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Sept. 29, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:26
438 St Argoth and the Wingless Dragon
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Good afternoon everybody, it's Steph.
Hope you're doing well. It's the 29th.
Don't panic about what happened this morning.
Believe it or not, I actually got a date wrong.
Shocking. No, it's not.
And this afternoon, 5 o'clock, just after 5, on the 29th of September, 2-0-0-0-6, I would like to take you and me together on a journey.
To a little country I call Imagination.
And I hope that this little fable will help you to understand Why I view with some skepticism the claims of those who say,
well, the state isn't so bad, you are exaggerating the threat, the state is fine, yes, I have to get a driver's license, but I'm sure that's Goodish, in a way, and yes, I have to get a license for my dog, and I have a marriage license, and yes, my taxes are too high, and yes, lobbying seems to be a bit corrupt, but heavens, man, I mean, aren't you just going overboard in your condemnation?
And yes, I know some nice Christians, and yes, and yes, and yes, and yes.
Well, I thought of arguing this syllogistically, but...
Frankly, that seems like quite a lot of work.
So, we're going to take a slightly different approach, and I'm going to use a parable.
Yes, a fable.
If you will. Now, let us imagine that there is a land in the shadow of an eternal dragon.
And this dragon is hungry and fearsome and flamethrowing and ghastly and huge and terrifying and rapacious and so on, and constantly swarms down,
eats up all of the Crops and has his dragon-like way with his small appendage with the local virgins and eats a couple of children, races back off to the mountaintop, and the villagers, of course, live in terror with this dragon, in terror of this dragon.
And let us further suppose, and of course this has nothing to do with me, so please don't think I'm making a vanity entrance in one of my own fables.
Let us suppose that this village that groans under the predatory weight and rapacious predations of this terrifying, terrible dragon...
Gives birth one day out of nowhere to a hero, ladies and gentlemen, to a strapping six foot four crowned with golden blonde hair, possessed of a firm jaw, blue eyes, and a strangely cocoa-colored skin, just for political correctness sake.
And this hero wakes up and says, you know, I don't really believe that this whole dragon thing Is such a good deal for me, for the village, for the future. And I really can't see, saith our hero, I really can't see how anything is ever going to change unless we do something about this dragon.
And said hero sets to work to try and understand the dragon.
And what happens is that he begins to sharpen his sword.
Maybe he has to invent swordsmithing.
Who knows? He starts to sharpen his sword.
He starts to thrust and parry in the backyard.
He forgoes all concourse with, sayeth, fair maidens to preserve his strength for his upcoming tussle with the ultimate foe.
And to make a long story relatively short, he goes up and he finds that he is unable with fearsome battles that the very heavens shake and the ground quivers and trees weep their leaves and roses burst into flames and all these things occur, that our fair hero finds that he is unable to kill the dragon.
However, He is able to hack off its wings, and therefore the dragon is low, rendered far less fearsome thereby.
He can't kill the dragon because he doesn't have the magic sword with the FDR inscription on it, but he is unable to kill the dragon, but he's able to hack off its wings.
And lo, he doth carry back the wings to his village, and there doth he feast upon food and maidens to his heart's content.
But the dragon remains alive in a cave at the top of the hill, and the dragon realizes that he's going to have a fairly tricky go of it, floundering down like a huge scaly worm, and he's going to have a fair trick of it.
Thundering down the mountainside to get to the The fair maidens and the people that he wants to eat because he's going to be kind of ridiculous and because he can't fly.
He's still got the old fire-breathing thing, but he can't seem to get round to flying anymore because he's got no wings, but he's sitting up there and of course, you know, he's getting hungry.
Now, this dragon Having been cast down from his high seat of ultimate power and now of course the village is flourishing and the babies are now dancing in the fields and the women are all tall and healthy and gorgeous and the men are all tall and healthy and gorgeous and everything's doing fine,
the wealth is increasing. And people sort of forget about the history of the dragon and his predations and how he laid waste for thousands of years to the vet.
