The Country Of The Blind

I love stories because I think in metaphors, and I think stories can very powerfully illustrate deep truths. A well-told story can drive the truth deeper than a list of facts. I think that’s why Jesus often taught with parables.

H.G. Wells wrote a short story called “The Country of the Blind” which I think describes very well the brainwashing abuse victims experience as well their struggle to escape it. It describes the difficulty of trying to explain the truth to people who can’t or won’t understand abuse and who find nothing wrong with their blindness.  It’s a story about whether a person will choose blindness to win acceptance and love or fight for freedom even if thought crazy. It is very powerful and I’d like to share portions in this post. I summarize the story in between portions that I quote. (You can read the full story here: The Country of the Blind.)

The story is about a community of people who lived in the remote Andes mountains. One day, a massive earthquake cut off the valley from the rest of the world. After a time, there was some sort of genetic disease that caused the people to go blind, and the blindness affected their descendants. After many generations, Nunez, a man from the outside world, climbed in the mountains and fell into the valley. He encountered the villagers, realized they were all blind, and thought he could share his beautiful sighted world with them–and even become their king because, “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Now we will enter the story, where Nunez converses with some of the villagers:

The voice of an older man began to question him, and Nunez found himself trying to explain the great world out of which he had fallen, and the sky and mountains and sight and such-like marvels, to these elders who sat in darkness in the Country of the Blind. And they would believe and understand nothing whatever he told them, a thing quite outside his expectation. They would not even understand many of his words. For fourteen generations these people had been blind and cut off from all the seeing world; the names for all the things of sight had faded and changed; the story of the outer world was faded and changed to a child’s story; and they had ceased to concern themselves with anything beyond the rocky slopes above their circling wall. Blind men of genius had arisen among them and questioned the shreds of belief and tradition they had brought with them from their seeing days, and had dismissed all these things as idle fancies, and replaced them with new and saner explanations. Much of their imagination had shrivelled with their eyes, and they had made for themselves new imaginations with their ever more sensitive ears and finger-tips. Slowly Nunez realized this; that his expectation of wonder and reverence at his origin and his gifts was not to be borne out; and after his poor attempt to explain sight to them had been set aside as the confused version of a new-made being describing the marvels of his incoherent sensations, he subsided, a little dashed, into listening to their instruction. And the eldest of the blind men explained to him life and philosophy and religion, how that the world (meaning their valley) had been first an empty hollow in the rocks, and then had come, first, inanimate things without the gift of touch, and llamas and a few other creatures that had little sense, and then men, and at last angels, whom one could hear singing and making fluttering sounds, but whom no one could touch at all, which puzzled Nunez greatly until he thought of the birds.

[Nunez] spoke of the beauties of sight, of watching the mountains, of the sky and the sunrise, and they heard him with amused incredulity that presently became condemnatory. They told him there were indeed no mountains at all, but that the end of the rocks where the llamas grazed was indeed the end of the world; thence sprang a cavernous roof of the universe, from which the dew and the avalanches fell; and when he maintained stoutly the world had neither end nor roof such as they supposed, they said his thoughts were wicked. So far as he could describe sky and clouds and stars to them it seemed to them a hideous void, a terrible blankness in the place of the smooth roof to things in which they believed—it was an article of faith with them that the cavern roof was exquisitely smooth to the touch. He saw that in some manner he shocked them…He began to realize that you cannot even fight happily with creatures who stand upon a different mental basis to yourself.

Eventually, Nunez ran from the village. He stayed away for a couple of days, but he had no shelter, no food, and he was completely isolated…so he humbly and submissively returned.

“I was mad,” he said. “But I was only newly made.”

They said that was better.

He told them he was wiser now, and repented of all he had done.

Then he wept without intention, for he was very weak and ill now, and they took that as a favourable sign.

They asked him if he still thought he could “see.”

“No,” he said. “That was folly. The word means nothing—less than nothing!”

They asked him what was overhead.

“About ten times ten the height of a man there is a roof above the world— of rock—and very, very smooth.” … He burst again into hysterical tears. “Before you ask me any more, give me some food or I shall die.”

He expected dire punishments, but these blind people were capable of toleration. They regarded his rebellion as but one more proof of his general idiocy and inferiority; and after they had whipped him they appointed him to do the simplest and heaviest work they had for anyone to do, and he, seeing no other way of living, did submissively what he was told.

He was ill for some days, and they nursed him kindly. That refined his submission. But they insisted on his lying in the dark, and that was a great misery. And blind philosophers came and talked to him of the wicked levity of his mind, and reproved him so impressively for his doubts about the lid of rock that covered their cosmic casserole that he almost doubted whether indeed he was not the victim of hallucination in not seeing it overhead.

So Nunez became a citizen of the Country of the Blind, and these people ceased to be a generalised people and became individualities and familiar to him, while the world beyond the mountains became more and more remote and unreal. 

After some time, Nunez became resigned to the fact that he would never escape the valley. He fell in love with one of the village girls. Her father, Yacob, was against the marriage because Nunez’ was considered an idiot, delusional, and couldn’t do anything right. The girl wept that he was getting better…. 

