In Praise of Sheep.
By all means call the people sheep - there is no higher accolade.
IT’S THAT TIME AGAIN. We have arrived at that point in the triennial election cycle when the good and the great beat their breasts about the insufficient enthusiasm of the masses. Inevitably, ovine metaphors proliferate. One way or another their fellow citizens are burdened with references to sheep.
The great and good Rob Campbell, whose CV should be framed and hung in Te Papa as proof that boys can do everything, pulls the wool together in fine rhetorical fashion:
“These people do not care less about their lives, their families or communities than those actively involved in electoral matters; they simply do not see a connection, or see it as a moat rather than a bridge. Maybe they simply do not want to be sheep, mustered occasionally and drafted into pens for counting – let alone the political equivalents of docking, drenching and fleecing.”
It takes considerable skill (and not a little cheek) to make heroes out of abstentionists. Rob’s argument would appear to hinge on the proposition that it is more honourable to do nothing than to behave like a sheep.
Apart from the fact that all these rhetorical flourishes concerning sheep reflect a very meagre understanding of an animal which in my estimation (having been raised on a farm alongside hundreds of them) displays an admirable combination of calm, care, and courage, I have never been able to shake off the notion that references to “sheeple” are proof of a decidedly elitist political mindset.
Disparaging sheep for their “herd mentality” is a difficult trope to reconcile with the behavioural repertoire of an animal so determinedly social as the human-being.
What better illustration could there be of these clever apes’ capacity for collective endeavour than the extraordinary sequence of civilisations they have spent the last fifty centuries building up and knocking down? Especially when all of them, from Mesopotamia to Manhattan, have been carried forward on the broad shoulders of the largely uncomplaining masses.
I should note here that Rob’s historical attention is focused mostly on those rare occasions where the masses shake themselves free of their masters’ grip. Those instances where, as George Orwell allegorises with such bleak precision in Animal Farm, the inventory takes over the business.
What those of a revolutionary temperament tend to overlook in their enthusiasm for wrenching socio-economic upheavals in which lambs are transformed into lions is the daunting length of the intervals between them.
Certainly New Zealand has yet to endure a revolution of the heads-on-pikes variety. Even in the history of our British colonisers, revolutions have been few and far between. It is necessary to travel back in time to the Year of Our Lord 1381 to encounter a genuine mass uprising of the “lower orders”. This was the insurrection known as “The Peasants Revolt” which ended, as most rebellions do, in failure.
“Villeins ye are,” sneered their young king, Richard II, “and villeins ye shall remain.”
Which is not what happened. Over seven centuries the “sheeple” found ways to bend their ever more dependent shepherds to the iron law of supply and demand. The source of wealth has always been the labour of ordinary people: one cannot become rich on one’s own. Like the sheep with which they are so often and so contemptuously compared the masses are shrewd and patient.
If one is fed and protected, then much is bearable – the dogs, the shearers, even the final flourishing of knives. Look into the strange eyes of a sheep and you will recognise the deep wisdom of acceptance. It is there, too, in the eyes of those whose aspirations remain unsplattered by the blood-red tinctures of revolt.
It is the certainty of a pay-packet, the weathertightness of a roof, the laughter in the voices of children, that ordinary people rise each day to preserve. Like sheep, they understand that their personal safety and the safety of the flock are indivisible.
Make any of those things impossible, Rob, and you will get your revolution. Fortunately, most governments are too intelligent (and too scared) to leave their citizens with nothing to lose.
Provoke a mother ewe too grievously and you will hear her snort and stamp her cloven hoof in warning. Persist in your folly and she will charge: head down and heedless.
Call the people sheep, Rob, there is no higher accolade.
Well done for attracting a different audience. Like you I was brought up around sheep but without the same regard for them. Perhaps my independent streak was encouraged as a small boy by the sight of thirty odd sheep carcases whose owners apparently followed the leader through a hole in the fence to their death on the rocks below. Pretty much describes half the population and economics.
AI 2026 - the planet wide-silent take over by machines that out-think people and don't eat meat