Mother Goat had seven Kids. One day she left them at home while she went to the meadow to cut some fresh grass. ‘Don’t let anyone in’, she warned them,’ the big bad Wolf is hereabouts.’
Sure enough within half an hour the Wolf shows up pretending to be Mother. He puts on his sweetest caring voice, ‘oh let me in for I have fresh grass for you.’
The Kids laugh out loud because they can hear the gruff voice belongs to the Wolf and mock him from the safely shuttered windows. The Wolf goes off, educated in his error and eats some turnips to soften his voice. ‘oh let me in for I have fresh grass for you.’
The Kids are about to open the door when one of them sees the Wolf’s dark paw on the windowsill. ‘Stop, its the Wolf; see his dark paw’. So they mocked him some more and the Wolf slunk off further educated. He went to the Miller and stole some flour, covering himself from nose to tail and tried again…’oh let me in for I have fresh grass for you.’
Sure enough, the foolish Kids let him in and all are gobbled up except the smallest who manages to hide in a cuckoo clock. When Mother Goat returns she finds the lone survivor who tells what happened. ‘So that’s who I saw sleeping off a heavy meal in the meadow.’ She took scissors, needle and thread then snuck up on the Wolf and cut him open. Out came the kids. Mother Goat then told them to fill the Wolf with rocks which she sewed back up.
When the Wolf woke up he had a mighty thirst. He staggered to the river but when he bent down to drink fell in and was drowned, much to the jubilation of the Kids who sang and danced and feasted on their grass.
So, what is the moral of the story?
Folklore is full of such simple tales, the good and the innocent triumphing over the seemingly greater figure of evil personified by the Wolf. It makes you wonder if folk are just trying to comfort themselves with the wish fulfilling idea that though life’s troubles cannot be surmounted, some brave soul will come along and save the day, a life stance of passivity which existentialist Irvin Yalom calls, ‘the myth of the ultimate rescuer’. Mother Goat will swoop into view and save us all from death anxiety.
But did the Kids learn anything along the way? The dancing and feasting suggests not. You can’t help but notice that they survived by pure luck which rather compels one to rethink what good and evil might be. After all, the Wolf is just doing what Wolves do. It is the inflated naivety of the Kids which is the author of their demise. In a parallel universe somewhere the Wolf gets to keep his prize. After all it seems like a just reward for discovering that if he can accurately fulfill the Kids fantasy expectation for just a moment they will let him in, all against better judgement which might caution, ‘he’s been twice before, don’t you think we ought to think twice before answering? Mother if it is you what did you give us for breakfast? List our names in order of birth. Tell the story of what happened to Father Goat. Lets see some ID….
‘The Devil comes to us not with horns and a tail but as everything you ever wanted..”
Why? Because everything you ever wanted is where the route of least resistance lies. You really will get tired of winning. The wish that the Wolf is Mummy is more compelling than the scary prospect of being breakfast which then cannot be adequately defended against.
The recent Presidential debate is a good example of this. The naive assumption that Trump was simply going to let Biden have his time on the basis of gentlemanly agreement displays a staggering failure to grock the situation. After three years of aggressive bombast and steamrolling falsehoods, the nation thought he would be nice and polite for TV.? Its like offering candy to a cornered wolverine and being surprised when it takes your arm off.
If you are to come to grips with evil then, like charity, it has to begin at home. The idea that it is enough to simply vote Trump out is as foolish as the notion that he will behave himself in debate with Biden. We, like the Kids, want it to be Mama at the door and so we forget it could be the Wolf despite the fact he’s already tried to get in several times. The unthinkable happens because no-one thought about it. They could not confer, nor talk to themselves about what was going on.
We prefer to think that big bad Trump has produced a culture of contempt and uncaring, conveniently forgetting that it is he who was produced, brewed, distilled and oak barrelled by us, by a culture so in denial of its greed and avarice that it had to get elected to be noticed…
Wanting to be rid of Trump is like the urge you get to pop a really ripe pimple, feeling somehow vindicated and triumphant when it finally coughs its load, the underlying conditions blinkered off by momentary victory. We forget that Trump was made like this, just as surely as pizza makes pimples and by the same wishing as the Kids wanting the knock at the door to be Mama. He was made by the ferment of instant gratification, by saccharine values that just wants what it wants, by our eternal stirring over celebrity, by giddily identifying with those who seem to be living-the-dream.
All of which is a kind of wickedness…
which somewhat relativizes the honest wish for bbq’d Kid.
When Trump said, ‘you knew I was a snake when you let me in’, he was telling the truth. He had openly and un-apologetically lied, cheated and grifted his way through life. It was all in plain sight and yet this still somehow made him the best man to run the country, voted into office by the same narcissistic streak in the electorate, who either lapped up the opportunity to regress or who were regressed already and then, in their millions, couldn’t be arsed to vote.
‘All that is necessary for the triumph of Evil is that good men do nothing.’ Edmund Burke.
The Founding Fathers were afraid of greedy men coming into power but they had not reckoned on the collective wolf in the electorate, invisible behind the white picket fence of constitutional ideals and moral rectitude. Discussion ceases because everyone thinks the same thoughts, so what’s to talk about? Kant reminds us that there is no synthesis, no progress, without thesis and antithesis, without dialogue. The Kids do not talk to one another and so they come to a regressive end, swallowed up by the Unconscious.
‘Individuals who believe they are masters of their fate are as a rule the slaves of destiny.’ CG Jung
The idea that we are more evolved ain’t so. In the absence of the Great Mother the Kids lose their individuality, their capacity for relatedness, the truth of their vulnerability, the flimsiness of their protection. The Kids fucked up, very badly. Like them, we have made a mistake. We forgot to take the Wolf seriously. We forgot his persistence. After all, it could never happen here… or to us.
Realizing you made a mistake is the beginning of change.
Pull over, don’t beat yourself up, learn to confer in the Wolf’s belly.
‘Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.” S Dali
When you face your own naivety, learn to ask for help and begin to value relatedness, then outer threats can be more adequately defended against because the Kids start pulling together. More importantly, the refusal to be seduced into the comfy notion of shared specialness will also keep the inner Wolf from the door and limit the chances of you being gobbled up by the idea that life should be easier than it is…
