On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Eve Keneinan tells a story about a people who once depended on the words of the Oracle and why they eventually stopped listening:
Once upon a time, the people of a certain land were blessed with an oracle of uncanny precision and depth in its predictions and information.
The people rose to prominence and prosperity thanks to consulting the oracle.
However, the people were never allowed to consult the oracle directly, but only through the priests that carried their questions to it, and brought the oracle’s responses back to them.
Eventually, the priests began to confuse the virtues and gifts of the oracle as their own, and began no longer to bother asking the oracle questions before deciding on what “its” answers would be.
Thus it transpired that, while the oracles was a reliable and beneficial as it ever was, since its true answers no longer reached the people, but merely the false and self-serving answers of the priests, the act of “consulting the oracle” became no longer beneficial.
So people stopped consulting the oracle.
The priests were mystified by this.
“The oracle is as reliable as ever,” they said amongst themselves. “Why do the people then no longer trust it?”
And yet they had done it themselves.
