• HeyListenWatchOut
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    1 year ago

    The story of the ant and the grasshopper is literally a left-wing allegory for how a few capitalists (grasshoppers) are able to get away with abusing a massive group of workers (ants) until the workers realize the power they collectively have.

    Do you not remember the PIXAR film “A Bug’s Life?” The warning Hopper states to his gang and then the ending is the ants realizing they don’t have to be afraid of their supposed self-proclaimed masters.

    The way you are attempting to use this is like literally one of the worst comparisons someone can make… Like the way you are using it is actually the textbook definition of Orwellian “newspeak.”

    • @SJ_Zero@lemmy.fbxl.net
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      1 year ago

      The Fable of the ant and the grasshopper I’m referring to comes from Aesop’s fables, a work collected around between 500 and 600 BCE.

      It’s been told and retold in many different languages around the world, and in virtually every example of the Fable being told, the story is basically the same: the ant works through the summer, and the grasshopper dances. Eventually the winter comes, and the ant survives and the grasshopper dies of starvation. For over 2,000 years the moral of the story has been but there’s a work time for work and there’s a time for play, that you need to work hard in the summer or you will starve in the winter.

      It’s wonderful that somebody reinterpreted the Fable for a modern kid’s movie, but that does not change the original meaning of the fable. Aesop was a slave born in Greek society, a society that utilized slavery. It’s not likely that greek society would have been super into a slave teaching their kids that one day the slaves would overcome their Athenian masters.

      Aristophanes wrote many plays criticizing greek society a few hundred years after Aesop. The following was from his play “Ekklesiazousai”, which was a comedy about what would happen if women took over the government. It’s a sort of hilarious example of the difference between greek society and modern society for many reasons, especially this exchange:

      Praxagora: I want all to have a share of everything and all property to be in common; there will no longer be either rich or poor; […] I shall begin by making land, money, everything that is private property, common to all. […]

      Blepyrus: But who will till the soil?

      Praxagora: The slaves.

      In Orwell’s 1984, the main character’s job was in the ministry of truth, ironically changing history to better suit the party. In this sense, replacing a 2500 year old fable with a 25 year old movie sounds more like that 1984 than simply citing the original fable.