What can humankind learn from crabs in a bucket?
If you put one crab in a bucket, it will crawl out. However, if you put two crabs in a bucket, they will keep each other from getting out as each one will pull the other down. If they would leave each other alone, they could both get out. If they helped each other, they could both get out. Those are not the ways of crabs.
Trying to reason out or find the instinct that leads crabs to keep each other in the bucket is really an exercise in futility unless it can teach people something about themselves. A better approach would be for people to look at the ways in which they imitate the behavior of those crabs in the bucket and then to eliminate those behaviors from their lives. Helping someone else get ahead is frowned upon in America because capitalism demands that if someone is getting ahead, someone else is falling behind. While corporations would like people to believe that a rising tide lifts all boats, those organizations actually work on water displacement where the more boats that sink the higher the water rises lifting only those boats that are still afloat. What they fail to realize is that as more boats sink, more people go down with them until the world is drowning in poverty. Human beings can find a better way. Instinct does not have to bind people to doing its bidding unquestioned. That is the magnificence of humankind. The thing is that people will have to make the conscious choice to change the system and to fight the instinct to hold others down. It may be difficult, but it can be done. After all, people are more than crabs, and the only bucket people have to escape is that of greed. |
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