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Warning! Dead Parrots Ahead!

Written by: Robin Elliott

Article Overview: There are three kinds of people in the world: Eagles, ducks and dead parrots. Find out which you are and who you want to be spending your time with.

Warning! Dead Parrots Ahead!

In Monty Python’s Flying Circus, there’s an explanation for a parrot's lack of responsiveness: “It's not pining, it's passed on. This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. It's a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn't nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies. It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot.”

There are three kinds of people in the world: Eagles, ducks and dead parrots. Dead Parrots – the world is full of them. They are the people who talk the talk but who never walk the walk, people who copy the words of great men, but have no life of their own. They masquerade as leaders and saviors. They know all the words and all the answers and they have studied much, but their lives are meaningless meanderings of mediocrity and compromise. They hold office, hold forth, but don’t hold any water. They are professors in universities, bureaucrats, mayors of cities and leaders of unions. Figureheads, mouthpieces, slaves. They fear and avoid innovation and creativity at all costs. They are simply parrots and they have no life, no spark, no courage and no integrity. There is a Nykusa proverb that goes, "The dead if not separated from the living, bring madness upon them."

We have to be careful of pretenders and posers. Avoid the fakes and the shadows. The puppets look real, but they’re not; they’re vitriolic ventriloquist’s dolls and they have no conscience. The maps they share are of cities that don’t exist. Their plans are bogus and their promises are lies. Dead Parrots parade proudly through the herd (the ducks), impressing the plebs, amazing the village idiot and, most of all, consuming the creations of the visionaries and producers (the Eagles). We all pity the ducks – they’re the hoi polloi, the stagnant masses, seething humanity. Pretty harmless unless they gang up and group dynamics goes to work, but generally anemic. It’s the Dead Parrots that we have to be careful of.

The sycophantic ducks mindlessly go about their business, looking for a leader to follow, joining the cults, serving the collectivist Dead Parrots and gratefully accepting survival. The Eagles create, produce, lead, innovate and soar. And while the Dead Parrots tolerate, use and abuse the ducks, they hate and fear the Eagles. They gladhand and backslap the Eagles while at the same time backhanding, backstabbing and undermining them. They copy them and then try to kill them. The ducks will frustrate us Eagles and steal from us, but Dead Parrots are out to destroy us and our work.

Eagles are realizing that we need to protect and assist each other. We need to stand together and form a tight formation of interdependent winners. As the “Atlas Shrugged” story goes, “Dagny discovers that all the great minds who retired and vanished from society now live and work in this remote Colorado valley. Ellis Wyatt is here, as are the other Colorado industrialists. Ken Danagger has joined them. The great banker Midas Mulligan owns the valley, and the philosopher Hugh Akston and composer Richard Halley reside here also. Dagny learns, not surprisingly, that Francisco d’Anconia is another thinker who has come here to be free from the looters’ oppressive code.” I suggest you find a group of great minds or create one like I did with the Dollarmakers Joint Venture Forum (www.jvwisdom.com).

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