teach a man to fish

Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for the rest of his life… but what if you limit his fishing options to just your pond, where you charge admission? What if your mining operation has poisoned his river and tainted all the fish? What if, instead of teaching him anything, you offer to lend him a fish, the value of which he will pay plus interest? Or, you will make him work for you and you will pay him in fish, but not enough fish for him to have any vigor or strength, just enough to keep him working but never enough to allow for his spirit to break out of your system. Or you sell him fish from your river at a lower “price” than it will take him to get his own. And, I’m bypassing entirely the notion that a guy—or a culture, as you could parameterize it up—wouldn’t figure out how to fish for his damn self if there are fish to be gotten nearby. Civilization was built around access to water, access to food. But, yeah, this one guy is not only hungry, but can’t be bothered to figure out fishing, a basic skill present in every society throughout human history, even where the water was only accessible through holes sawed through sheets of ice. Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, but if he doesn’t have fish the next day or the next or the next or the next week, if he isn’t getting protein, he’s going to be undernourished and he’s going to die. But, at least you didn’t let go of your principles. And, who cares if this one guy dies? He was too retarded to figure out how to get fish out of water. He wasn’t worth saving in the first place.