If you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to ask for a glass of milk, because charity encourages helplessness and ingratitude.
When you give him the milk, he’ll probably ask you for a straw. Altruism does not result in gratefulness; it results in a sense of expectation and entitlement in the receiver. He has been given something for nothing. What have you taught him about the value of his own labor? Nothing. You have given him not a cookie but your own self-esteem. When he’s finished, he’ll ask you for a napkin, and you will have no grounds on which to deny him, for you have conditioned him to suckle uselessly at your teat. Then he’ll want to look in a mirror to make sure he doesn’t have a milk mustache.
When he looks in the mirror, he might notice his hair needs a trim. So he’ll probably ask for a pair of nail scissors. His misfortune is not a mortgage on your well-being.
To whom would you rather give that cookie – men who could not equal the power of your mind, but who would equal your moral integrity, who could never approach you in stature, but who would do their best, work as hard as you did, live by their own effort, and – eating that cookie – give a moment’s silent thanks to the man who gave them more than they could give him?
Or would you rather see it eaten by whining rotters, who proclaim that you are not to be paid, neither in matter nor in spirit, neither by wealth nor by recognition, nor by respect nor by gratitude?
You would rather see the cookie smashed and scattered to the winds first.
When he’s finished giving himself a trim, he’ll want a broom to sweep it up. He’ll start sweeping. He might get carried away and sweep every room in the house. He may even end up washing the floors as well. Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not give a cookie to a mouse. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving him that cookie. The issue is whether you must keep buying your life, cookie by cookie, from any mouse who might choose to approach you. The issue is whether the need of others is the first mortgage on your life and the moral purpose of your existence. The issue is whether man is to be regarded as a sacrificial animal. Any man of self-esteem will answer: “No.” Altruism says: “Yes.”
When he’s done, he’ll probably want to take a nap. You’ll have to fix up a little box for him with a blanket and a pillow (you have to do nothing; the illusion of obligation exists here only in your mind). He’ll crawl in, make himself comfortable and fluff the pillow a few times. He’ll probably ask you to read him a story. Will you forever acquiesce? What is his claim on your sacrifice, and where does it end?
So you’ll read to him from one of your books, and he’ll ask to see the pictures. When he looks at the pictures, he’ll get so excited he’ll want to draw one of his own. Will you surrender all your values to him? And if so, what will he do with them?
He’ll ask for paper and crayons. He has no right to them, but he will ask for them regardless. He’ll draw a picture. When the picture is finished, he’ll want to sign his name with a pen. Then he’ll want to hang his picture on your refrigerator. Which means he’ll need Scotch tape. He’ll hang up his drawing and stand back to look at it. You are a vegetable waiting to be eaten.
Looking at the refrigerator will remind him that he’s thirsty. If you exchange a penny for a dollar, it is not a sacrifice; if you exchange a dollar for a penny, it is. If you achieve the career you wanted, after years of struggle, it is not a sacrifice; if you then renounce it for the sake of a rival, it is. If you own a bottle of milk and give it to your starving child, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to your neighbor’s child and let your own die, it is.
So he’ll ask for a glass of milk. And chances are if he asks you for a glass of milk, he’s going to want a cookie to go with it.
Tags: advice, ayn rand rewrites, books, helping is futile, i kind of already wrote this once but this version is better
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I much prefer this version. That mouse is not entitled to your cookie.
In my experience, mice prefer Froot Loops to cookies. But that’s just a small sample size.
My mom’s mice like tootsie rolls. But this is how I feel about the giving tree book.
I enjoy the circular nature of the mouse stories, because as books on tape they go on and on forever and my children are endlessly entertained and I get to go to bed instead of reading 6 more books and falling asleep on their rug.
Mousocher?
Eh, it kinda works.
how do you do the strikeout thing on your keyboard? I want to be able to do that. I miss that.
On IntenseDebate you can use the strike HTML tags! So < strike > and < / strike > (hopefully that doesn’t format…)
this man does not deserve the information you have sweated and sought for yourself. Should he not figure it out on his own and reap the rewards of his own hard work?
“His misfortune is not a mortgage on your well-being.” I love that line. I will be using that next time someone asks me to do something last minute.
I have always liked “Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.”
Unless it’s lack of planning by your boss.
Wasn’t it Randian anyway? The mouse is a useless layabout whom helping will only serve to further his ceaseless cycle of dependency.
Was just coming down here to say that I feel like this book didn’t need a lot of editing to become Randian…
guys that’s literally how I decide what stories to rewrite in a Randian fashion
thank you for unleashing the full Randian potential of this and other works 🙂
So how about a version of the little red hen?
Why do I feel that Mallory as Ayn Rand could totally win the Republican primary
All the old white men in the primary would keel over and die in the face of such magnificence. They should be so lucky.
The mouse received a cookie, milk, and the use of some household supplies. The mouse cleaned the human’s entire house.
I feel like this is a reasonable exchange of goods and services, and that the human arguably got the better end of the deal.
yes, agreed! Can I hire this mouse? Does he do windows?
The mouse is probably an illegal immigrant. By hiring this mouse, you are dooming America to bankrupt itself educating and medicating this mouse’s non-English-speaking lazy anchor babies with your tax dollars.
What you need to do is find a genius industrialist who is so fed up with being bested by crony mediocrities that he has turned to a life of window-cleaning drudgery. This is the only moral choice for owners of dirty windows.
Genius industrialist mice are a dime a dozen these days.
Maybe Joe Manganiello will do it. (Ideally topless.)
Assuming that an anchor baby is neither hardworking nor English speaking tells me you have little contact with actual anchor children. That is probably for the best, except you are left being wrong.
I do not imagine that a mouse swept the house to satisfaction. There’s like, a small mouse-shaped path through some crumbs, and then he passed out from exhaustion before he could reach the hall.
