When you’re young, whether at school or at home, reading or having a story read to you, it’s rarely explained that these aren’t just stories for the sake of it but rather, allegories.
That is a story using symbolic characters, events, and settings to represent and deliver a deeper, moral or political meaning or a deeper truth.
A takeaway that you can apply to your own life.
The story is the story and enjoyed in the moment for what it is — The Three Bears, Hansel and Gretel, Goldilocks, Shakespeare or the many parables of the Bible.
For me this morning it was Gulliver’s Travels.
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲:
Gulliver, after being shipwrecked and struggling ashore on the Isle of Lilliput and falling asleep, woke to find himself tied down by hundreds of tiny ropes by the equally tiny Lilliputians.
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲:
This is how, as a society and not paying attention, (like Gulliver falling asleep) when we finally wake up it’s too late and find ourselves being tied down by tiny, snivelling bureaucrats with their rules (ropes) and red and more recently, green tape.
The cumulative effect of these small rules, regulations, and procedures (the tiny ropes) can completely immobilise, thwart, discourage, dispirit and disincentivise an individual, a small or large business or even a government itself that has oversight of that same bureaucracy.The tiny ropes can also be our own habits and addictions as well as the hundreds of social and political constraints of political correctness and woke ideology.
So remember, the story is usually just 𝐀 story it’s not 𝐓𝐇𝐄 story. The story is often just the delivery method of something much deeper and more meaningful.