You know, it becomes a little bit complacent, a little bit non-frightened of dragons.
And the dragon, of course, doesn't die.
The dragon is, at least so far, has been found to be immortal.
The dragon does not die.
And the dragon Is getting pretty damn hungry, right?
Dragon's up there with no wings and can't even flounder.
Maybe he flounders around to sort of lick some lichen or moss off the side of the cave and sort of survives on that.
But this is a great affront to the pride of the dragon because the dragon feels that he is such a noble and powerful beast that there is no way that he, as a dragon who is a noble and powerful beast, should ever be reduced to licking fungi moss off the side of a cave wall in order to survive.
And maybe the odd bat that flies in and gets trapped in the cave.
The dragon eats up and is living on fungus and dead bats and when he used to feast on the flesh of delicately complexioned virgins and all these tasty morsels of human flesh in the valley below.
And the dragon getting hungry, getting kind of like cheesed off.
Nobody can figure out how to kill the dragon, but they kind of forget about the dragon.
It's up there in its cave, and maybe every now and then there's a bellow of rage from the top of the hill, and they sort of laugh at it, because they don't feel afraid.
The villagers don't feel afraid of the dragon anymore.
And... So the dragon, of course, since it's a fable, we can take this course.
The dragon is a magical dragon, and the dragon has the power to cast spells, and basically the most powerful spell that the dragon has is...
To enter into the dreams of people.
And the dragon, of course, tries this.
He tries entering into the dream of the person, the hero, who slayeth the dragon's wings.
But the hero, lo, doth throw off the mantle and intrusion of the dragon in his dreams and does not react to them in any particular way, shape, or form.
And yet the dragon continues and then one night the dragon comes across Argoth.
Argoth is a skinny little boy.
Who, yo, lo toileth in the fields, and yet is very weak, but has a wonderful sing-song voice and a great command of language, thus Argoth, the field tiller, turner guy.
And Argoth doesn't have much to offer the village, and he's not very handsome, and he's certainly not strong.
He can sing a little, and he's not bad with a bard's tail.
But this is not something he can do full-time, and so Argath is not looking to have great things in this world.
But what What the dragon does is he lures through the dreams of riches.
The dragon sends dreams to Argoth and intimates that the dragon is lying on a huge hoard of gold that will turn Argoth into the richest man in the village and get him to bed all of the tall and buxom potential rich guy groupie maidens.
Argoth up to the top of the cave, and Argoth goes up to the top of the cave and has a conversation with the dragon.
And the dragon says, Oh, oh, Argoth, thou art so very spindly, and thy legs are knobby like two hickory sticks, and thy chest is sunken like an inverted bowl, and thy hair is scrawny and scraggly, and thy chin is weak.
Thou hast no particular possibility for any kind of advancement or great things in this village.
For lo, they have not invented capitalism and so you can't found Microsoft.
You are not going to go very far in this world, but if you and I put our heads together, we can sort all of this out.
I can get some food again and you can get some power.
And so by this time, you know, many years have passed, and they've pretty much forgotten about the dragon, except in some sort of vaguely scary tales that are written down in, say, some localized version of ancient Aramaic.
And so Argoth talks to the boy, and they hatch a plan.
And One day, the village is expanding, of course, it's doing well, it's flourishing, it's rich, it's becoming prosperous, and this means many more fair blonde and tall and blue-eyed and still, of course, predominantly cocoa-buttered skin babies toddling around and waddling around the village.
So they need more land.
So what they do is they... They go and they start to till the land right at the base of the mountain.
And of course the mountain land had been sort of taboo and off limits for so long because the fear of the dragon was still fairly strong and there was a sort of historical taboo that people didn't really remember, sort of like a fear of not circumcising children in the modern world or something like that.
And so they start to cultivate this land and so on.
