Blanket Story
Once upon a
time, in a tiny house in Piggytown, there lived five little piglets. One day,
Papa Pig returned from the market with a bag full of wool. “Winter is coming,”
he declared, “and it will soon be cold. Mama Pig will use this wool to make
blankets for you all.”
The biggest
piglet looked at the bag and said, “There is not enough wool for all of us.
Since I am the biggest, I will need the biggest blanket, and since I am the
strongest, I will take what I need.” The second piglet spoke next. “That’s not
fair,” he said. “The wool should be divided into five equal bundles, one for
each of us.”
“But some of us
are fat, and some of us are skinny,” observed the third piglet. “The blankets
should be cut to size and given to each according to his needs.”
At this, the
fourth piglet joined in. “Don’t you see, there is not enough wool for our own
blankets? We need to share what we have. Let’s pull our beds together and try
sleeping under one big blanket.”
But when they
huddled together, no matter how close, the blanket did not cover them all.
There was always a hoof and a jowl, or a snout and a rump that stuck out in the
cold.
Finally, the
fifth piglet piped up, the youngest and the tiniest. “How much time do we spend
in bed?” he asked. “We can sleep in shifts.” And sure enough, there was more
than enough blanket to cover three piglets at a time. So there was no grumbling
or grunting when Mama Pig came home one day with piglet number six.
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Like the German
folk tales collected by the Brothers Grimm and the Mother Goose stories that
passed for children’s nursery rhymes in 15th century England, the
blanket narrative is deceptively simple, but it reveals deep layers of meaning
under the microscope of academic scrutiny. The first piglet clearly represents
laissez-fare Capitalism, Darwin’s evolutionary theories pushed to the pragmatic
and self-serving extreme. “Might makes right” is a convenient motto for the
biggest hog, who takes the whole blanket just because he can. Karl Marx’s brave response is embodied
in the second piglet’s bid for equality of access, a plan for dividing goods
and services among the entire populace. But the third piglet, speaking for
Marxist realist-revisionists, points out the folly of identical shares.
Individuals have different talents and requirements, hence the neo-Marxist
watchwords, “to each according to his need, from each according to his
ability.” The fourth pig, somewhat harder to identify in the pantheon of
Western thought, seems to offer a sensible solution in the form of urban
planning. He re-conceptualizes the dilemma of scarce resources as a problem in
geometry; with his brothers in closer proximity, the blanket covers more
ground. But this solution carries with it a premonition of the Malthusian
Catastrophe, for when Mama pig brings more piglets into their midst, all the
huddling in the world will not prevent the devastating consequences of
population growth. And this is why the fifth piglet’s answer proves so timely.
Adroitly drawing on Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, this
porcine physicist understands that space and time are flexible. By shifting his
brothers’ sense of time, he gives them each more space. Thus we see the great
ideas of our leading intellectuals (Darwin, Marx, Weber, Malthus, and Einstein)
embodied in a story about pigs in a blanket. It is not for nothing that George
Orwell made swine the undisputed masters of his Animal Farm.