The Country of the Blind

H. G. Wells

3 ideas

1. Nunez and the valley of the blind

   Nunez, a mountaineer, falls into an isolated Andean valley whose people have been blind for fifteen generations and have rebuilt their language, cosmology and daily routines around touch and hearing. He expects the proverb 'in the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king' to hold, but his sight gives him no advantage: they treat his talk of seeing as madness and his eyes as a disease. They agree to let him marry Medina-saroté only if surgeons remove his eyes, and he escapes up the mountainside instead.

2. Superior capability fails inside incompatible systems

   A real advantage turns into power only when the surrounding society has the concepts, practices and physical arrangements that can use it. The blind valley has adapted to its condition so completely that sight has no work to do, and the people who have it cannot even describe it to anyone. The adapted majority does not read the extra ability as a gift. It reads it as a sign that something is wrong with the person who has it.

3. Normality defines deviance as pathology

   A community's shared limitation can become its standard for health, and then any capacity outside that standard gets diagnosed as illness to be cured. The valley's elders explain Nunez's 'delusions' as the result of his eyes, 'irritated' organs, and they prescribe removing them. The lens asks, in any institution, whether the thing being treated as a defect is really a threat to the group's settled way of seeing things.

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