And then one night there is a terrifying series of explosions and sounds and roars and it sounds like a million mangled trumpets being blown by all the wind gods in a thunderstorm.
And huge gouts of flame come roaring and tearing off into the sky from the top of the We're good to go.
To the mountain, and by cultivating the fields close to the mountain, lo, we have Angareth, the mountain god of fire, who now demands sacrifice, and if he does not receive his sacrifice, then lo, he will explodeth under our very feet.
Everything that we have earned and everything that we have and our children and our possessions and our houses and our accordions and our harmonicas and our penny picks and all these sorts of things, our balalikas, will all burst into flames and there will be much woe in the land.
And, you know, he's pretty passionate about it, but what he says is he says, the fire god of the mountain sky heavens has spoken to me, and lo, I shall be able to approach this fire god and put it out, and make him stop his angry volcanic eruptions.
And they say, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're like a skinny spindly little guy, sure, sure, sure.
But he says, loeth, let me try.
So off he goes, Argoth, up the mountainside, and he goes into the cave, and immediately the rumblings and the thunderings and the gouts of flame that splasheth the very heavens with tongues of fire, they diminisheth to nothing.
And then he comes down and he says, lo, I have spoken to the god, and he has said to me three things, three things the volcano god has said unto me.
Number one, none but I, Argoth, shall be able to speak with this mountain god of fire who threateneth Threaten us so much with destruction.
That's number one. Number two, he would like sacrifices of chickens and maybe a pig or two.
Burnt offerings. Nice.
He's got a jackal tongue.
The kind of thing he likes. Medium rare.
So, he will need some sacrifices.
So, number one, only I can speak with him.
Number two, he will need some sacrifices, or he will burn us up a little more.
And number three, they will have to keep these sacrifices, will have to keep on coming.
Otherwise, he will explode, and we will destroy the village, and should we try to move to another village, he will follow us and bloweth us up there as well.
Now that we have angered him by trespassing on his property, we must now give sacrifices to him, and blah blah blah blah.
And people say, well...
Okay...
Let's do ourselves a little cost-benefit calculation here.
So, basically, for the price of a couple chickens, a pig, maybe, once every couple of months, and they say, is that all he's looking for, Mr.
Argoth? And Mr. Argoth says, why, yes, verily, that is all he requires as sacrifice to his honor, slash, belly, which he mutters under his breath, of course, because...
And so they say, well, okay, so let's look at this cost-benefit calculation.
So on the one hand, we lose a couple of chickens every couple of months, maybe a pig every couple of months.
Eh, you know, that's like 0.0001% of the GVP, gross village product.
And so we can probably get away with that.
We can live with that. But, if it's true, then we lose a couple of chickens and a pig every couple of months, but we get to keep our village and we don't have to live in fear of it being true.
If it's false, well, we lose those things and we don't gain anything other than a certain amount of peace of mind.
So, overall, I would say that it is for the best.
It's sort of for the best.
Now, they decide to do this, and of course, Argoth goes up, you know, cuts these chickens and pig up, and goes up to the mountaintop, and they see the and goes up to the mountaintop, and they see the fire of the sacrifice, They hear a pleased boom or two and one or two gouts of flame, and then everything settles down.
Of course, they can't really remember the dragon that has no wings, and so they think it's a fire god.
And Argoth, of course, splits the chicken and the pig with the fire god slash wingless dragon, and this is how it all sort of goes down.
Now, as, of course, this is a political fable, you can imagine what begins to happen after the The villagers have made an irrational compromise and begun to give up their interests to this imaginary being that they fear, which can't actually harm them in any way, shape, or form.
They end up receiving the following speech in a few months from our good friend Argoth, the false servant of the imaginary god.
Wait, that's the same thing.
Anyway. So Argoth then goes to the villagers and he says, Lo, the fire god is much pleased with these sacrifices, but lo, he finds that more offenses have occurred, that fires have been lit without speaking the fire god's name.
