The Parable of the Mucks and the Glucks

The Parable of the Mucks and the Glucks:

There was once a civilization called the Glucks who lived near the North Pole, and another civilization, called the Mucks, who lived near the South Pole. One day they both found out two significant things at once. They both became aware that the other civilization existed, and they also became aware that the planet they were both on was shaped like a ball instead of a pancake. The explorers who made both civilizations aware of each other had found their way back home without ever turning around.

After putting two and two together, a lot of people from both civilizations got to talking about which civilization was right side up. Both of them were oriented as though they were right side up, but if the Glucks were right side up, that had to mean the Mucks were upside down. Then some folks put four and four together and realized that if they looked more closely at the situation with people living on balls, every individual has a slightly different orientation of what “right side up” looks and feels like to them. If we’re farther away from someone, our orientations are more different, if we’re standing close together, they’re mostly but not exactly the same. Still, everyone has a slightly different perspective of what is right side up.

Emotionally, it feels better if we believe we’re right side up. We prefer to feel stable and balanced; we feel a greater sense of safety and security with a fixed orientation, and so we hold fast to our perspective. There’s a lot of people trying to sway our mind and accept their orientation, but we’re inclined to hold fast to our own, and that’s understandable. Eventually, the idea of post-modernism found its way to the Mucks and the Glucks to create an uneasy peace for awhile.

This idea gained more and more followers over time. Many people saw how it could make it much more tolerable and peaceful for us to live in the vicinity of people with different orientations, and eventually, many of the holdouts came around. The idea was that everybody’s truth is true. “let’s agree first, that everybody is right in their description of the world they perceive, and second, that anybody who thinks that anyone else is wrong about their description of the world they perceive, is wrong about that."

A lot of people began to embrace this precarious new idea and began to feel much more flexible and open-minded about their orientations. It was challenging to our minds because it created some cognitive dissonance, but mostly it was the emotions around it that were difficult to contend with. We feel like if another person’s perspective gains too much traction, it will threaten the validity of our own perspective. Making us feel wobbly and afraid. Because of emotions, this post-modernism thing is easier to apply in theory than it is in practice.

All of a sudden, there were so many opposing truths broadcasting from all these billions of stations and it was all at their fingertips.

The Mucks and the Glucks did a pretty good job of keeping the Peace for a while. Then something unexpected happened. They discovered a new technology that, with a few clicks of their fingers, could connect them to anyone else in the world. They called it the cluckernet (a silly name, I know) But talk about connection! What they didn’t foresee was an explosion of TMI (a cousin of TNT) called the information age.

All of a sudden, there were so many opposing truths broadcasting from all these billions of stations and it was all at their fingertips. Their media went from three channels to 8 billion channels pretty much overnight. There were truth’s flying around all over the place and people beginning to feel not just wobbly, but more like “I just don’t know what’s true anymore!”

Some people were scratching their heads and thinking, “yeah, I like this everybody’s truth is true” thing, but I can’t shake this idea that there’s gotta be a greater truth out there that might somehow contain all these different truths within it. You know, like the One ring to rule all rings! Post-modernism is great and all, but it also feels really disconnected, I want something more unified.” So, some of the people from Gluck and the people from Muck began to look for an authority figure whose perspective everyone could try their best to fall in line with, while others stayed back in the “let’s just agree to disagree” mindset. Using an imperfect system they designed called democracy, and by a narrow majority, the decision was made to go with a more authoritative figure.