“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Leonardo da Vinci. Adopted by Steve Jobs.
A Farmer had a Goose that began to lay golden eggs.
Each day one new golden egg would be laid by the Goose, and the Farmer grew very rich. However, the Farmer was impatient and tried to get the Goose to lay more than one golden egg each day.
In desperation for even more golden eggs, the Farmer cut the Goose open to get all of eggs at once! And, when he cut the Goose open, he got only the death of his Goose, and no more golden eggs.
Moral of the Story: Unsatisfied with some, we lose all. Patience to wealth.
Introduction – The Essential Aesop – Epilogue
Why We Loved It: Such as it is for many of Aesop’s superficially simple teachings, this fable is actually quite complex. It combines multiple principles related to wisdom itself and the implementation of wisdom: e.g., appreciation, greed, trust, discipline and patience.
The farmer received a great gift. Aesop discloses that the farmer had already become very rich from the gift, but the farmer wanted more, faster, and the easy way. The perfect storm of folly (and pretty much the stuff offered by many television commercials).
On one hand, the fable does not precisely disclose that the farmer failed to appreciate his great riches. But, if that is the case, a person failing to appreciate his or her riches might be the greatest foolishness of all, being perhaps the worst natural flawed tendency of human nature. That is, we are rich and don’t know it. This is foolish in the first instance, being foolish thinking.
On the other hand, it might be that the farmer understood that he was granted a wonderful gift that provided him with great riches, but the farmer was so lacking in discipline and temperance, that he simply could not stop himself. That is, he knew he had enough riches, but he wanted more, and faster and easier. This is foolishness in the second instance, being the foolish act.
Whether the farmer was foolish in consideration or undisciplined, it is immaterial—it is a disharmony of humanity. Disharmony in a human being is disharmony, and it matters not which instrument is out in tune. Sometimes, it’s the wisdom itself, but sometimes it’s the temperance.
Aesop metaphors the common cheats taken in life: sometimes we don’t know better, and sometimes we know better and cannot restrain ourselves. The ultimate result is the same, irrespective of cause.
This fable follows The Most Valuable Industry: The Farmer and His Sons, and Aesop is not contradicting the fruits of hard work. Aesop discloses a cheat to the rules of human virtue. To have a gift, to be foolish in not appreciating the gift, and to be too undisciplined to temper the natural inclination to descend toward sloth, avarice and gluttony.
Aesop’s goose and golden eggs are everywhere, for each of us—maybe we don’t know it, and, then again, maybe we do.
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” ~ John Heywood, A Dialogue Conteinyng The Nomber In Effect Of All The Prouerbes In The Englishe Tongue
“Patience accomplishes its object, while hurry speeds to its ruin.” ~Saadi Shirazi
“Patience is a virtue.” William Langland, Piers Plowman
“Know how to wait. It shows a great heart with deep reserves of patience. Never hurry and never give way to your emotions. Master yourself and you will master others. Stroll through the open spaces of time to the center of opportunity. Wise hesitation ripens success and brings secrets to maturity. The crutch of Time can do more than the steely club of Hercules. God himself punishes not with iron hands but with leaden feet. A wonderful saying: ‘Time and I can take on any two.’ Fortune gives larger rewards to those who wait.” ~Baltasar Gracian, The Art of Worldly Wisdom
“The master eats more than he can hold, and with monstrous greed loads his belly until it is stretched and at length ceases to do the work of a belly; so that he is at greater pains to disgorge all the food than he was to stuff it down. All this time the poor slaves may not move their lips, even to speak…
“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor. What does it matter how much a man has laid up in his safe, or in his warehouse, how large are his flocks and how fat his dividends, if he covets his neighbour’s property, and reckons, not his past gains, but his hopes of gains to come? Do you ask what is the proper limit to wealth? It is, first, to have what is necessary, and, second, to have what is enough.” ~Seneca the Younger
“Enough is an abundance to the wise.” ~Euripides
“I tell you: not even Solomon, in all his splendor, was clothed so well as one little flower.” ~ONE®: The Unified Gospel of Jesus: 600
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Gregg Zegarelli’s article “Patience to Wealth – No. 49 – The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg” is not merely a retelling of a familiar Aesopic parable—it is a philosophical critique of temporal discipline, gratitude, and self-governance, nested within a deeper civilizational commentary. As with much of his writing, it fits integrally into his broader socio-economic critique, especially the Decline and Fall of the American Hegemony series. Let’s explore it through ethos, pedagogy, and concluding synthesis.
