The Girl and The Snake

I have alway liked the allegory about the girl and the snake.

    A young girl was trudging along a mountain path, trying to reach her grandmother's house. It was bitter cold, and the wind cut like a knife. When she was within sight of her destination, she heard a rustle at her feet.

    Looking down, she saw a snake. Before she could move, the snake spoke to her. He said, "I am about to die. It is too cold for me up here, and I am freezing. There is no food in these mountains, and I am starving. Please put me under your coat and take me with you."

    "No," replied the girl. "I know your kind. You are a rattlesnake. If I pick you up, you will bite me, and your bite is poisonous."

    "No, no," said the snake. "If you help me, you will be my best friend. I will treat you differently."

    The little girl sat down on a rock for a moment to rest and think things over. She looked at the beautiful markings on the snake and had to admit that it was the most beautiful snake she had ever seen.

    Suddenly, she said, "I believe you. I will save you. All living things deserve to be treated with kindness."

    The little girl reached over, put the snake gently under her coat and proceeded toward her grandmother's house.

    Within a moment, she felt a sharp pain in her side. The snake had bitten her.

    "How could you do this to me?" she cried. "You promised that you would not bite me, and I trusted you!"

    "You knew what I was when you picked me up," hissed the snake as he slithered away.

I talk to people all the time.  People frequently tell stories of some friend, family member, or destitute stranger who they treated well and were then treated poorly in return.  They go on to further illustrate their relationship with this person.  They recount  multiple incidents of this person treating them poorly.  The list of bad actions perpetrated on the various victims is countless and ranges from minor slights to violent physical attacks: being rude, disrespectful, not paying back borrowed money, stealing, beatings and worse.   There is a commonality in these stories.

The other day I heard a  humorous phrase that rang true: "voluntary victim."   In my mind, this phrase clarified the category of victims who offer themselves up knowing full well, or at least having some clue, as to the nature of the perpetrator.

The mistake on the part of these victims is not the result of a lack of intelligence or worldliness.  I have seen this in people of all different degrees of intelligence and economic levels.  I think the mistake lies in the victim's philosophy, specifically their morality, and more specifically in that idea that mercy is a moral virtue.

The victims believe, that to be good and virtuous, they must forgive unconditionally; turn the other cheek; "to err is human, to forgive divine;" "unconditional love," etc.  This is different from the forgiveness of a person who has made up for a mistake or wrongdoing by recognizing their error and making just recompense by paying for their wrong and committing never to do it again.   What I am talking about is the person who does not deserve forgiveness but is forgiven by the victim anyway.  Here the victim, who is applying a moral rule, grants unearned forgiveness, or mercy.  As a result the wrongdoer is able to repeatedly victimize the virtuous person, not by the deviousness of the wrongdoer but by the virtuousness of the victim.  This is the moral ideal that offers the virtuous as a meal to the vicious.  If morality should serve as a guide to life and happiness, and I believe it should, then this idea of mercy, or unearned forgiveness, is an inversion of morality.  The idea of unearned forgiveness, when practiced, leads to the destruction of one's life and happiness.

If mercy is a faulty moral ideal, then what legitimate moral concept is there to replace it?  What moral concept can one use and to defend one's self against vicious people?  "Justice" is the virtue of judging men's character and conduct objectively and of acting accordingly, granting to each man that which he deserves" (1).

    Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification—that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero—that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions—that to withhold your contempt from men's vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement—that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit—and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence (2).

It is only by accepting the moral principle of justice, and rejecting the concept of unearned forgiveness or mercy, that people can defend themselves against people who seek to harm them.

1. Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism the Philosophy of Ayn Rand.  Plume 1993.
2. Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual. Signet 1963.