The Donkey and the Tiger Re-Revisited
“It’s odd you would post the parable and yet so radically miss it’s message.
It’s your website, so project whatever whatever insecurities or misgivings you may have around others’ gender identities, but be aware that you’re neglecting the fact that you have no true insight into the inner life of another person. Furthermore, gender is a societal construct. Perhaps you’re meaning to suggest that people can’t change their sex? Or that you’re uncomfortable with others who don’t identify by the binary status you’ve opted to live life (and perceive society) by?
The point is, you’re the donkey in this scenario. You’re stuck in a rigid mindset that ignores posthumous brain studies, psychological research, and others reported lived experiences in favor of your own assumptions. And you’re asking for your views to be rewarded/validated by having other people oppressed for living as their true selves.
If your belief is so grounded in absolute and obvious truth, I wonder why people are so quick to shed the concept of a gender binary when they’re told they’re free to live in whatever way feels genuine to them?”
“ We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.”
A commenter who uses the handle “Tiger Totem” responded with the above quote in response to my piece from last year called “The Donkey and the Tiger Revisited.” And I find his remarks illustrative. It deserves taking another look at The Donkey and the Tiger.
This little parable illustrates the ontological difference between the idea that reality is objective vs the idea that reality is subjective. We are increasingly culturally captive to the latter, and this philosophical framework is known as Postmodernism.
In the story, the donkey is the postmodernist. He makes a subjective truth claim that is contrary to common sense and simple observation. The tiger, by contrast, states the obvious: what his senses - not to mention centuries of collective observation and wisdom have taught.
In our own Clown World culture, we are in an uproar over the definitions of male and female, as well as the assertions that human beings have “gender” in addition to sex, and that “gender” is a “subjective reality” that may or may not conform to one’s biological sex. Moreover, the fact that male corresponds to masculine, and female corresponds to feminine, are dismissed as merely a case of “social construct.”
My interlocutor is proposing that the donkey would say things like “Men cannot get pregnant,” whereas the tiger would say, “Men can get pregnant.” Of course, this violates the entire premise of the parable, which argues that reality is objective, and that this objectivity is the ontology of the tiger. This is the tiger’s frustration with the donkey. The donkey is delusional, precisely because the donkey believes in “subjective reality,” that grass is whatever color he believes it to be - in contravention to reason, observation, and the common experience of mankind. It is a premise that cannot be falsified.
Tiger Totem is forced into a form of gaslighting, taking that tack that “everybody knows” that men can get pregnant. There must be something wrong with you if you say otherwise. This calls to mind another important little story that serves as a kind of parabolic antidote to Clown World: “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” in which the king has gaslighted the townspeople that he is wearing a beautiful suit, when in fact, he is walking around the town naked. It takes a little boy to point out the obvious.
And indeed, children intuitively know that there are boys and girls, there are no non-binaries, nor do their fathers have babies. And this is why our revolutionary cultural elites are applying a full-court press to indoctrinate children into what they naturally know to be wrong - not to mention grooming them for even worse abuse.
It is interesting that Tiger Totem also cites “posthumous brain scans” to attempt to normalize abnormal behavior.
Here is another work of literature that we need to revisit as a corrective to Clown World: The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether, an 1856 short story by Edward Allan Poe. In this story, we learn of inmates in an asylum who identify in a variety of ways: a teapot, the bearer of Cicero’s head, and a chicken. In former times, we considered such deviance from reality to be indicative of insanity. In some cases, such dalliances are harmless, but in other cases, such maladies could result in harm (like the man who thought he was a piece of cheese in the Poe story, who was often trying to slice himself with a knife.
In our day, we find men who identify as women seeking to hire a purveyor of the knife to remove his genitals.
As Postmodernism is normalized, we find fewer people subscribing to objective reality. Such opposites as the followers of Ayn Rand and Christians both acknowledge that reality is objective, extra nos, that our subjective thoughts may be wrong, and that our feelings are fickle and should not be treated as barometers of the way things are.
At least for now, it is still permissible to consider a man who thinks that he is a teapot or has Cicero’s head on his shoulders to be insane, mad, crazy, or mentally ill. If a woman runs around clucking like a chicken, we take pity on her, we don’t simply redefine chicken to include a human woman who believes herself to be one. But as the weaponized reclassification of reality from objective to subjective marches on, we now have human beings identifying as cats, dogs, wolves, or even space aliens. We have white women averring to be black, and middle aged men claiming to be young girls. I suspect it won’t be long before denying that a man is a wolf or a teapot or an eight-year old girl will be criminalized.
My interlocutor mentioned brain scans. I have no doubt that there is objective evidence found in the brains of men who know they are men vs. brains of men who think they are women, or teapots, or Cicero, or cheese, or a chicken. It makes sense that mental illness would show up in brain scans.
But of course, when archaeologists exhume the bodies of those who have been dead for 30, 300, or 3,000 years, they can identify the person’s objective sex: male or female. As far as if the person believed himself to be a woman, a teapot, a Roman orator, or a lower life form - that will not show up in the objective forensic evidence.
In our age of Postmodernism, emotion, and pseudoscience, it is important that we tigers double-down, we children of truth point at the grifter king and mock his nakedness, and that we normal people understand that the mentally ill ought not run the asylum.