The Tortoise and the Hare: A New Perspective

Do you believe the Tortoise and the Hare story? Did you when you first heard it?

I’ve often wondered why the hare lost. The hare had speed and agility and should have won but the story is about the use of consistent effort being better than haphazard and undisciplined action despite talent. The message, the lesson is that it is far more valuable to give consistent and steady effort.

'Slow and steady wins the race' is the moral of that story.

The history of humanity though, is the story of the hare. Humans progress in fits and starts. Human history is rife with periods of ignorance and periods enlightenment. Human history is anything but ‘slow and steady’ so I suggest there's another agenda to the story.

Just as the victor in a war or the prevailing society gets the last word, the victor also writes the story. History is preserved by the dominator and told in such a way to make the dominator the hero of the story. The surviving member of the family, the elders and by default, the keepers of the family lore, have the ability to frame the family events in any way they want.

As the survivor of my first spouse, I'm in the position to tell our story in any way I want and there is the tendency to make myself the hero of our story despite my desire to live with utter integrity as part of the essence on which I’ve based my self-worth. That's not to say, I'm NOT the actual hero...

It occurred to me that the story of the Tortoise and the Hare is told from the perspective of the tortoise.

A hare can live as long as 12 years. A tortoise can live as long as 150 years. Who then, as the survivor, would have the best chance of telling the story last? Whose story would it be about? Who would be the hero of the story? Obviously, to all questions, it would be the tortoise.

Did the tortoise really win the race or was it the skewed ego-driven fantasy of the survivor lying with no hare as witness to contradict the story?

‘Slow and steady’ is a valuable concept but the hare probably won the race.

The only minor flaw in this theory is that tortoises can’t tell stories to us humans. Neither can hares speak to us to confirm or deny anything, much less a story of a race that in all likelihood never even happened. [insert exclamation here to describe the primal scream that accompanies the realization of a rapidly disintegrating theory].

I maintain though, that if the story of the race were true, and the likely storyteller was the tortoise, and the tortoise had actually told the story, he would have done so in a way to make himself the hero with the truth of the outcome seriously suspect.

Here then, is yet another fly in the ointment of a cherished truism.