We trust experience to settle what’s true.
There is an old story in Kalila and Dimna about four travelers who put that to the test.
A prince, a merchant’s son, a nobleman, and a farmer’s son met on the road with no money and nothing left to eat. Resting under a tree outside a city, they talked about what matters most.
The farmer’s son said work. The nobleman said beauty. The merchant’s son said reason. The prince only asked a question: they say everything depends on fate, have you ever thought about that?
They agreed that each day one of them would go into the city and bring back food.
The farmer’s son went first. He cut wood all day, sold it, and came back fed. On the city gate he wrote: A day of hard work is worth one gold coin.
The nobleman went next. He had never worked and didn’t know how. He fell asleep under a tree, and a wealthy woman found him, liked him, and fed him. On the gate he wrote: A day of beauty is worth five hundred gold.
The merchant’s son overheard traders planning to buy a ship’s cargo cheaply the next morning. He bought it first, on credit, and they paid him a thousand gold to hand it over. He never touched a crate. On the gate he wrote: A day of using reason well is worth a thousand gold.
Each of them went into the city carrying a belief. Each came back with proof of it.
That part isn’t strange. That is how it usually goes. We find what we walk in looking for, then write it down as if the day had taught it to us.
The prince went last.
He sat on a bench by the city gate. The king had died without an heir, and the funeral was that day. The whole city was mourning. The prince didn’t know. A stranger who wasn’t grieving looked suspicious, and a guard threw him in jail as a spy.
The city’s officials couldn’t agree on a new king. When they heard about the strange young man at the gate, they sent for him. He told them who he was: a king’s son from another country. When his father died, his brother took the throne, and he left rather than fight and spill blood.
Some of them recognized him. In the end, they made him king.
If anyone had proof, it was him. He had wondered aloud whether everything depends on fate, and fate had handed him a kingdom.
That is not what he wrote.
Next to his friends’ three lines, he had a fourth added: Work, beauty, and using reason are good and valuable things. Living together in peace is better than all of them.
Nobody under the tree had argued for that. It wasn’t a thesis the day had proven. It was something he had already lived, the day he walked away from a throne instead of fighting for it.
The other three could take their proof personally. My effort. My face. My reason. Each line on the gate was a price set on something they owned.
Fate is the one answer that leaves nothing to own when it comes true. There was no “my” in what happened to him. The others had declared; he had only asked. So the proof didn’t harden into a claim. It left room for something else to be written.
Three men came back from the city with their belief confirmed.
One came back without needing his.
— P1st