And thus, they are offense unto his blazing eyes, and they are an abomination, and they must not be abominated.
They must be debominated, because they are an abomination.
So, that's bad.
And he is angry, he has told me.
And, you know, see this little scorched-smoking eyebrow?
He's angry, for sure, because he almost got me with that...
Fire, anger thing of his.
And so he requires a small cow, just the one, just the one time, as an offering of appeasement, right?
Appeasement, of course, in the real sense of the word.
And... So the fire guard will call him Matchstick, and Matchstick the fire guard demandeth a small cow.
Or he's going to blow up the village from very much underneath the ground, coming up like fissures and tongues of flame to burn you all, and that will be bad.
And so they say, well, okay, so, okay, well, so we'll, if we say, oh God, matchstick, we consecrate this fire to you in the future with this, you know, with the fires, we won't have to do the cow thing again, right?
Because the cows aren't too cheap.
He's like, yes, verily, this is what has been spoken unto me, and so is true.
So, of course, he goes up at the cow and they have a good old feast up there.
The dragon eats and so on.
Now, the dragon finds something quite fascinating.
That the dragon, much like the salamander, has with its tail, you pull the tail off and the tail regrows.
The dragon, Matchstick, he finds that the more that he eats meat, The more his wings regrow.
It's remarkable. The reason that his wings were taken off and then they never grew back.
They sort of crusted over and so on.
And that's because he wasn't able to eat anymore.
Other than the odd bat and some moss he wasn't able to eat.
So now he's getting a pretty damn good set of meals.
He finds that he is able to regrow his wings again.
It's just tickled in his back and it's all too wonderful for words.
And, I mean, he's a long way from being able to fly, but, gee, it's a pretty good deal.
And this is the main reason.
I mean, I don't think that even Argoth doesn't know this.
The main reason that Matchstick, the dragon slash fire god, wants all of this meat, wants the cow, wants to escalate, is because he wants his wings to grow back faster, so that he won't need this pathetic little Argoth fellow to be his voice, and he won't have to Go through all of this trickery and all of this stories and nonsense and making up all of this religious claptrap in order to get what he wants.
He wants just to be able to go down and live his life of old, of preying upon the villagers, of seizing whatever the hell he wants.
And he doesn't want to have to keep going through this awful, horrifying, embarrassing, shaming ritual of having to manipulate all of these goods out of these people.
He wants to just hold them in terror and just swoop down on them and do whatever dragonfire he feels like.
So then, a month or two later, They say, Argoth comes down and says, Lo!
Very, very bad things, my friends.
The dragon is much pleased at death with the...
Sorry, not the dragon.
Excuse me, Herbal.
The fire god Matchstick is much pleased with your sacrifices, and he commends you all, and he wants to offer you a deal.
He wants to offer you a deal.
He says he has the power because fire is more powerful than clouds, right?
Because you'll notice that if you carry a fire brand, like a torch, up to the top of a mountain, not this one, of course, because that's my province with Matchstick, the fire god, But if you carry a torch to the top of a mountain, you will verily notice that the cloud that paths along the torch does not put it out.
So the fire is more powerful than clouds.
Now, one of the problems that you have, being villagers who, of course, live in such a high land that you're close to a mountaintop, one of the big problems that you have, my brethren, is that the rains, they are is that the rains, they are not plentiful.
It's dry. I could go on with more eths, but I think you get the idea.
It is dry, the rains are not plentiful, and this means that you come spring you're a little pinched for food because you're eating a chunk of it over the winter.
But lo! Matching the Fire God wishes to strike a bargain with you and wishes to offer you all of these, the following wonderful, pleasant, magnificent, delicioso kind of goodies.
Number one, the god Mastic wishes to say to you that if you give him five cows, then he will promise you that you will have plentiful rains.
Yea, verily, it will be like a monstrous bucket of water upended over your lands.
