Shameless Clout Chasing: This Honeybee Is Pretty Clearly Only Helping Guide A Blind Ox Through A Perilous Swamp So Someone Will Write A Fable About Her
-
Loading... - Akira Tanaka
- 20 Jan 2023
- 57 Views
- 0 Like
- 0 Comment
It sucks to see a good deed cheapened by ulterior motives, but sadly one supposed good Samaritan has made it painfully obvious that they’re only being charitable out of naked self-interest: This honeybee is pretty clearly only helping guide a blind ox through a perilous swamp so someone will write a fable about her.
Ugh, this kind of calculating bullshit really leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
We’ll admit, we were downright charmed when we first heard that a benevolent honeybee who got separated from her hive in a storm had offered to help a blind ox navigate a dark and treacherous swamp so they could both reach the tranquil meadow that lay beyond it. It seemed beautiful to see two creatures so different work together toward a common goal of finding a great big meadow with tasty grass and lots of wildflowers, and the blind ox choosing to trust the honeybee even though she buzzed like the mean flies that loved to harass the ox felt like a particularly urgent testament to the importance of overcoming prejudice. But on closer inspection we’ve come to the regrettable conclusion that this story is indeed too good to be true, because the honeybee is almost certainly doing all this just to boost her own profile with a spot in somebody’s allegorical moral lesson.
Looking more carefully, there are a ton of red flags in the honeybee’s superficially altruistic behavior. For starters, her path through the swamp takes a number of lengthy, extraneous detours across especially hazardous sections of the mire, detours that serve no obvious purpose beyond dragging out the duration of their journey to give the honeybee a better chance of having her “good deed” noticed. The honeybee also got weirdly hostile when a passing stork offered to fly up high and point them toward the quickest route out of the swamp, telling him to “find your own imperiled ox” with the unsavory implication that his assistance would only steal her spotlight in any succinct, didactic tales about the adventure. And while we don’t have a concrete paper trail to prove anything conclusively, we actually overheard the mean flies talking later about how someone had paid them off to harass the blind ox in the first place—that detail would be fishy enough on its own, but it gets full-on sinister when you learn that whoever paid them did so in honey. Read More…
