The City Next to the River

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There was once a city that was built next to a major river which flooded frequently, resulting in great damage and loss of life. The city dwellers were split into two camps with different approaches for how to deal with this.

The larger camp formed an organization called the Rescue Corps, in which every adult in the city was obligated to join. Whenever there was a flood, the Rescue Corps would sweep through the city either by foot, or by boat where the water was too high, and rescue people trapped in their homes by the water. In this way, many people were saved. Membership in the Rescue Corps required extensive training on the order of one to two uninterrupted years, and was a hazardous job. Many Rescue Corps members drowned in the course of their service each time there was a flood. But precisely because of the rigorous training and the peril of the occupation, the Rescue Corps became the defining pride and joy of the city, honored on every civil occasion, and membership in which was required to get a normal job.

There was another, smaller camp, that had a different idea of how to protect the cityfolk from floods. They had studied a faraway country called Holland, which had built walls to hold back the sea. Accordingly, this community decided that the best way to prevent flooding was to build walls abutting the river. This camp, colloquially called “Hollanders”, disagreed with the Rescue Corps approach, and felt that although it was important to have some sort of rescue organization, the philosophy of building the entire society around it missed the point. The Hollanders held that the primary focus of society should not be on the rescue of lives after a flood occurred, but on the prevention of floodwaters from reaching the city in the first place. Accordingly, most Hollanders refused to join the Rescue Corps, and instead spent most of their time building walls. And build they did. They built walls of sandbags, or wood, of cement, desperately attempting to cover every square inch of land near the river. Many of them spent their entire day building and repairing walls. They even went so far as to try to recruit members of the Rescue Corps to neglect their training and join with them in building the wall, and were in many cases successful.

Naturally, this difference in philosophies and practice led to a great deal of friction. The Hollanders felt that the Rescue Corps were missing the forest for the trees, and that their approach was terrible and led to a great deal of needless death and damage. The Rescue Corps, for their part, felt that the Hollanders were neglecting their societal responsibilities of taking part in the Rescue Corps, and that their invocation of Holland and walls was a fantasy. Most members of the Rescue Corps were of the opinion that Holland never existed, and that even if it did, it didn’t have a wall for most of its history and presumably relied on a similar organization to the Rescue Corps. They pointed to the fact that there were still occasionally floods despite the Hollander’s furious wall-building activities. The Hollanders retorted that there were still gaps and cracks in the wall, and that if only the Rescue Corps would join them, they would be able to fend off many more floods and save many more lives. The Rescue Corps were also resentful that the Hollanders didn’t risk their lives like they did. However, there was a small cadre of Rescue Corps who had studied Holland and were convinced of its existence, and accordingly agreed with the Hollanders that wall-building was critical. This group also engaged in wall-building, but felt that it was still important for everybody to join the Rescue Corps, because in their view, wall building was vital but insufficient. Nevertheless, they were certainly not resentful of the Hollanders, and in fact appreciated their contribution.

Eventually, a wise man arrived at the city, and representatives of both the Rescue Corps and Hollanders came to plead their case. After hearing their words, the wise man said the following. “You are both correct. Holland is not a fantasy, but an actual country that really defends itself from the sea with walls. You should definitely engage in extensive wall-building, and the Rescue Corps should join in this effort, as an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of rescue. However, by the same token, this won’t guarantee an end to floods. The walls will sometimes develop cracks that you may not repair as frequently as you should. Therefore, you still require a large Rescue Corps organization for such cases. If you do as I say, you will no longer have two separate communities of Rescue Corps and Hollanders, but one united society that engages in both types of vital defense.” And so it was.