And this will give you a significant chunk of food, and no mold, and no flooding, because he's going to finesse the clouds just the way you want them.
And you will then have all of these crops.
It will be wonderful, and you will be able to breed death like rabbits.
And the people are like, yeah, you know, it does get kind of pinchy around the...
I do get a little pinched around the middle come spring, so I wouldn't mind at least one year where we had some decent crops.
Ah, says the Aragath, he says, and not only, today only, you will not only get a knife that can cut through a boot, but if you give him the five Kauzeth, then he will also, Fire God, the magnificent Fire God Matchstick, will also allow you to settle and to plant in the lands right up to the base of the mountain.
Ah, but no higher. So they go back and forth and say, well, that's a lot of extra land, that's nice to the god, that's good, and boy, it would be nice to get the reins, and so on.
So they say, yeah, five cows, you know, it's good, right?
Obviously, every time Argoth goes, this fire stops spouting, so there must be something real that's going on here, so, and, you know, there hasn't been any eruptions of fire from the fissures of the earth and so on, so, okay, let's go with that.
Let's do the five cows, and so they give to Argoth the five cows, and lo, he goes up the mountain and takes his five cows to the To the fire god matchstick the dragon.
You knew this was going to be the next topic, right?
Now, of course, when Argoth, the spindly ex-field worker, now spindly scurvy priest guy, goes into the cave, bright out, he goes into the cave, and he sees that the supposedly wingless dragon is kind of...
Turns away sort of quickly, rolls away kind of quickly, right?
Brings up a lot of dust, you know, cuts it, coughs it out, and blinks it out of his eyes, and he says, how come you rolled over so quickly?
I was startled.
Yes, that's it. I was startled, and my dragonness is easily startled.
And he's like, what's that on your back?
Right? Because he sees these two growths, right?
These two sort of nubbins that are sticking up.
It's like, uh, this is, uh, uh, I bruised myself.
It's like, well, I'm pretty spiky bruises.
Are you sure? Yes.
I, I, uh, I had a bad dream and I humped my back up very quickly and I bumped it against the, the cave roof and, uh, boy, uh, ow, uh, oof, you know, that's, uh, ow.
And so I was like, huh, cause you know, They kind of look like little wings.
Yes, well, that's, you see, how we dragons bruise is it looks like little wings.
And don't worry, Jimi Hendrix will write a song about it many years from now.
And Argos is like, huh, well, maybe I just never noticed them before, but...
You'd think I would, but okay, maybe I didn't.
Ah, and you have brought for me the five cows.
Yes, the five cows are outside.
Let's have ourselves something to eat.
And the dragon says, well, I have to tell you, my friend, I will absolutely share the next one with you.
I think I've got worms, because everything I eat, you know, it just goes right through me.
I'm like a fire hose here.
You might not want to step near the back of the cavern as well.
It's a little splooshy, a little oogie.
So, given that everything's running through me, I'm sorry.
I've got to eat the five cows.
Like, I'm just not going to get along too well without them.
But, you know, our deal is still on.
This is an unusual situation.
I just, I'm all, you know, I'm gouty.
I'm, like, grippy, you know?
He's like, oh, well, maybe you shouldn't eat.
No, no, no, no. I've got to eat, right?
Because I've got to keep my strength up.
But, you know, if you don't mind, I'd really appreciate it, blah, blah, blah.
And he's like, well, you know, I'm kind of hungry.
This is my only source of income now, right?
This is my only source of food. It's the stuff that I bring up to you.
And we have a nice little cookout.
We have a nice little roast here.
And so this is Argoth.
He says, if I don't get to eat these cows, I'm like...
I'm sort of done, right?
Because I don't till the fields anymore.
I'm like the priest of fire god slash wingless dragon.
And the dragon says, or something equally equivalent, but perhaps a little more terrifying.
And, you know, a little burst of flame comes out of the dragon's mouth, and he says, let me put it to you this way, small spindly priest guy.
I'm going to eat the five...
Cows. Let me, uh, let me not pretend to mislead you with a seeming negotiation.
I, the Dragon God Fire Guy, am going to eat the five cows, you see?
And if you have a problem with it, then I guess I'll also have a little aperitif called Argoth.
And Argoth is like, oh, okay, that was a little warm.
You know, that was a little warm and, you know, could I suggest a claret or two?
I know they haven't been invented yet, but man, if you've got time on your hands, you might want to work on that.
And he thinks to himself, okay, I'm in a little bit of a pickle now, see, because I don't have an occupation anymore except pretending to run around serving this fire god.
Like, I don't till the fields.
I'm not a weaver. I'm not a carpenter.
I'm not a physician. I'm not a dancer.
I'm not a singer. I'm not a podcaster.
I pretty much just serve this fire god.
And so, if the fire god doesn't give me food, then I get nothing.
I can starve to death. Plus...
If the fire god...
But you know what?
I have to have something to eat.
I can't go around saying, oh, I didn't get the food from the fire god because I'm supposed to be bringing these sacrifices up, not eating them myself.
That's not going to look too good.
And so he says, look, I gotta have something.
I appreciate it. I don't want you to get mad.
I gotta have something to eat. I'm starving here.
And the dragon says, next time.
Next time. I'm not gonna hear any more about it right now because there's one other thing I'm gonna do for you if you take even one hair or one A little earlobe of these five cows is I'm going to spout fire and rumble and curse in my wail, my dragon trumpets into the sky and then you are going to be in trouble,
my friend, because you are supposed to be in control of me and you're supposed to be my voice and my communicator and so on and everyone's going to go, hey, Argoth, you're the guy who the dragon, you're the guy who the fire god wants, it's the only one that the fire god will talk to, you go up and calm him down.
And I'll keep doing it, even after you come up.
So I'm totally going to destroy your credibility with your townsfolk as the only voice to the dragon, to the fire god.
So, you know, let's put it this way.
You go and live on some roots and berries and go steal the chicken of your own, because these cows are all mine.
But the Argoth has made a deal with the devil, right?
He has now taken a false position of pseudo-representation.
And what choice does he have?
He's going to have to live off the pickings, and this is of course what he does.
So the dragon gorges like crazy on these cows, and lo, their anguished mooing doth fill the air.
And there's some leftovers and some scraps while the dragon is sleeping off his enormous meal.
Argoth goes up, and he roots around among the bones, and he roots around among the tendons, and he sort of In the smoldering fire, he's sort of squatting down there among the filth and debris of half-chewed raw cow, and this is his meal, right?
This becomes his meal, and this is the best that he can do.
Now, the interesting thing is that a new hero arises.
He doesn't know that he's a hero yet.
But a new guy arises in the village.
Did I say I was going to make a long story short?
I sucked you into the middle.
It's good. You'll like to hear how it ends.
So then, a new guy arises in the village, right?
And he's a skeptic.
You know, maybe he's...
About six foot tall, 210 pounds, a little scraggly on the old hair.
But he decides to, he doesn't really believe the whole mountain fire god thing.
He's like, really? Mountain fire god?
I mean, I didn't believe the dragon thing particularly, but this mountain fire god, I can tell you, that makes no sense at all to me.
I mean, that's just completely deranged.
So, let's not...
But I'm the kind of guy who got to see it for myself, right?
I mean, I got to see it for myself.
Because what if it is a scam, right?
First it was like a couple of chickens and a pig every couple of months.
Now it's like five cows, and for sure there's going to be more.
And what is the dragon giving us in return?
Sorry, what is the fire god giving us in return?
Well, the fire god through this cheesy little Argoth fellow is saying, oh, you can plant crops on the ground.
Well, we can do that anyway.
And you won't have your city, your village burst into flames and be consumed with fire.
