant survives and when the flood waters recede, he gets down, pilfers the drowned boyar’s pockets for the gold and takes it with him to give to his village to rebuild a new, fairer, equal society or some such BS.
Like all parables, it has a message: in this case, death to the boyars. Or perhaps, “don’t worry, in the end, fate (clears throat: some undefinable power in the Universe) will take care of evildoers.”
The message is not “wealth is bad” because it is wealth that is used to build the new communist society. Now, we could argue ad infinitum about whom the gold actually belonged to (yawn; I’m not gonna convince you and you’re not gonna convince me so let’s just skip ahead to “let’s agree to disagree”) in the first place.
The ethics of what people would do in a life-or-death situation like this aside (hint: you don’t know what you’ll actually do until you have to, no matter how much you’d like to think of yourself as virtuous), what’s really interesting about this parable is how clearly it announces the intentions of communism—only when the bad people are dead will the downtrodden be able to build paradise.
So don’t say that you’ve not been warned, especially if the 100 million deaths in the 20th century alone are just not proof enough for you. “It’ll be different this time. We (the ones we’ve been waiting for, the right people) will be in charge.” Sure, sure.
And please don’t miss the irony of the actual economics that are implied here which is to say that the assumption is that that gold would actually end up doing good in the hands of people who ended up with it, especially the modern version of those people. There’s a reason that the Pareto Principle (power law distribution) is an actual thing that manifests again and again. Just like there’s a reason that collective farms lead to shortages, starvation, and slave labor (the actual result of communism). Somehow (shocker!) it’s always that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” who are in charge when these things “happen.”
“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”—Margaret Thatcher
Thatcher was absolutely right and I don’t see her being disproven now or ever. The only error in that statement was the use of the word “socialism.”
Remember, it’s not like they’re not telling you what their intent is.
The goal of socialism is communism—Vladimir Lenin
You’re just not willing to listen.
The North Koreans have a picture book of this story. Well, it contains several stories of the same basic two themes: you have to kill off all the capitalists rich folks, and how you are living in a better world and don't know it. Well, if you are in a camp, you aren't, but you must have been bad. Only 'bad' people are in camps. This book was introduced to me three days after I met my second North Korean escapee via the tunnels the North Koreans dug into South Korea. They dug some during the active conflict, and some after, but the South knows where they are, and troops, sometimes ours, sometimes ROK, are stationed near them, and we've got them rigged with motion sensors and the like. I understand that the images are even in color to the picture book, which just adds to the whole "screaming propaganda," because 99% of PRNK images are in black and white.
This is brilliant. Thank you.