A story is told to illustrate the modern generation’s addiction to abundance, a condition that makes us victims of our own success. It is called the ‘parable of Henry the pheasant’. A pheasant is a bird, in case you were wondering. The location is England in Blenheim Palace, the Churchill family home. The season is just after a harsh winter that took toll of the pheasant population, and hunters had been busy, clearing the remaining ones. Only one pheasant remained, and the locals gave him a name- Henry. One pheasant in control of the palace gardens means one thin- abundance. There was food in the freshly seeded field. Henry had no competition and his intake was largely unregulated by the environment. He ate constantly, and eat he did so much that before long, he was enormous! He used his enormous stature to scare other birds away, consuming even more food. He became so fat that they made him a tourist attraction: the fat pheasant Henry. An obese pheasant meant only one thing- he could no longer fly. He lived the high life, but not on the sky. What is a bird that cannot fly? Soon, Henry disappeared. A fox ate him. May he rest in peace.
The parable of Henry teaches us many lessons, the most outstanding being how much we sacrifice our long-term interests for short-term rewards. It teaches us how ill-equipped we are to handle abundance sometimes, and what becomes of us in these times. We get so blinded that we can only see two steps ahead, not further. When food and money are in rapidly growing supply, Dr. Peter Whybrow, who told this parable, says that we lose the ability to self regulate.
A good example would be the current state of most oil producing nations in Africa. The boosted trading activity will not always be a blessing. It comes with too much unregulated dirt. The ills drown the abundance. Even simpler, for the lovers of gambling, too much money means one thing- more gambling. Maybe more drugs. More alcohol.
You can also put the parable of the pheasant into perspective this way- by asking yourself what if? What if we had everything we ever needed, all the money in the world, food on our table, wouldn’t life simply lose its meaning? Maybe money is given meaning by its scarcity. We are probably not made for abundance, but wired for an environment of scarcity. So a balance of scarcity and abundance renders everything else meaningful.
So like the pheasant, abundance makes us too fat to fly, according to Dr. Peter Whybrow. Our success becomes our dysfunction.
Something to think about…
Adapted from Vanity Fair: