The Country of the Blind

Thank you to our anonymous reader for forwarding this story!

Apparently it was Erasmus, a Dutch thinker, who first penned the phrase, 'In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king'.

The idea of course is that sight amongst the blind is a precious gift and one which would be lauded.

If only it were so.

In 1904 H.G. Wells wrote a short story called The Country of the Blind.

A lost climber Nunez falls and descends into an isolated and inaccessible valley whose people over many generations have grown to become sightless. With the realisation of his situation, Nunez at first believes that he will be feted as king of his new domain. He comes to learn differently.

The people do not feel deprived awaiting being released from their darkness. Indeed quite the opposite. Their beliefs, religion and rituals have all expunged any reference or recollection of sight to the extent that it has become little more than an echo buried within childish fairy stories.

Nunez's attempts to demonstrate the power of his fifth sense are to no avail. The enhancement of their senses of taste, touch, smell and hearing have replaced the need for sight, and his protestations to the contrary are seen as no more than the rantings of the feeble minded and insane. They no more miss or accept the value of a fifth sense, than do the sighted a sixth sense.

In time he is absorbed into the society, required to renounce his belief in sight. Indeed in order to be assimilated into the community by marriage, the village elders propose to cure his insanity by removal of the facial features he, in his insanity, insists on referring to as 'his eyes'.

As society speeds headlong, head-down and with little thought, it is perhaps more appropriate to say that

In the land of the blind, the world will beat a path to the door of a man who can teach them a few new words of Braille, but will have little time for the man who seeks to open their eyes.

Review by Steve Unwin