I’ve been thinking alot about a parable* I heard in sixth grade (yes, my memory sometimes extends that far backwards in time.) The teacher introduced a scenario, in which you are hypothetically stranded on a desert island, inhabited by two tribes: Truth-tellers, and Liars. As you are seeking safety/rescue, you come to a fork in the trail, and there is a bystander. You have no idea whether he is a truth-teller or a liar, but you do know that one of the divergent paths leads to safety/rescue.

You can ask only one question, and the bystander will only give an answer of “Yes” or “No.” What do you ask him, and which path do you take?

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Basically, I’ve been thinking about this parable in the context of government, benevolence, and other gobbledygook, like, the “common welfare” and the “public good.”

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The long and short of it is, you need to phrase your question in such a manner that you can guarantee a falsehood, and then do the opposite, such as: Would a member of the other tribe recommend that I take the left path?

If the respondent is a truth-teller, and the left path is the correct path, he will respond, “No,” because if asked which path to take, the liar would tell you to take the (incorrect) right path. If the respondent is a liar, he will respond “No,” because he cannot tell you the truth; i.e., that a member of the other tribe would honestly tell you to take the left path. Therefore, if the response is “No,” then you take the path to the left.

If the respondent is a truth-teller, and the left path is not the correct path, he will respond “Yes,” indicating that members of the other tribe would mislead you. If the respondent is a liar, he will respond “Yes,” indicating that the other tribe would mislead you, when in fact they would not. Following similar logic, we can be sure that if the response to our query is “yes,” then we should not take the path to the left, but instead, veer rightwards.

Somehow, this ties into the nature of man and his government. I’m working on connecting the proverbial dots…

*You may have heard a simpler version of this parable, where the respondents are not restricted to yes or no answers, like this one, for instance.

I haven’t really followed, or paid attention to the plight of Joe Darby, the poor soldier who blew the whistle on Abu-Ghraib a few years back, but I noticed Anderson Cooper interviewed him on 60 minutes this past Sunday. It seems that pretty much everyone he’s ever known now hates him and looks down on him.

“These were people who knew me since I was born. These were people who were my parents’ friends, my grandparents’ friends that turned against me,” Darby says.

Apparently he should’ve just kept his mouth shut.
What happened there is likely a war-crime. The Chernobyl disaster decades ago is not, but the way the old-guard Soviet government handled the situation is strikingly similar to how the military brass and the enlisted men would’ve preferred Abu-Ghraib to be handled:

“Everything you saw and heard – keep your mouth locked!” they said. From the photographs [I took,] it was clear that the active zone was badly damaged. Until May, no-one else was allowed to take pictures … “To begin with they did not publish my pictures. In May they showed one on central television, but it was one taken from the ground so the scale of the destruction was not visible. Later they showed one of the pictures taken from above, but they touched it up so that the ray of light emanating like a burning sun from the reactor, along with the smoke, ash and other flakes of material, was not visible.”

Anatoly Rasskazov has not been outcast by his countrymen, although the bureaucracy has seen that his maladies go largely untreated. His fate is worse:

“When I returned home at midnight, I was vomiting. I was all red. I had a sore on my forehead which has remained unhealed for 20 years. A radiation burn. And my whole throat was burning, because I had been inhaling this soup of radionuclides. “

But the principle is the same.