One day a man went to buy something from a grocer. Seeing him very dejected, the customer asked:

“Why are you so sad and crying? You shaved your head and dressed in black. Something very serious must have happened.”

“Oh, my poor Sargal Singh is dead. I loved him very much and now he is dead!”

And he broke down in tears again.

So the customer thought:

“If he complains so much, it must mean that this Sargal Singh was an important person. Maybe he was his son, or his father, or his best friend. I should be respectful. I’ll shave my head too and mourn for various days.”

A friend of that customer saw that his friend was shaven and mourning and asked:

“Why are you crying? What happened?”

“Oh, Sargal Singh is dead. He is dead!!”

In a short time, to show respect to their friends and Sargal Singh, thousands of people started mourning.

“Oh, poor Sargal Singh! He’s dead.”

One day the King’s minister, who was also crying about the death of Sargal Singh, talked about it with the King, who had become aware of the phenomenon that had invaded his entire kingdom. So many people were sad. So the King asked.

“But who is this Sargal Singh?”

The minister replied:

“I don’t know, but everyone is crying for him and so I felt like I should do the same.”

Wondering why nobody before his minister had asked about the identity of this Sargal Singh, he said to the minister:

“Find out who he is.”

Thus, going up through the chain of people, he arrived at the grocer. And he asked:

“Who is Sargal Singh?”

“It’s my donkey. I loved him very much and now he’s dead.”

Thousands of people were mourning about the death of a donkey, thinking him to be a very important person.

This story is quite instructive. We have seen in history how thousands, and sometimes millions of people accept foolish ideas only because someone has said it, not even having the intelligence to find out if what they heard was true or if it was some foolish weirdness.

Throughout the history of humanity, we have seen millions of people who have gone blindly after a madman. During the Second World War, millions of people went to kill and be killed just because a leader told them to do so. Life is so dear to everyone and yet millions of people were willing to give their lives to a madman without ever really finding out whether what they were doing was correct or not.

Without needing to go back 80 years, we witnessed something similar happen in January of this year. While I was watching the invasion of the Capitol on CNN, I could not help but laugh at those images. If people had not died or gotten hurt, the whole thing would have been just comical, with people dressed in bison-shaped headdresses and bearded people screaming like children who had never grown up. They did all that only because a man, a single man, told them to do it. Like sheep, they followed their master.

While I was looking at the images from Washington DC, I, who was born in Italy, couldn’t help but think of Hitler, of Mussolini. It was the same exact thing. Empty lives in need to be filled with anything, no matter what.

Like the way people reacted to the news of the grocer’s donkey: Sargal Singh died, poor Sargal Singh!

This is a section of the book “On a Silver Platter”.

To buy the complete book, click above

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