The Snake, the Stranger, and the Eternal Amnesia of Power

 

The Snake, the Stranger, and the Eternal Amnesia of Power

History is a magnificent, cynical museum of predictable human folly, starring earnest civilizations that routinely invite disaster through the front door while patting themselves on the back for being humanitarian. Take the recent grim reports echoing from the Spanish autonomous enclave of Ceuta, where a massive surge of undocumented arrivals overwhelmed local reception networks and left vulnerable young girls preyed upon in the surrounding hills. It is the ancient parable of the farmer and the snake brought vividly to life in the twenty-first century: you rescue the freezing serpent from the cold, slide it into your coat, and are predictably shocked when it sinks its fangs into your flesh. We love to wrap our collective borders in the comforting fiction of infinite, unconditional compassion, ignoring the darker evolutionary reality that indiscriminate hospitality in the face of chaotic lawlessness is merely an invitation to self-destruction.

Human nature is pathologically resistant to learning from history, trapped instead in a recurring loop of sentimental self-deception. Our evolutionary software was finely tuned for small, tightly knit kin groups where empathy was an immediate, low-risk survival tool; when scaled up to a borderless globalized theater, that same empathy becomes a structural vulnerability. We desperately want to believe that human nature is universally benign, that raw malice can always be cuddled into submission. Yet, the brutal reality of statecraft is that open borders without enforced rule of law do not create a utopia—they create a vacuum where the predatory instincts of the strong instantly feast upon the weak.

Governments and institutional bodies operate on an absurd ledger of willful blindness. They spend millions lecturing ordinary citizens on moral purity while failing at the most basic duty of the social contract: keeping the public safe from predatory violence. When crises erupt, the bureaucracy retreats into defensive euphemisms, pretending that structural lawlessness is merely a temporary logistical hurdle rather than a catastrophic failure of basic sovereignty.

We love to wrap our administrative incompetence in the noble language of progressive idealism, but civilization’s dark comedy reminds us that nature has a brutal way of punishing those who mistake naivety for virtue.

The next time you hear a politician demand open arms in the face of overwhelming security risks, remember the farmer warming the snake. In the grand theater of modern politics, the highest form of irony isn't that we fall for the same tragedy twice—it's that we write moral essays praising the reptile while digging the victim's grave.