Hmm, but if we are talking about “mouse scale”, the glass of milk is actually a small thimble with a few drops, and the cookie is just a crumb fragment as well- so the amount of cleaning done still likely pays off greater dividends than the cost.
The human did not ask the mouse to clean her house, though. Perhaps the house wasn’t dirty. Perhaps the human finds cleaning relaxing. The mouse is just favor-sharking, like so many men with doors held open.
The greatest/truest Randian, I just realized after reading this, was the fascist leader of the “surrogate band” in Pink Floyd’s The Wall, who pulls different types out of the crowd and then finally – honestly – declares “if I had my way, I’d have all of you shot.” Rand’s passively murderous/genocidal ethos was a public mask for her active murder fantasies (as seen in her avid fascination with serial killer William Edward Hickman, to whom she referred as a “Superman” – no joke).
Ah, but he didn’t give the audience what they paid for, which was not a “surrogate band”! Is he a man or a moocher?
Needs more trains.
But what if the story you read him is one of Mallory’s previous Ayn Rand rewrites? Would he learn self-respect, and to masterfully have sex, and to love trains? Like, a lot?
We are all just vegetables, waiting to see Who Will Eat Us.
The real ending to the sentence that begins “If you give a mouse a cookie…” should be “it’ll be one less for you to stuff in your fat mouth so the mouse is doing you a favor.”
And if you give Paul Ryan Social Security Survivors Benefits, he’ll go away to college, become an Ayn Rand disciple, drive the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, get elected to congress, then act like a wiener and try to destroy the very program that got him through school in the first place.
If MRA is substituted for mouse, this story becomes factual.
This from a woman who ended up claiming social security.
“If the state chooses to bankrupt itself by returning tax-gotten gains to the citizens it stole from, what obligates the citizens to refuse them?” Ayn Rand’s ghost remarked, before turning her attention back to re-writing children’s stories and submitting them to The Toast.
If Ms. Rand was given the opportunity to decline paying into SS, took advantage of that opportunity, THEN accepted SS payments, you may have a point.
No, people are wrong about this. The hypocrisy is not that she took Social Security or Medicare after paying into it. The problem with her foolish view, and the foolish views of all Libertarians, is that she *needed the social safety net*. Her entire viewpoint is undermined. Liberals are right – it takes a village and we all need help sometimes.
Further, the 3 reasons Libertarianism is a mega flawed outlook are:
1) Positive feedback loops in wealth create a permanent aristocracy. That’s not “liberty,” but just another kind of tyranny.
2) As with Rand, we see that the individual needs the safety net of the collective in the face of catastrophe.
3) Governments, without a profit motive, serve to invest in long term very useful projects that might not earn out for decades (like the space program), and they serve to stabilize economic systems (see the number of crashes in the US before the establishment of the Fed).
3)
I have given countless cookies in my lifetime and there was only one person, and I mean one that asked for more. And that mouse that kept asking for years had something wrong with her mentally. All the rest of the ‘mouses” (so derogatory by the way as if they are pests or parasites) were so grateful and went on to give to other mouses. Sometimes the altruism was reciprocated back to me. But I don’t understand how Ayn Rand can get off thinking that we all don’t need help from each other…that no one is is exempt from needing help. Not even the wealthiest of people are exempt. Our social nature of helping one another is a human quality, and to deny that is to deny we are human. It is why we have survived as opposed to bacteria that eat up every resource and give nothing. There will never be a time in a person’s life where they don’t need help in some form or fashion, and I highly doubt Ayn Rand got away with not needing help. I know she received Social Security. I think her philosophy is used to mask her being just an outright sociopath asshole.
See http://www.essentialhayek.com for reasons why we have different rules for dealing with intimates (like cute mice) and strangers (like Rand’s “looters”). To mix the two in this context is pretty damned funny though.
“What have you taught him about the value of his own labor?”
That he should get a job, have the surplus value his labor produced for the capitalist taken away from him, and then receive only a tiny fraction of it in return.
Ayn Rand’s original title for this piece was “Ratlas Shrugged.”
Vivid proof, if anyone needed it, that Randian thought is just gussied-up selfishness.
Gussied-up? Ayn Rand literally wrote a book called “The Virtue of Selfishness”.
A message board I belong to noticed your article and ran with the theme – “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” by other authors: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.ph…
A few years back, we did the same for “Lord of the Rings.” I myself wrote a brief Ayn Rand version: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.ph…
Summed up: You either enrich me, or your life has no purpose. (in fact, you are probably detracting from the sum total of life)
See, part of me understands the need to be a little selfish in the interest of self-care. Part of me understands that not everyone can be one-hundred percent charitable and giving of every piece of themselves, and sometimes, people need to take care of themselves first, so they can then go on to continue to take care of others. Part of me understands that sometimes it’s just not possible for someone to be charitable, for whatever reason.
However, another part of me thinks that “if you’re nice to someone, then they’ll just walk all over you because you showed them that all they have to do is ask and you’ll give it to them!” is bullshit 99.9% of the time. (I do admit, there are people out there who would be lazy and mooch off of a kind person, but that’s not going to stop me from being kind to others and giving what I can when I can, and the idea that we should stop being charitable to others who need and deserve it simply because some people can and will take advantage of you for it is selfish nonsense.)
On the other hand, being kind and charitable to people with the expectation that you’ll get something out of it is also selfish as hell. Sometimes, you need to be charitable because it’s the right thing to do, not because you’ll get something out of it.
Strikes me that the best way to do ‘Randian rewrites’ is just to take your source and make it wordy, dull, and doctrinaire…
Strikes me that the best way to do ‘Randian rewrites’ is just to take your source and make it wordy, dull, and doctrinaire…
You, and these, are perfect.
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