The Cleverness of the Axe

There’s a version of The Woodcutter and the Trees series of fables that I ran across the other day that’s particularly relevant to this moment in history:

The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the axe; for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them.

Or perhaps it’s always resonant because some variation of it has been told for thousands of years now.

Illustration in the triptych above by Ferdinand Hodler.