The reason for societal deterioration [a parable]

See if you understand.

Once upon a time, there was a great tree planted by a shepherd to maintain the balance of an imperfect ecosystem. The tree grew mightily and reached the skies, its produced fruit unevenly distributed yet its stature securing sporadic protection for the inhabitants on the ground. Accused of hoarding the ecosystem’s resources, the herbivore animals loathed the tree’s selfish utilization of the resources but learned in their early generations to live in abased subjection lest the tree send forth its branches to chase and assault any dissenting animal unto a demise whose grisly details we need not particularly speak of.

Now there was also a great illustrious star expelled from the habitation of the shepherd. That star—how shall we say, a fallen luminary—one day accessed a bottomless pit and created an airborne plague of fungal spores. Two emissaries of the shepherd warned the animals of the ground of what great calamity a perdition of fungi would bring upon the ecosystem in the future and how the great tree was the last barrier to that nightmare, but behold, hardly any of the animal generations thereafter remembered.

It came to pass, that as the great tree became increasingly unpopular and demands for its axing grew, the animals of the ground believed the tree was the worst tyrant they ever suffered under and that nothing could be possibly worse than the tree. Clamoring increasingly militant for freedom and liberation, the animals strove hard to cut down the great tree, in the process violently railing against and executing by extrajudicial mob authority any fellow animal who defended the legitimacy of the tree or simply questioned the wisdom of toppling the great tree. Pivotally bolstered by an outside battalion of carnivores—one dissenter professed to have witnessed those carnivores in the dead of night receiving instructions from the expelled star/luminary, but he was quickly smeared a “conspiracy theorist” and no one heard from him again—the day at long last arrived that the tree came crashing down.

It came to pass on that day, that the animals of the ground were cheering in overwhelming jubilation at the toppling of the great tree, anticipating a new era of liberated utopia. But upon the carcass of the deceased great tree the fungal spores found their expected host to flourish out of, and a great mushroom began blooming. It soared to the top of the skies and disseminated a poisonous fume into the air which killed half the animals of the ground. Save seven penitent souls, all of the animals lamented their new woe but none repented of their deeds that created the calamity.

The shepherd, after ten shy of five hundred days, saved the last seven surviving righteous animals (who refused to join the majority of their cohorts’ insurrection against the great tree) and used his arsenal of flamethrowers to completely annihilate the mushroom and every remaining inhabitant of the poisoned ecosystem, for all animals of the ground were driven insane by the stench of the mushroom.

[THE END.]