So [Yacob] went and sat in the windowless council-chamber with the other elders and watched the trend of the talk, and said, at the proper time, “He’s better than he was. Very likely, some day, we shall find him as sane as ourselves.”

Then afterwards one of the elders, who thought deeply, had an idea. He was the great doctor among these people, their medicine-man, and he had a very philosophical and inventive mind, and the idea of curing Nunez of his peculiarities appealed to him. One day when Yacob was present he returned to the topic of Nunez.

“I have examined [Nunez],” he said, “and the case is clearer to me. I think very probably he might be cured.”

“That is what I have always hoped,” said old Yacob.

“His brain is affected,” said the blind doctor.

The elders murmured assent.

“Now, what affects it?”

“Ah!” said old Yacob.

“This,” said the doctor, answering his own question. “Those queer things that are called the eyes, and which exist to make an agreeable soft depression in the face, are diseased, in the case of [Nunez], in such a way as to affect his brain. They are greatly distended, he has eyelashes, and his eyelids move, and consequently his brain is in a state of constant irritation and distraction.”

“Yes?” said old Yacob. “Yes?”

“And I think I may say with reasonable certainty that, in order to cure him completely, all that we need do is a simple and easy surgical operation—namely, to remove these irritant bodies.”

“And then he will be sane?”

“Then he will be perfectly sane, and a quite admirable citizen.”

“Thank Heaven for science!” said old Yacob, and went forth at once to tell Nunez of his happy hopes.

Although horrified, Nunez was convinced to sacrifice his sight to win love and acceptance. The day before the surgery was to occur, he climbed into the mountains for a last look at the beautiful world. 

He had fully meant to go to a lonely place where the meadows were beautiful with white narcissus, and there remain until the hour of his sacrifice should come, but as he went he lifted up his eyes and saw the morning, the morning like an angel in golden armour, marching down the steeps…

It seemed to him that before this splendour he, and this blind world in the valley, and his love, and all, were no more than a pit of sin.

He did not turn aside as he had meant to do, but went on, and passed through the wall of the circumference and out upon the rocks, and his eyes were always upon the sunlit ice and snow.

He saw their infinite beauty, and his imagination soared over them to the things beyond he was now to resign for ever.

He thought of that great free world he was parted from, the world that was his own, and he had a vision of those further slopes, distance beyond distance, with Bogota, a place of multitudinous stirring beauty, a glory by day, a luminous mystery by night, a place of palaces and fountains and statues and white houses, lying beautifully in the middle distance. He thought how for a day or so one might come down through passes, drawing ever nearer and nearer to its busy streets and ways. He thought of the river journey, day by day, from great Bogota to the still vaster world beyond, through towns and villages, forest and desert places, the rushing river day by day, until its banks receded and the big steamers came splashing by, and one had reached the sea—the limitless sea, with its thousand islands, its thousands of islands, and its ships seen dimly far away in their incessant journeyings round and about that greater world. And there, unpent by mountains, one saw the sky—the sky, not such a disc as one saw it here, but an arch of immeasurable blue, a deep of deeps in which the circling stars were floating…

His eyes scrutinized the great curtain of the mountains with a keener inquiry…

He glanced back at the village, then turned right round and regarded it steadfastly.

He thought of Medina-saroti, and she had become small and remote.

He turned again towards the mountain wall, down which the day had come to him.

Then very circumspectly he began to climb.

When sunset came he was no longer climbing, but he was far and high. He had been higher, but he was still very high. His clothes were torn, his limbs were blood-stained, he was bruised in many places, but he lay as if he were at his ease, and there was a smile on his face…

From where he rested the valley seemed as if it were in a pit and nearly a mile below. Already it was dim with haze and shadow, though the mountain summits around him were things of light and fire. The mountain summits around him were things of light and fire, and the little details of the rocks near at hand were drenched with subtle beauty—a vein of green mineral piercing the grey, the flash of crystal faces here and there, a minute, minutely-beautiful orange lichen close beside his face. There were deep mysterious shadows in the gorge, blue deepening into purple, and purple into a luminous darkness, and overhead was the illimitable vastness of the sky. But he heeded these things no longer, but lay quite inactive there, smiling as if he were satisfied merely to have escaped from the valley of the Blind in which he had thought to be King.

“We [victims] have literally been brainwashed by the abuser…Our reality has been changed to the reality the abuser creates….There’s no one outside of us that’s confirming our experience. We go to friends, pastors, even counselors, and are told the same thing our abuser is telling us…Nobody wants to believe that a seemingly normal person would want to destroy the persona of his partner…Everyone around us is confirming the brainwashing. We are being gaslighted by our whole world.” ~ Helena Knowlton

I think that if we are willing to exchange the truth for a lie, we are sacrificing sight for blindness. Better to lose “love” and “acceptance” than submit to being blinded. Better to be thought of as a delusional idiot than to give up the beauty of truth. 

For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? ~ Matt 16:26