The Tale of the Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail

In Robert Heinlein’s ‘Time Enough for Love’ there is a sub-story entitled ‘The Tale of the Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail’.

It’s the story of one David Lamb who was extremely smart and able but, in the face of stupidity and bureaucracy that surrounded him, decided to scam his way through life; using his intelligence and empathy to make his life easy, and in doing so, achieving no good for anyone but himself.

Dave Lamb was what I call a ‘me’ type. Someone whose base personality can be measured on one axis as someone whose basic default motivation is aimed at doing good for themselves rather than others. The opposite of a ‘me’ is a ‘good’.

If you look at little children you can immediately tell the me’s from the good’s.

As people mature, many of the me’s learn to adopt the habits of good’s, and it can be harder to tell them apart.

But this is for sure; under stress we all revert to type.

The irony of the story in the book is that it is being narrated by one Lazarus Long, 500 years later. And Lazarus was the old David, and David was the young Lazarus – even though it wasn’t explicitly stated. The characters lived a long time in this book.

If we all had 500 years to contemplate ourselves surely then even the most rigid ‘me’ might be able to work themselves into a ‘good’. As Lazarus did in the book, sort of.

But we don’t have 500 years in our lives.

So if you find yourself, for example, being gutless in the face of hypocrisy aimed at others then you might just have to face that you are a bit of a ‘me’.

That is, someone that can justify not helping others even if one could do so at relatively little cost.