Staff Writer Emorie Hayes has surely been enjoying Contemporary Civilizations 

As I maneuver about, the curdling anger gurgling at the back of my throat, my uvula burned by the cry of stomach acid tickling it, and the nasty feeling of determination encroaches the back of my mind, a game of the hare and fox amidst my thoughts. 

The hare wants to try. The hare, the King-Philosopher, wants to believe that trying its best is enough. The hare, coated in a dusty brown, its cheeks pinched with a sweet rouge, naively prances about the fox. In her mind, the dapper orange of the fox is inviting, its snarl curling into a kind grin, becoming something entrancing. It wants to believe that to obtain an individualized sense of a “good moral code,” could equal a good life. That those around you are meant to be approached with open arms, your ventricles bare to their intentions. But the young hare is not wholly naive. It has been lacerated, its fur split with large cracks of pain. 

And the fox, its fringe licked clean with terror, its eyes covered in a film of nasty experience, is nary an enemy to the hare. No, the fox intends to be for itself. Itself, being one being, has no room for the meek hare, simply something for the fox to overcome. The fox must Prince with swift excellence: it must be willing to kill, the hare an enemy, its territory a means of growth. The fox has been taught the extremist subset of an individualist, that a person is supposed to be wholly for themselves. They can deceive others around them, spewing words and performing actions that appear as if as some sorta ricashade, they are intentionally for the betterment of those around them. But this is a false positive: a dangerously naive notion that has led to the hare in divots of the corner she has been backed into. In her selfishness, the fox is of Machiavellian kin. 

Under the flare of anger, the blanket of suffocating debate, the hare and fox don’t seem to understand where they overlap. The hare, while imitating an air of naivety, is particular in her execution to ensure that those around her are well aided by her all knowing morality, that all she does is for the virtue of all. While the fox is also wishing to achieve a subset of virtue, being superior. This overriding narrative will be their ruin. 

The story of the fox and the hare is something that haunts me. In a world of having driving for yourself and you only, an individualistic society will create an individual. Am I to be the hare, bare my skin for those around me to ensure the society I grow in continues to prosper? Or am I to be the fox, the prince, and aim for the betterment of myself, especially in a world of self-made people?

To this question I answer: I’ll be a secret third option, neither.

Image via Bwarchives