The Cage Series: A Beautiful Cage is Still A Cage

There are cages made of iron. And then there are cages with comfortable chairs. Those are harder to recognize.

Aesop tells of a king with one beloved son, a young man fond of martial exercises and presumably quite capable of finding trouble without paternal assistance.

Then the king has a dream. His son will be killed by a lion.

So the father does what frightened people have been doing to people they love since approximately forever:

He decides that if he can control enough variables, nothing terrible will happen. He builds his son a palace. Not a dungeon. That matters.

It is pleasant. Beautiful. Safe. The walls are decorated with life-sized paintings of animals for the young prince's amusement.

The king gives his son everything. Except a door. And among the painted animals is a lion.

The King Wasn't Cruel

This is what makes the fable interesting. 

It would be much easier if the king were a tyrant. Then we could boo appropriately, throw a few metaphorical vegetables, congratulate ourselves on recognizing oppression, and move along.

But he isn't. He is afraid. His actions come from love complicated by terror.

He believes he is saving his son's life. And that makes this ancient little story painfully modern.

Because some of the most suffocating words in the English language can be: I'm only doing this because I worry about you.

The sentence may be completely sincere. It may also precede the removal of someone's choices. We do this with adult children. We do it with aging parents. We do it with disabled family members.

We do it with people recovering from illness, people with cognitive difficulties, people who have fallen, people who have made bad decisions and people whose decisions simply frighten us.

Sometimes restrictions are necessary. Sometimes someone genuinely cannot safely do what they once did.

But there is a difference between helping a person navigate risk and quietly replacing their life with one we have decided is safer. Love does not automatically make control harmless. 

The Painted Forest

The detail I cannot stop thinking about is the artwork. The prince's walls are covered with animals. Imagine that palace.

Forests painted across plaster. Deer beneath trees. Birds frozen forever in flight. Perhaps wolves on distant hills and horses galloping beneath Nordic skies.

Everything he might have encountered outside has been carefully reproduced inside. Here is the world, son. You just can't enter it.

There is something almost more painful about that than an empty cell. A prison announces itself honestly. A beautiful cage can confuse you. 

You are housed. You are warm. You are fed. Someone is looking after you. What exactly do you have to complain about?

Only this: Your life is no longer yours.

That is not a small thing.

Safety Is Not the Same Thing as Living

Modern psychology gives us better language for what Aesop merely shows us. Human beings need some sense that their actions matter. That they can make choices. That they have meaningful influence over what happens next.

Research in residential aged care, for example, has found that greater autonomy is associated with better well-being, while experiences of being controlled are associated with poorer outcomes—particularly psychological well-being.

This does not mean everyone must be permitted to do absolutely anything they please. None of us live that way.

Children have limits. Illness creates limits. Disability creates limits. Money creates limits. Bodies create limits. Other people's rights create limits.

The issue isn't whether limits exist. The issue is whether a human being still experiences themselves as a participant in their own life.

There is an enormous difference between: “How can we make this safer for you?” and “You are not doing that anymore.”

One preserves agency. The other can slowly erase it. 

What Happens When Nothing You Do Matters?

Psychology has another useful concept here: learned helplessness.

The original research grew from experiments showing that repeated exposure to situations a subject could not control could eventually reduce attempts to escape—even when escape later became possible. The idea was subsequently studied in humans as well.

That doesn't mean every person who loses autonomy develops learned helplessness.

Human beings are considerably messier than laboratory diagrams. Some become passive. Some become depressed. Some stop initiating things.

Some ruminate. Some become irritable. Some become furious. And some start banging metaphorical sticks against painted lions.

Which brings us back to the prince. 

He Does Not Try to Escape

This is the strangest part of the story. The prophecy says a lion will kill him. The king assumes the danger exists outside the palace. But the prince never reaches the outside world.

Instead, one day his grief over confinement erupts again. He stands before the painted lion—the image of the creature responsible for his imprisonment—and rages at it. Then he reaches toward a thorn tree to cut a branch with which to strike the lion.

A thorn pierces his finger. The wound becomes inflamed. A fever follows. And the prince dies.

Townsend's nineteenth-century version ends with the moral: “We had better bear our troubles bravely than try to escape them.”

Fair enough, Aesop. But I think there is another story sitting underneath it.

The prince does not die because he disobeys his father and runs recklessly into the forest. He dies inside the safe place. His anger is directed at a painting. His rebellion has become so compressed that his enemy is an image on a wall.

The king succeeded in keeping every lion away from his son. He did not succeed in keeping suffering away from him. And in trying to eliminate one danger, he created another kind of life entirely.

The Trouble With Zero Risk

People who love us often want certainty. We want it for them too. 

No falls. No bad relationships. No financial mistakes. No driving accidents. No wandering. No strangers. No exhaustion. No heartbreak.

No possibility that the dreadful thing we imagine at three in the morning might actually happen.

So we begin trimming away risk. Then we trim a little more. Eventually we may discover that we have eliminated a large portion of the person's life along with it.

There is no completely safe version of being alive.

Walking contains the possibility of falling.

Driving contains the possibility of crashing.

Loving contains the possibility of grief.

Choosing contains the possibility of choosing badly.

Autonomy has consequences.

That is partly what makes it autonomy.

The goal therefore cannot always be: How do I stop anything bad from happening?

Sometimes the wiser question is: How do we preserve as much life as possible while managing the risks that are actually present?

Those are very different questions.

Care Without Captivity

Real care may occasionally require saying no.

But it should also remain curious.

What can this person still do?

What decisions can remain theirs?

Can a dangerous activity be modified rather than abolished?

Can assistance increase freedom instead of merely increasing supervision?

Can we distinguish between this frightens me and this is demonstrably unsafe?

And perhaps most importantly:

Have we asked the person whose life we are reorganizing?

Because a person can be grateful for help and still resent control.

They can understand your fear and still want their keys.

They can love you and still want you out of the driver's seat of their life.

Those things are not contradictions.

The Lion on the Wall

I keep returning to that painted lion. The king meant it as decoration. The prince experienced it as accusation.

There stood the whole reason for his confinement, staring back at him every day while being completely incapable of harming him.

The real lion was never in the room. Fear was. Fear built the palace. Fear locked the door. Fear called the arrangement protection. And love paid for the furnishings.

That may be the uncomfortable wisdom hidden inside this strange little fable.

Sometimes the cage is built by someone who loves you. Sometimes every bar has a perfectly reasonable explanation.

Sometimes the person holding the key is frightened, exhausted and entirely convinced that they are doing the right thing.

And sometimes they may even be partly right. But the person inside the cage is still inside a cage.

A palace does not become freedom because the wallpaper is beautiful.

A painted forest is not a walk beneath trees.

And being kept alive is not quite the same thing as being allowed to live.

A beautiful cage is still a cage.

🦁Where in your life has someone else’s fear been allowed to make your decisions for you?