Wednesday, January 23, 2013

The famous stone soup metaphor

Stone soup only tastes good because of all the other things the villagers allowed the vagabond guy in the story to put in there (carrots and stuff), but they wouldn't have put anything in at all if the guy hadn't said that stone was the main ingredient.

I think it's a shame that this story is usually told merely as a "smart guy outsmarts the not-smarties" story, when it seems to have a lot more metaphorical potential than that.

For me, the story is really about how the good things in society come about through shared beliefs that aren't actually doing very much by themselves. Yes, like religious beliefs. The goodness of Christians, say, doesn't come from Christ, but from what Christians give of themselves.

So what role does the clever vagabond play in this metaphor? The cynical priest? Not really, since everybody wins in the end, and he never really lied about the stone being essential, since without it no soup could have been made at all. Maybe he's more like Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, a metaphor of the self-emergent catalyst.