The Parable of the Talents: Forced Burials

Key Thought
The only way for less-gifted individuals to appear successful, is to force other more-gifted individuals into obscurity. This is most efficiently accomplished by using the apparently commendable policy of "social engineering"


Do you know the Parable of The Talents? A quick recall of the salient points given 2000 years ago, are as follows:- the Master is about to make a long journey. He calls his three servants and gives out five talents, two talents and one talent respectively. The servants are required to use the talents and multiply them, and to be prepared to give An Account of their stewardship on the Master's return. They are told that there will be consequences for poor stewardship. The story tells us that the servant with five talents worked hard and multiplied the original five to ten. The second servant multiplied the two talents into four. However, the third servant chose to simply bury his one talent. On the Master's return, at The Accounting, the first two profitable and multi-talented servants were amply rewarded for their diligence and good stewardship. The unprofitable servant who buried his one talent, justified his actions, saying that it was a pointless exercise to multiply the wealth for an unjust Master etc. etc. As one might expect, the Master dealt appropriately with the unprofitable servant.


If we fast-forward to November 2013, let us consider a possible hypothetical evolution of the Parable of the Talents. Let us suppose the one-talented servant, with his propensity for talent-burial and still angry with the unfairness of the Master's original distribution of talents, decides that, with a little organization and planning, it might be more fun to bury the multiple talents of the other two servants, rather than his own one talent. For the unprofitable servant, it would achieve two important objectives; firstly, revenge against the Master for inherent unfairness of the initial endowment, and secondly, the satisfaction of subjugating, frustrating and ultimately destroying the other two more talented servants.


The unprofitable servant decides that the first thing to do is to find other unprofitable and disgruntled servants with one talent, get organized into a union of some sort (UOTUS), and promote the concept of social engineering as a method of correcting unfairness. Once the union is formed and the concept of social engineering is elevated, through systematic propaganda, to the level of a "Greater Good", the second step is to make a list of servants to whom the Master has unfairly given more than one talent and work out a plan to force those multi-talented servants to either re-distribute or bury their talents; after all, this is a War against Injustice.


The unprofitable servant knows it is important to know the enemy and so makes a study of the multi-talented servants. The unprofitable servant notes that multi-talented servants, are usually quite individual, non-unionised and happily engrossed in their own talent-multiplication process. Consequently, he tells UOTUS, that it should be easy to force these individuals to bury their talents alive if they are dealt with one at a time.


The union of the one-talented servants (UOTUS) decide at their meetings, that for the "Greater Good", any means may be used since the "ends justifies the means". In this war, as in other wars, Truth becomes the first casualty. It is perfectly acceptable to lie about the enemy to win a war. A generalized formula of attack is devised that can be specifically tailored to inflict maximum damage on any specific multi-talented individual. Several meetings later, the battle plan is ready and now moves into action. The union of the one-talented servants (UOTUS) begins the attack and works its way systematically down the list of the unsuspecting and unarmed multi-talented servants.


As the haze over the scene of attack clears, the camera long-shot of the battle landscape appears littered with pockets of the multi-talented servants, each held captive by a group of gloating one-talented servants. Zooming-in on the distressing scene, it is clear that each multi-talented servant is being forced to dig a hole and bury their multiple still-living talents. The brutal forced live burials continue unabated, despite the screams of the still-living talents. Sometime later, each multi-talented servant, cowered, and deeply afraid of the Union of the One-Talented Unprofitable Servants (UOTUS), wonders when the Master will return and demand An Accounting.