The Legend of Three Stooges

Long ago, before maps learned to sit still, there lived three fat stooges whose names history mercifully forgot. What people remembered instead was their appetite—for certainty, for control, and for being right louder than everyone else.

They owned a thin donkey named VPP. The donkey was frail, ribs like parentheses, but endlessly patient. He carried more weight than he was built for and never complained. They also kept a small mule called KJV, stubborn but familiar, and a fat chicken named TR, pampered, noisy, and convinced it was royalty.

The stooges announced one morning that they would climb the sacred mountain called TT, the Mountain of Total Truth. No one had ever reached its summit, but the stooges declared they already knew what was at the top.

They piled themselves onto the thin donkey.

The donkey staggered but walked.

To prove their seriousness, they brought along the mule and the chicken, and three maidservants—Clement, Lin Kang, and Nyuen—quiet figures who had walked long roads and carried old wisdom in their bones. The stooges did not ask their counsel. They only demanded their labor.

As the journey began, the road rose and narrowed. The mountain grew steep and slick with loose stones. The donkey’s legs trembled. He slowed. The stooges beat him and shouted, accusing him of weakness, of betrayal, of not being “pure” enough for the climb.

At the sharpest slope, VPP collapsed and died.

The stooges did not mourn. They argued over who to blame, then shrugged. Hungry from the climb, they slaughtered the mule and the chicken, roasted them over a fire, and congratulated themselves on their wisdom.

“See?” they said, licking grease from their fingers. “We never needed them anyway.”

Now with no animals left, they turned to the maidservants.

“Carry us,” the stooges commanded.

Clement protested quietly. Lin Kang warned them of the road ahead. Nyuen looked to the horizon and said the mountain was not what they thought it was.

The stooges laughed.

They climbed on the backs of those who had tried to help them, digging in their heels, demanding speed. And somehow—through endurance that did not belong to the stooges—they reached the mountaintop of TT.

But there was nothing there.
No throne.
No banner.
No final answer carved in stone.

Only wind.

Embarrassed and angry, they pushed onward and descended into a place called the Valley of Death, where the light bent strangely and every echo sounded like certainty. There the paths split endlessly, and every sign contradicted the last.

The stooges got lost.

They argued louder, blamed harder, and rode their servants until strength ran out. Clement fell. Ling Kang vanished into the fog. Nyuen simply lay down and would not move again.
At last, when the stooges were alone and terrified, sunlight broke through the valley, revealing a long road leading east. They stumbled forward until they reached the distant Kingdom of Batam, a place famous not for wisdom, but for echo chambers where voices only heard themselves.

There, the three fat stooges died arguing, still insisting they had been right all along.

No one buried them.

The lesson the old storytellers passed down was simple and sharp:

Cruelty always disguises itself as conviction.
Those who bully others in the name of truth end up devouring their own tools, riding the backs of the faithful, and mistaking noise for light. Truth is not carried by force, nor preserved by hunger for dominance.

If you must climb, lighten the load.
If you must teach, do not trample.
And if someone weaker is carrying you, remember—you are already lost.

That is why elders tell children this legend, and why adults grow quiet when they hear it.