That's not happening anyway.
So there's no testable hypothesis here that proves that this fire god actually exists.
Now, there's something up there for sure, because I believe the people, the flames and the trumpets and so on.
Or the trumpet noises. So, what he does is he goes and he crawls up to the mountainside and he goes and have a look in the dragon cave, right?
And he sees, of course, that it is a dragon cave, and the dragon is still alive, and its wings are growing rapidly, right?
And he can sort of reason this out.
Like, he doesn't see them growing, like, pop out they grow, but the dragon hasn't been seen in the sky, so there are some old fables of a terrible dragon many years ago.
But the dragon hasn't been seen in the skies.
The dragon, obviously, he sort of puts it together and goes like, holy crap, this dragon got to Argoth and got Argoth to start bringing all this food up.
And now the dragon is becoming incredibly dangerous.
The dragon is now becoming horrendously problematic.
And that is becoming a huge issue for us.
And... So now what are we going to do?
Right? Now what are we going to do?
And... What happens then is that Argoth, sorry, this new hero...
I'm sorry, let me just merge, I'll continue in a moment.
There we go. One more merge and then we will continue.
Good thing I didn't sing this as a light operetta, isn't it?
Anyway. So, what happens, of course, is this new hero We'll call him Titanus, right?
This new hero, not Titanus, for those who are going to make that play on words.
That's my job for later. But Titanus comes down and he says, oh, my friends, we have been fool-ed.
And what's happened is that there's no fire god.
There's a rapidly growing dragon.
Right? And everything that the fire god was supposedly protecting us from was never a danger to begin with.
And everything that the fire god is offering to us, we already had anyway.
So the whole thing is a complete and ridiculous and total scam.
You know, we have to stop this.
We have to reverse all of this foolishness that we've believed in for so long.
And we have to go up and kill this dragon, like for once and for all, right?
Because maybe this has happened. This is a cycle that just keeps happening, right?
That we almost killed the dragon.
The dragon comes back through false stories from other people and the obscuring of its evil and the belief that it is giving us benefits when in fact it's doing nothing other than selling back to us at a high price.
And so, my friends, we must fear the dragon.
We must this, we must that, right?
And, of course, all the villagers laugh at him, and all the villagers say, oh, come on, don't be ridiculous.
Dragon. I mean, these are just fairy tales.
It's all pure nonsense.
There's no dragons in the world.
There's like a couple of pictures in old storybooks, and there's some fables that doddering old men tell of their great-great-great-grandfathers who knew something terrible about, who knew that there was this dragon.
I mean, it's all nonsense. It's all fairy tales, right?
And he says, well, you know, I've got to tell you, having seen the dragon, and its wings are almost grown, and it's going to come back, and it's going to destroy us, and we're going to go back into the Dark Ages, and there will be much woe, and lo, the maidens will be violated, and the children will be eaten once more, and there will be a great charcoal.
The people will be reduced to two charcoal stumps standing in the middle of a charcoal landscape, and lo, this will be double plus on good very bad.
And everyone sort of laughs at him, you know, don't be silly, and so on.
And he says, well, come up and have a look, for God's sakes.
Come up and have a look. I can show you this dragon.
He's sleeping it off, right?
He's just engorged a huge patriot act.
Sorry, he's just engorged the right to torture.
Sorry, he's just engorged five cows, and he's sleeping now for a short time while he gathers his strength for what could well be the final growth spurt and the endless tyranny upon our souls and natures and blah, blah, blah.
And then what happens is they all say, oh no, you know, we can't go up the mountain.
We can't go up the mountain and look, because that makes the fire god matchstick very angry.
But I'll tell you what we'll do.
What we'll do is we'll ask Argoth.
And the new hero, Titaness, is like, are you crazy?
Ask Argoth. Argoth was the guy who's making up all this crap to begin with and who's got you to feed this dragon that's going to devour you.
