By ALEXANDER DOLITSKY
This tale serves as a warning against misguided empathy. It demonstrates how avoiding confrontation and sacrificing your own well-being to accommodate extreme individuals will ultimately lead to your own downfall.
In a quiet, peaceful kingdom there lived a king. More than anything in the world, he loved his only daughter—a capricious princess who spent her days and nights bored in her golden chambers. To cheer her up somehow, the king proclaimed: “Whoever brings to the palace wild beasts never before seen for the amusement of my daughter, shall receive a sack of gold.”
Thus, seasoned and hardened hunters set out for the most remote and dangerous jungles in search of wild beasts for king’s daughter. Whether it took a long time or a short time, they eventually returned with a fearsome catch. In the middle of the Palace Square stood sturdy iron cages, inside which fierce, hungry predators prowled, growled, and bared their sharp teeth.
The headhunter stepped forward, keeping his rifle at the ready, and respectfully but firmly warned: “Your Majesty, beware. These beasts were born in the wild; they know no mercy and recognize only strength and submission; they are deadly. Under no circumstances should you get close or release them free.”
The princess looked at the fluffy ears of the animals, fluttered her eyelashes, and stomped her foot loudly. “Oh, you are so nasty, evil, wicked, and cruel!” she screamed at the hunters. “How dare you tormenting such cute, miserable and poor animals. You simply don’t understand compassion at all! Servants, open these horrible cages immediately and free the poor things!” she commanded.
The hunters exchanged glances, silently stepped back to the castle walls, and tightened their grip on their rifles. The king, accustomed to indulging every whim of his daughter, merely waved his hand. “Carry it out!” he ordered.
Heavy locks clicked, iron doors creaked open; for a moment, silence fell over the courtyard, and in the next second the wild predators leapt as one upon their liberators. The royal family had no time left to realize their blunder mistake.
Within minutes, the starving beasts devoured the spoiled princess, the trusting king, and all the courtiers who had enthusiastically applauded so loudly for the princess’s “kindness” and misjudged “humanity.”
When no one remained in the courtyard alive, the beasts slowly turned toward the hunters. But fearless hunters calmly raised their rifles and fired a volley into the air. A faint, bitter ghost of lightning lingered in the courtyard. The predators knew the authority and smell of the heavy gunpowder all too well. Growling and tucking their tails, the pack fled the palace toward the depths of the jungle.
The hunters merely sighed deeply, slung their rifles over their shoulders, and walked away from the castle; where the king, princess and other servants had never understood that the jungle lives by its own harsh laws and draconian rules.
Connect to your life: The Perils of Misguided Compassion
This story serves as a warning that sacrificing for chaotic groups and avoiding necessary confrontation will eventually compromise the safety of peaceful societies.
The primary moral of the tale is that misguided compassion that ignores reality and expert warnings leads to eventual destruction for all. True kindness and sympathy must be paired with wisdom, or they can become fatal when dealing with forces that operate on harsh, immutable laws.
The hunters in the tale explicitly warned the king about the deadly nature of the wild beasts, but he ignored them. The princess’s naive desire to see the predators as “cute” didn’t change their dangerous, wild instincts. The king’s failure to discipline and restrain his daughter and his habit of indulging her every whim ultimately caused the downfall of the entire kingdom.
The author was born and raised in the former Soviet Union before settling in the U.S. in 1978. He moved to Juneau in 1986 where he taught Russian studies and Archaeology at the University of Alaska Southeast, and Social Studies Teacher at the Alyeska Central School of the Alaska Department of Education. From 1990 to 2022, he served as a director and president of the Alaska-Siberia Research Center, publishing in the fields of anthropology, history, archaeology and ethnography. Find him on Amazon.com.
2 thoughts on “Alexander Dolitsky: Blind sympathy, brutal reality, when empathy becomes a weakness”
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” -Elon Musk
So, Dolitsky, you’re sharing a campfire with one of the most cruel, selfish and toxically narcissistic man ever. Bill Gates, another billionaire said of Musk, “the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children” . As an atheist, don’t trust my biblical quotations and interpretations, but I think there is quite a bit of instruction and sentiment in the bible towards helping the poor and the meek.
I think the point of your interesting story is to advocate for holding back your dollars and donation of time given to “chaotic groups”. The unanswered question is, Who do you suggest we ignore?
Alexander, that’s an interesting story. I’ll take a shot: The King=leftist politicians. The Princess=their empathetic followers. The Hunters=U.S. and Israeli forces. The Beasts=recent foreign invaders of western countries. Am I close?