By Kuruvilla Pandikattu SJ
In a small courtyard, a hen arrives wary and alert. The owner’s footsteps feel like threat. She flinches at shadows, keeps distance, and treats every human approach as danger.
Then a different pattern begins. The owner feeds her—once, then again, then daily. Grain appears with clockwork reliability. Water is placed within reach. The hen’s fear loosens into familiarity. She grows. Her feathers brighten. She starts waiting for the owner, not hiding from him. A bond forms, built on repetition.
This is where British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) sets his trap for our complacency. In The Problems of Philosophy, he notes that domestic animals learn to expect food from the person who usually feeds them—yet that expectation can be fatally mistaken. Russell’s line is chilling precisely because it is ordinary: the feeder can become the killer (Russell, 1912; see also Russell, 1912/online ed.).
Our hen interprets a run of good days as a promise. The evidence is real: she has been fed. The inference is fragile: she assumes she will continue to be fed.
And then—suddenly, from her point of view—the story flips. One afternoon the owner does not bring grain. The household prepares a feast. The hen is slaughtered, roasted, and served—tandoori, fragrant and final.
Russell’s point is philosophical, but it is not abstract. It sits in the centre of modern life: we keep confusing trend with guarantee.
Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) gave the classic diagnosis: no amount of past regularity can logically prove that the future will resemble it (Hume, 1748/2000). We live by induction because we must, not because it is watertight. The hen’s mistake is our daily habit: “It has gone on like this; therefore it will go on like this.”
The parable becomes sharper when we ask a harder question: not “What happened yesterday?” but “What is the system for?” The hen does not understand the owner’s incentives. She experiences feeding as kindness, but it may be husbandry—care designed for later extraction.
That is why the story travels so well from the courtyard to the economy.
In personal relationships, a steady period of warmth can be genuine and still not be stable. Trust grows through repetition; so can imbalance, silent bargaining, and accumulated grievance. The break often looks sudden only because the underlying pressures were not taken seriously early enough. The lesson is not paranoia; it is moral attention: look for the conditions that make care durable, not merely frequent.
In well-being, we also imagine a smooth ascent. Yet the psychology literature has long warned that people adapt quickly to improvements; yesterday’s jackpot becomes today’s normal (Brickman & Campbell, 1971). Progress is real, but its emotional returns are not endless.
In economics, the parable becomes a critique of “unbroken growth” narratives. American economist Hyman P. Minsky (1919–1996) argued that stability itself can breed fragility: long calm periods encourage greater risk-taking and leverage until a crisis becomes structurally likely—the system’s success writes the script for its reversal (Minsky, 1986).
That is the economic version of the hen’s tragedy. A society sees years of expansion and begins to treat growth as the default state of reality. Policy, business, and personal aspirations are then built on the assumption that the feeding will continue. When shocks arrive—financial, climatic, geopolitical—the damage is intensified because too much of the system was optimised for efficiency and speed, not for resilience and slack.
This is where contemporary risk research becomes morally relevant. The Cambridge Existential-risk researcher Luke Kemp and colleagues argue that prudent risk management demands serious study of worst-case climate outcomes, not only “most likely” scenarios (Kemp et al., 2022). In complex, tightly coupled systems, failures can cascade. What looks like “unthinkable” disruption becomes thinkable once interdependence and amplification are acknowledged.
Notice what connects Russell’s hen, Minsky’s instability, and climate “endgame” thinking: the reversal is not always an accident. Fragility is often engineered—by incentives that reward short horizons, externalise costs, and treat buffers as waste.
Conclusion: inequality, capitalism, and the coming knife-edge
The most politically urgent implication is inequality. French economist Thomas Piketty (1971– ) documents how, absent countervailing institutions, capitalist dynamics can produce persistent and widening disparities—especially when returns to capital outpace overall growth (Piketty, 2014). Inequality is not merely an ethical blemish; it is a systemic risk. It concentrates power, weakens social trust, and makes societies more brittle when shocks hit.
In that sense, the hen’s story is not only about epistemology. It is about how capitalism can train populations to trust a rising curve while ignoring who controls the yard, who sets the terms of survival, and who bears the losses when the pattern breaks. Capitalism’s great strength—its capacity to generate growth—becomes dangerous when it pretends that growth is a moral entitlement and not a contingent achievement. When inequality rises, the promise of progress becomes unevenly distributed, and the eventual “setback” is rarely shared fairly.
Or, in the language of Lebanese-American risk scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960– ), systems that look robust can hide catastrophic downside; what matters is exposure to ruin, not comfort during the good run (Taleb, 2007).
Russell’s hen teaches a final discipline for our time: enjoy the feeding, but do not worship it. Build relationships, institutions, and economies that expect reversals—because reversals are not anomalies. In a highly unequal capitalism, they may be the system’s default way of “collecting its due.”
References
Brickman, P., & Campbell, D. T. (1971). Hedonic relativism and planning the good society. In Adaptation-level theory: A symposium (pp. 287–302). Academic Press.
Hume, D. (2000). An enquiry concerning human understanding (T. L. Beauchamp, Ed.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1748)
Kemp, L., Xu, C., Depledge, J., Ebi, K. L., Gibbins, G., Köhler, T. A., Rockström, J., Scheffer, M., Schellnhuber, H. J., Steffen, W., & Lenton, T. M. (2022). Climate endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(34), e2108146119.
Minsky, H. P. (1986). Stabilizing an unstable economy. Yale University Press.
Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century (A. Goldhammer, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
Russell, B. (1912). The problems of philosophy. Williams and Norgate.
Taleb, N. N. (2007). The black swan: The impact of the highly improbable. Random House.
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