Distrust interested advice

A story of the Fox Without a Tail

It happened that a Fox caught its tail in a trap, and in struggling to release himself lost all of it but the stump. At first he was ashamed to show himself among his fellow foxes. But at last he determined to put a bolder face upon his misfortune, and summoned all the foxes to a general meeting to consider a proposal which he had to place before them. When they had assembled together the Fox proposed that they should all do away with their tails. He pointed out how inconvenient a tail was when they were pursued by their enemies, the dogs; how much it was in the way when they desired to sit down and hold a friendly conversation with one another. He failed to see any advantage in carrying about such a useless encumbrance. "That is all very well," said one of the older foxes; "but I do not think you would have recommended us to dispense with our chief ornament if you had not happened to lose it yourself."
The moral of the story is: Distrust interested advice.

Self-conceit may lead to self-destruction

A Story of the Frog and the Ox
"Oh Father," said a little Frog to the big one sitting by the side of a pool, "I have seen such a terrible monster! It was as big as a mountain, with horns on its head, and a long tail, and it had hoofs divided in two."
"Tush, child, tush," said the old Frog, "that was only Farmer White's Ox. It isn't so big either; he may be a little bit taller than I, but I could easily make myself quite as broad; just you see." So he blew himself out, and blew himself out, and blew himself out. "Was he as big as that?" asked he.
"Oh, much bigger than that," said the young Frog. Again the old one blew himself out, and asked the young one if the Ox was as big as that.
"Bigger, father, bigger," was the reply. So the Frog took a deep breath, and blew and blew and blew,
and swelled and swelled and swelled. And then he said: "I'm sure the Ox is not as big as...; But at this moment he burst.

The moral of the story is: Self-conceit may lead to self-destruction!

Use and Abuse of History

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) wrote of his fellow Europeans: “…art thou not mad? Thy knowledge does not complete Nature, it only kills thine own nature….Thou climbest toward heaven on the sunbeams of thy knowledge—but also down towards chaos. Thy manner of going is fatal to thee; the ground slips from under thy feet into the dark un­known; thy life has no stat' but spiders' webs torn asunder by every new stroke of thy knowledge”
[Nietzsche F., (1910) Thoughts out of season, II: The use and abuse of history. (A. Collins translation), T. N. Foulis, Edinburgh & London].

Nietzsche's words are as poignant today as they were then. Nobody has to remind us that we stand in the midst of a cultural crisis. Our spectacular successes in space camouflage a deeper descent toward confusion. The signs of discontent are omnipresent, manifested in the spirited revolts of the 1960s and the perhaps even more disconcerting, apathetic malaise of the 1970s.
We sense that our culture and civiliza­tion are on the verge of collapse. Modern civilization has been judged and found wanting. Within the last century, doubts have arisen as to the very rationality of our science and technology. Science, which promised us progress, speaks today of our doom. Its greatest triumph may be the power it has given us to bring ourselves and our world to ruin, for technology's by-products may be able to destroy our land and all living organisms. Science has opened our eyes and increased our knowledge; it has also closed our eyes to the few vital things that really matter.
Erich Fromm suggests that the effects of our "technetronic age" are vividly illustrated in Herman Kahn's book on thermonuclear warfare, a book that raises the question: "How many millions of dead Americans are 'acceptable' if we use as a criterion the ability to rebuild the economic machine after nuclear war in a reasonably short time so that it is as good or better than before?" In Kahn's discussion, figures for gross national production and population increase are primary criteria, whereas human questions of suffering, brutalisation, and meaning are ignored. At no other time in human history has the question of the psyche, the human personality, become so problematic. The philosopher Kurt Reinhardt observes that "In this 'progressive' age it is both pitiful and tragic to see the ever increasing discrepancy between the plenitude of scientific knowledge and the helplessness with which governments, peoples and individuals face the intellectual and moral problems of human life"
[For further reading you may consult: Reinhardt K., (1960), The existentialist revolt, Fredrick Ungar Publishing Co., New York]