The Parable of Molson’s Toilet
For the first time, a man encounters a toilet.
He thinks to himself, “this looks like a nice place to piss.”
After urinating in it a few times, he starts to wonder what the oval shaped flapping thing with a hole is for.
”Every time it’s down, I just piss all over it,” he observes.
One day, tired of getting pee on his pants from splash-back, he removes it, still unsure what it was for.
But the next day, he is hit with a terrible case of diarrhea.
“Oh no, I don’t have time to make it to the latrine. I’ll run to the toilet instead!”
He rushes to the toilet and goes to squat.
And he falls right in!
And that’s when he realizes, relieved that he didn’t shit his pants, but with a butt soaked in toilet water, what that flappy thing was for.
“It was a place for me to place my feet so I wouldn’t fall in!”
Never remove something until you know what it is for.
“The Parable of Molson’s Toilet” was a (hopefully humorous) adaptation of the wisdom of “Chesterton’s Fence”, a useful heuristic for those who wish to reform institutions or laws.
