Fools have a place in world. They form a vital character that melts the toughness of world by maintaining dual realistic and fantastic perspective.
Perhaps, human beings need the fool. He is, at times, a subtle teacher and a real instructor. Tickling and amusing, he supposedly thwarts situations that are outrageous and atrocious to survive. As pointed in Cervantes’ Don Quixote:
“O sir!…may God forgive you for the wrong you have done in robbing the world of the most diverting madman who was ever seen. Is it not plain, sir, that his cure can never benefit mankind half as much as the pleasure he affords by his eccentricities?”
In 1494, a German humanist and satirist Sebastian Brant satirized through fools. He wrote a famous allegory The Ship of Fools wherein he depicted 110 varied follies and vices, each undertaken by a different fool. A ship encumbered with fools and steered by fools to the fools’ paradise unites a common theme, shaping a long moralistic poem that lashes at the medieval grotesqueries, especially the abuses in the church.
Even the Shakespearean fool is an influential character. He usually speaks nonsense and yet divulges the truth. When all others live in distortion, it’s his distorted world that turns out to be a reality.
The most famous fool of Shakespeare is ‘The Fool’ in King Lear, the character with no name other than fool. When Lear is deserted by his unfaithful daughters, it’s only The Fool who accompanies the King as his only courtier. Similarly, when the King steadily slides into lunacy, he and his fool change places. Paradoxically, The Fool incessantly tells him sense—
‘Have more than thou showest,
Speak less than thou knowest,
Lend less than thou owest,
Ride more than thou goest,
Learn more than thou trowest
Set less than you throwest.
(King Lear)
Literary instances apart, the fact is that fools are not the only ‘foolish’. A person happens to be a fool when he does a foolish act. Stupidity cannot be limited to any particular group of people. Every so often, the people we look up to most make the biggest fools of themselves. They goof up tragically. Their buffoonery does not carry any covert sense. They are out-and-out idiots, gullible; and no amount of remorse helps them.
Politicians of all hues form the major lot and so do their blind followers. Both hoodwink the realities foolishly. Leaders shout and people sway. Empty slogans and pipe dreams, leaders sell them off mindlessly. Gullible masses take them flatly. Rationale and reason is bogged down by silliness.
Public mind is generally listless because of life pressures. It stops analysis and assessment after a certain period. More so, conflict of any kind makes it comatose. The level of timidity slowly droops into foolishness.
Like Brant’s voyage to fools’ paradise, people yearn and wait for things impossible. Leaders wish to become national heroes. Politicos feel to be godfathers. Doctors crave to be Hippocrates. Engineers hope to be booming builders. Cops want to be robocops. Lawyers pine to be just winners. Businessmen desire to be millionaires. Bosses aspire to be demigods. Teachers long to be role-models. Students want to be all-time achievers …blah blah.
Of course, all these high goals are not apparently unattainable but what makes them so is the corruption of mind that aims tall. When the basic element of truth decays and reality slaps us on face, the human mind loses its right to think big. And if it still does, it smacks of thorough foolishness. This is where the irony begins. People start carrying bloated misconceptions about themselves. They harbor misplaced optimism. They consider themselves to be the smartest or wisest of all! And this happens to be the chronic symptom of their foolishness—
“The fool doth think himself wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool”
(As You Like It).
The follies are committed by everyone. Prudent people learn from them. Fools do not. They goof up unremittingly. Or maybe they deliberately play fool, as an inverse approach to placate their blundered selves.
And imagine some fools becoming the self-centered examples of any nation or even getting projected as the ‘best achievers in various fields’. It is no less than any cataclysm. And more deplorable is the presence of foolish fans and followers, the incredulous and naïve ones who shout, scream and scribble odes, online and offline, for things absolutely incomprehensible and unfathomable to them.
Lord, be merciful to us, the fools!