“The Gramophone Spins, the Glock Speaks: Lessons in Adaptable Wisdom”

There’s something deliciously ironic about how we’ve managed to arm ourselves to the teeth with both rules and the means to ignore them.

On the one hand, my country churns out regulations like a factory on steroids—an endless stream of shalt and thou-shalt-nots that would make Moses’s stone tablets look like Post-it notes. We long left Happy Holland behind with its characteristic Protestant yet Pirate mentality.

On the other hand, we’re witnessing the rise of leaders who regard these “sacred” texts with all the reverence of yesterday’s shopping list.

Quite the predicament we’ve built for ourselves, isn’t it?

As a child, I spent hours lost in the hypnotic spin of my gramophone, consuming tales of children abandoned in forests, women locked in towers, and wolves dressed as grandmothers waiting to devour the innocent. Imagine the internal conflict when the father of my youngest called me “Caperucita Roja,” aka Red Riding Hood! (He certainly turned out the wolf in sheep clothes.)

These “sprookjes,” as we called them in Dutch, were nightmares packaged in cotton candy—brutal lessons wrapped in enchanting melodies. We never questioned the disconnect—that’s just how stories worked.

Fast forward to motherhood. With my first child, I dutifully regurgitated these grim Grimm tales, complete with all their severed limbs and wicked stepmothers. By the time my second came along, I’d softened somewhat, though I’d still belt out Nirvana’s “Rape Me” as a lullaby. (Don’t judge – the melody is surprisingly soothing when you ignore the lyrics, which, let’s face it, is what we do with most cultural inheritances.)

By my third child, I’d gone full revisionist, crafting tales of heroines and dwarves who didn’t need saving and villains with redemption arcs more complex than tax code. Somewhere along the line, I’d recognized the rigid artifice of these Western narratives and started improvising.

It took my African colleagues to help me understand what I was instinctively reaching for – stories that breathe and evolve with the teller and audience, not tales fossilized in amber and guarded by literary archaeologists who cry blasphemy at the slightest deviation.

African oral traditions don’t venerate the preservation of exact wording as we do in the West. They understand something we’ve forgotten: wisdom that cannot adapt dies. A story that cannot evolve in response to changing realities becomes irrelevant and dangerous at best.

And here’s where the Glock comes in.

We’re watching in real-time as societies armed with nothing, but rulebooks face off against those willing to wield raw power without regard for the law. It’s like bringing a grammar textbook to a gunfight. The rulebook says, “You can’t do that,” and the gun replies, “Watch me.”

The sad comedy of our situation is that we keep writing more rules, as if quantity might solve what quality cannot. As if the 1001st regulation will finally be the one that cannot be ignored. (Since when did a helmet for cycling make sense?!) Meanwhile, those who have never cared about rules continue not caring, with increasingly devastating consequences.

African oral traditions offer a different approach. They understand that resilience doesn’t come from having perfect rules but from communities who share values deeper than words on a page. Their stories don’t pretend that wolves don’t exist or that they can be regulated into vegetarianism. Instead, they teach communities how to recognize wolves regardless of their disguises and how to respond collectively when threats emerge.

When I watch how these communities navigate crises – climatic, political, economic – I see something we’ve lost. They don’t waste time citing subsection C of paragraph 12. They draw on collective wisdom transmitted through generations, wisdom that has survived precisely because it adapts.

My own journey from Grimm to improvisation mirrors what our societies desperately need: fewer rigid prescriptions that can be manipulated by the clever or ignored by the powerful and more living traditions that cultivate judgment, discernment, and collective action.

The irony is that we think ourselves more advanced for having written everything down, codified and cross-referenced. Yet here we stand, caught between the business end of authoritarianism and the dusty gramophone of rules too rigid to save us.

Perhaps it’s time we learned to tell new stories – stories that acknowledge both the wolf and our power to face it together. Stories flexible enough to adapt but rooted enough to guide. Stories that don’t just entertain or prescribe but empower.

The gramophone keeps spinning. The Glock remains loaded. But the story doesn’t have to end the way it began.

I’ll start: Once upon a time, there was a community that remembered how to write its own ending…

Your turn.

May Harmony find you,

Irena Phaedra

P.S. Take as soundtrack Peer Gynt: In the Hall of the Mountain King.