2 Samuel 10:3 · World English Bible
But the princes of the children of Ammon said to Hanun their lord, “Do you think that David honors your father, in that he has sent comforters to you? Hasn’t David sent his servants to you to search the city, to spy it out, and to overthrow it?”
When fear of looking naive picks the meaning, a leader will start a war to avoid feeling foolish. A meaning handed over by advisors gets adopted for what it lets a man avoid feeling.
From the Self-Help reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
SELF-HELP
When fear of looking naive picks the meaning, a leader will start a war to avoid feeling foolish.
A meaning handed over by advisors gets adopted for what it lets a man avoid feeling. Warning makes a young king feel shrewd; comfort makes him feel handled, a boy propped on his father's throne. He moves away from that second feeling, suspicion becomes the state he receives the envoys in, and contempt becomes the only action available inside it.
Two rulers could take delivery of the identical kindness and live in different worlds, one gaining an ally for a generation, the other buying a war. The sample was thin enough to carry either reading, and the one that won was the one that protected him from feeling young. The people under him pay for that model with their lives.
Self-Help lens
Which story are you believing mostly because believing it protects your pride?
We are disturbed not by events but by the stories we attach to them. The insult, the silence, the short reply: each is still blank until we write on it.
Two monks argue whether the wind moves or the flag moves. Neither, says the teacher: it is your own mind that is moving.
To know that you do not know is strength. The one who cannot bear to look uninformed will defend a guess until it costs him everything.
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