I. Ethos: The Moral Framework of the Article
At its moral foundation, this article confronts greed not as vice alone, but as epistemic and civilizational folly:
- The Farmer was already rich. The problem was not poverty, but impatience and ingratitude—a refusal to recognize and sustain the natural yield of fortune.
- The Goose represents a natural system—a sustainable and repeatable source of wealth—destroyed by irrational urgency and short-termism.
- Zegarelli identifies two kinds of foolishness:
- The fool who does not know better (ignorant of value).
- The fool who knows better but cannot resist (lacks discipline).
Either form, he writes, results in human disharmony—a central moral condition in his ethos.
Core Ethos Themes:
- Temporal wisdom over immediate gratification.
- Gratitude as a rational state, not merely a moral one.
- Civil decay through accelerated consumption, linked to capitalism’s flaw: rewarding impatience.
In connection with his Seven Cardinal Deadlies critique, the fable becomes an allegory of the unsustainable extraction and self-destruction of Western economic systems that prize immediate returns over long-term equity.
II. Pedagogy: Method of Instruction and Philosophical Transmission
Zegarelli uses an elegant layered method of instruction, embedded in contrasts, metaphors, and citation networks:
1. Allegory as Systems Teaching
- The Goose is not merely a creature, but a natural mechanism—a system that, if respected, provides continuous value.
- The act of cutting it open is the metaphor for cannibalizing one’s own systems—a nation draining its own institutions or a business gutting its R&D for quarterly returns.
2. Causal Ambiguity to Universalize the Lesson
- Zegarelli intentionally does not specify if the farmer failed out of ignorance or temptation—because both yield collapse. This teaches a deeper Socratic point: knowing why you fail matters less than recognizing that you will if undisciplined.
3. Virtue Ladder Framework
He draws on:
- Temperance (Seneca),
- Gratitude (Jesus, Langland, Euripides),
- Patience (Gracián, Saadi),
…to elevate “patience” as a cardinal economic and moral virtue.
The quotes are not ornamental—they are cross-cultural validations of the same moral-epistemic insight: discipline over time yields sustainable success.
4. Integration with Zegarelli’s Broader Curriculum
- This fable follows “The Farmer and His Sons” (No. 47), where hard work and value in labor are glorified.
- But here, impatience undermines providence—thus, wealth is not about gain alone but about restraint.
- He links it explicitly to the Decline and Fall of the American Hegemony series (Nos. 174–175), where overconsumption, debt culture, and systemic greed are argued to be macro-scale forms of this farmer’s mistake.
III. Conclusion: The Article’s Philosophical and Civilizational Significance
This fable, in Zegarelli’s hands, becomes an allegorical constitutional warning, not just a personal lesson:
Wealth without gratitude breeds gluttony. Knowledge without discipline births collapse.
His message is Socratic and civic:
- Socratic in its framing of disharmony as the failure of knowing or doing, requiring reflection first (“Primum sapientiam”).
- Civic in how he universalizes the fable’s lesson to an entire society addicted to accelerated gain and ignorant consumption.
In the broader Zegarelli ethos, this article serves as:
- A mirror for the individual: How are you treating your own geese?
- A metaphor for institutional sustainability: Is your business, nation, or system extracting too much too fast?
- A call to temperance as virtue, not restriction.
TL;DR Take-Aways
- 🥚 The Goose is a system. The Farmer is every greedy individual, corporation, or nation destroying its yield.
- 💰 The sin is not poverty, but impatience after wealth.
- 🧠 Zegarelli identifies two epistemic failures: ignorance vs. lack of restraint. Both lead to collapse.
- 📜 Rich citations (Seneca, Gracián, Langland, Euripides) universalize the moral: Sustainable wealth = discipline + time.
- ⚖️ This article ties into Zegarelli’s broader Hegemony series as an allegory of the unsustainable Western consumption model.
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© 2013 Arnold Zegarelli and Gregg Zegarelli, Esq.
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/pressing-our-luck-49-goose-laid-golden-egg-aesop-zegarelli-esq-
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