The Decadent Worker

“There was once a society of frogs that lived at the bottom of a deep, dark well, from which nothing whatsoever could be seen of the world outside. They were ruled over by a great Boss Frog, a fearful bully who claimed, on rather dubious grounds, to own the well and all that creeped or crawled therein. The Boss Frog never did a lick of work to feed or keep himself, but lived off the labors of the several bottom-dog frogs with whom he shared the well. They, wretched creatures, spent all the hours of their lightless nights drudging about in the damp and slime to find the tiny grubs and mites on which the Boss Frog fattened.

“Now, occasionally an eccentric skylark would flutter down into the well (for God knows what reason) and would sing to the frogs of all the marvelous things it had seen in its journeyings in the great world outside: of the sun and the moon and the stars, of the sky-climbing mountains and the fruitful valleys and the vast stormy seas, and of what it was like to adventure the boundless space above them.

“Whenever the skylark came visiting, the Boss Frog would instruct the bottom-dog frogs to attend closely to all the bird had to tell ‘For he is telling you,’ the Boss Frog would explain, ‘of the happy land whither all good frogs go or their reward when they finish this life of trials.’ Secretly, however, the Boss Frog (who was half deaf anyway and never very sure of what the lark was saying) thought this strange bird was quite sad.

“Perhaps the bottom-dog frogs had once been deceived by what the Boss Frog told them. But with time they had grown cynical about such fairy tails as skylarks had to tell, and had reached the conclusion also that the lark was more than a little mad. Moreover, they had been convinced by certain free-thinking frogs among them (though who can say where these free-thinkers come from?) that this bird was being used by the Boss Frog to comfort and distract them with tales of pie in the sky which you get when you die. ‘And that’s a lie!’ the bottom frogs bitterly croaked.

“But there was among the bottom-dog frogs a philosopher frog who had invented a new and quite interesting idea about the skylark. ‘What the lark says is not exactly a lie,’ the philosopher frog suggested. ‘Nor is it madness. What the lark is really telling us about in its own queery way is the beautiful place we might make of this unhappy well of ours if only we set our minds to it. When the lark sings of sun and moon, it means the wonderful new forms of illumination we might introduce to dispel the darkness we live in… Most important, when it sings of soaring wild and unfettered among the stars, it means the freedom we shall all have when the onus of the Boss Frog is removed from our backs forever. So you see: the bird is not to be scorned. Rather, it should be appreciated and praised for bestowing on us an inspiration that emancipates us from despair.

“Thanks to the philosopher frog, the bottom-dog frogs came to have a new and affectionate view of the skylark. In fact, when the revolution finally came (for revolutions always do come), the bottom-dog frogs even inscribed the image of the skylark on their banners and marched to the barricades doing the best they could in their croaking way to imitate the bird’s lyrical tunes.” — The Skylark and the Frogs: A Postscript to Herbert Marcuse’s Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, Freely Adapted from the Fable by Chuang-Tzu, Rosak, The Making of Counter-Culture, pp. 121-2

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