I don't think he says it in quite that high a squeaky voice, but I think you get the idea.
So, they're all like, well, yes, but you know, it's wrong and it's evil and it's blasphemous to even say it and if you say that again, you're going to get us into a whole lot of trouble, young titaners, so don't you be talking to us about going up the mountain and looking at the dragon for ourselves.
That would just be bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.
So, of course, they go off to Argoth and they say, Argoth, that fire god thing...
Is it really a dragon with its wings regrowing because you lied to us about what it was going to give us and we fed that which is going to destroy us?
And they're all tapping their cudgels and their pitchforks and their crucifixes, sorry, their crucifixion gear saying, and you know, you might want to think carefully about the answer because, boy, if you've been lying to us and getting us to give you and our greatest enemy all of this food, you know, we're going to flay you alive.
And Argoth says, oh, my friends, no, Titanus is crazy.
He's an extremist. He's an extremist.
He's either extreme left wing or right wing.
There's some damn wing that's involved, but I'll tell you, the wing that's not involved is the dragon's wings, because there's no dragon.
It's a fire god. And by the way, you asking me these questions, I can tell you, just based on the vision that's in the back of my hypothalamus, is making the dragon god most angry.
Sorry, it's making the fire god most angry.
I wouldn't make a very good...
I wouldn't make a very good Argoth.
Is making the fire god Matchstick most angry?
And if you persist in your questions, lo, there will be much woe upon the land, and lo, there will be fire across the landscape, and thy children shall burn, and thy irises shall burn, and pop into the sky, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So then they turn back to Titanus and they say, okay, so you're just like the crazy loon.
Obviously, Argarth is telling the truth.
Why would he lie? And he says, well, he'd lie because it's his only source of income.
Then he's lied to you and betrayed you into the arms or wings of your worst enemy.
And of course he knows that you'll tear him asunder if he tells the truth.
Well, that's not enough. You know, plus, you know, what if the sky god is really there?
What if the fire god is really there?
We'll get all burnt up. I mean, there's no proof for this dragon and blah blah blah.
Come look at it! No, we can't.
Anyway, so you get the idea. That's the end of the tale.
I bet you were expecting some big Sixth Sense twist.
That's the end of the tale because the tale is of course about us and I'm not even going to bother unpacking the metaphors because I'm sure that you're perfectly aware of what this story represents.
And what we need to do.
We need to keep pointing out the dragon, right?
Because the story ends, right?
Either the dragon is slain, or the dragon takes over the village again and plunges it into a new dark age, right?
At which point, of course, everybody will blame Titanus.
They will not blame Argoth, right?
Because Argoth will still be scurrying around like a little vermin, saying that if it wasn't for him, the devastation will be even worse.
And of course, he will say that the reason this devastation has occurred is because Titanus lied about the nature of the fire god and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And the fire god magically transformed into a dragon and was only able to do that because of Titanus' evil words.
I mean, you know the whole tale, right?
But this is like most of human history.
So, there is no particularly exciting ending, but what is the case, I think, what's sort of relevant for me in this circumstance is, ah, you know what, we'll talk about this another time, perhaps on Monday, but I did sort of want to talk about an interesting and fun metaphorical way to look at what's been going on over the past, say, 700 or 800 years.
I'm sure you can have fun unpacking The metaphors that are in this tightly concentrated and expertly and historically accurately told fable.
And I hope that you have enjoyed it.
I certainly had fun. And I will talk to you soon.
And perhaps you, if you're listening to this, would like to email me or come to the message boards at Free Domain Radio or donate for the root of Free Domain Radio and suggest to me how this could end or how this might end, do you think, in a just and virtuous way.
And then I will do sort of the part two with the ending and then talk about why I think this metaphor is so important and why I think it relates to a whole bunch of people telling me that the state really isn't so bad and that Christianity really isn't so bad and I've got it all wrong.
Thank you so much for listening.
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