The Country of the Blind — In the Land of the Blind, Who Needs Eyes?
The Country of the Blind — H.G. Wells Session 2
Gems from the world | 26th December 2025
The Blind World We Live In
We live in a world shaped by the majority’s vision. The collective decides what’s true, what’s valuable, and what’s meaningful. The individual, caught in the matrix, rarely asks: What do I see? Even existentialism, in all its rebellion, still operates within this duality—rejecting the world, yet never truly confronting the self. The Country of the Blind flips this: the blind are free, not in spite of their blindness, but because of it. They live as if the world is their own, and they don’t even question it.
Love in the Land of the Blind
In the story, Nunez sacrifices his eyes for love—an act of devotion that sounds noble but is built on a lie. He chooses to live by the standards of those who can’t even see the world he once cherished. Yet, isn’t that how we all fall into the trap of conformity? The world may be blind, but we choose to believe in its truth. Even in this blindness, there’s an illusion of choice: “Become blind for me,” she says. But in the end, it’s not about choice; it’s about surrendering to what the world deems as real.
The Maya of Sight and the Illusion of Choice
We think we see. But the truth is, even in our sight, we are blind. The world tells us to choose—to make a decision, to pursue something, to belong. But if you don’t know who you are, how can you choose? In the blind society, choice is irrelevant. There is no freedom in choosing when the chooser is already bound by the world’s expectations. The true freedom is in unknowing, in not choosing. The empty boat, says Chuang Tzu, is not yours, nor the river nor the oarsman. You are not the chooser, but the choice itself.
Familiarity and Authority: The Subtle Bondage
The idea that you must choose is a prison. We are told that if you don’t make a decision, you are a failure, a loser. But the truth is, the chooser has been overwhelmed by authority. The world imposes a thousand lanes on you, yet freedom comes only when you stop walking down any of them. Freedom is for the free, and the free are those who don’t need to choose. The passive choice—the belief that you must act, must decide, is what suffocates us. It’s the illusion of freedom that is destroying the planet.
The False Temple of Emotion
Emotion is another form of control. We are taught to revere our feelings, to protect them, to sanctify them. But emotion is merely the result of the ego—it is not sacred. “Man is condemned to be free,” Sartre wrote. The very essence of freedom is the recognition that you are not bound by feelings, that you don’t need to act on every impulse, and that your existence is not defined by what you feel. Don’t turn emotion into something sacred. Feel it, but don’t live by it.
Breaking the Chain of Illusion
Nunez’s struggle in The Country of the Blind is not just about sight, but about seeing itself. He comes to the blind to teach them what he knows, only to find that his knowledge is meaningless in their world. The blind don’t need his eyes—they need his surrender. And in that surrender, they are free. We, too, must choose to see—truly see—not with the eyes of the world but with the clarity that comes from beyond all illusion. To choose sight is to choose liberation from the bonds of the ego.
Beyond Choice, Beyond Control
In the end, the choice is simple: see with the world’s eyes, or with your own. The world will continue to tell you to make decisions, to follow rules, to conform. But true freedom doesn’t come from making the “right” choices. It comes from stepping out of the cycle, from refusing to participate in the game. The only question left is: Will you choose to see?
Egoless Existence: The Path Forward
Ego is the ultimate illusion. It creates a false sense of self that compels us to act, to feel, to respond. But there is no self—just cause and effect. If someone slaps you and your cheeks burn, ask yourself: Who is feeling this? The moment the ego is absent, what remains is pure cause and effect. The goal is to live without the ego—to act without attachment, without identification. The birds don’t think about flying, and we, too, must learn to live without thinking about the act of living. When we stop preparing, stop planning, and let life unfold on its own, only then do we glimpse true beauty.
In the End, Let Go of the Blindness
In the Country of the Blind, the blind are kings, not because they see more, but because they have accepted their blindness. The real blindness lies not in the eyes, but in the mind. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you must conform, or that you must become something. The truth is simple: you don’t need to be saved because you are not the one who is lost. When you realize there’s nothing to be found, that’s when true freedom emerges.
The Core Message:
In a world of blind choices, only the one who dares to see will truly be free. Don’t fall for the illusion of decision, or the sanctity of emotion. Just live, and know that you are not the chooser, but the flow itself.
‘The Country of the Blind’: summary
The story is about a mysterious valley in South America where a community grew up, separated from the rest of civilisation. A disease struck the community which meant that people went blind, until each new generation was born completely sightless.
An man from Ecuador, named Nunez, while acting as a mountain-guide for some Englishmen, falls and ends up amongst this ‘country of the blind’. He has heard the legends about them, and regards the whole thing as an adventure. He recalls the old proverb, ‘In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King’, and thinks he will ‘teach’ them about the world beyond their village.
When he is taken to see their elders, however, he discovers that over the course of the fourteen generations that their people had lived in this valley, they had developed their own world cut off from the rest of civilisation: their valley was the whole world to them, and birds in the sky were ‘angels’ with their gift of flight and their beautiful song.
Instead of day and night, they divide the day up into ‘warm’ and ‘cold’, because they cannot see the light (or dark) but can sense the temperature of the land by day and night. Because they don’t need to work by daylight, they sleep during the warm (i.e. daytime) and work during the cold (i.e. night-time).
Communication between Nunez and the blind is not perfect, and when they are trying to ascertain who he is, they misinterpret his responses and believe his name is ‘Bogota’ (whereas that is the place where he came from before his fall).
The people of the Country of the Blind view Nunez as someone who has been created so that he might learn from them; Nunez, of course, has other ideas and wishes to teach (and lord it over) the blind. His speech is not as beautiful or as elegant as theirs (their skill with language appears to have developed, presumably because speech was more important to them as they could not rely on visual cues or observing body language in conversation).
Although Nunez believes he is a King among these people, he is ‘a clumsy and useless stranger’ whose sense of hearing and smell is nowhere near as good as it is among those he considers his royal subjects. They do not recognise such concepts as ‘sight’ and ‘blind’: these words do not figure in their vocabulary.
He seeks to amaze them with his knowledge of what the world looks like (and the stars beyond), but they disbelieve him, arguing that the world ends at the edges of their own valley and that there is a roof of stone over the world (instead of the sky).
Becoming increasingly frustrated that his plan to become their King has not proved as easy to implement as he’d hoped, Nunez gets angry one day and picks up a spade, meaning to strike one of them down. He keeps repeating to himself, ‘In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King’.
However, he finds that he cannot morally bring himself to hit a blind person in cold blood, and when he the blind all gather against him, armed with their own spades, he runs away.
However, he cannot survive for long on his own, without food, and so he ends up going back to them and submitting to them, apologising for his former behaviour and telling them what he knows they want to hear: that he was mistaken when he said he could ‘see’ and that there is a stone roof over the world, as they argue there is.
Nunez becomes a citizen of the Country of the Blind, and is attracted to a young woman, Medina-saroté, who is unmarried because her face does not conform to the ideals of feminine beauty among the blind (but very much appeals to Nunez, since she has long eyelashes and lacks the sunken eyes which the rest of the blind have in this world). The two of them fall in love, and Nunez ventures to tell her about the beauty of sight. She listens and appears to understand.
However, Yacob, her father, forbids them to marry because he (and the rest of the blind) view Nunez as an ‘idiot’ who ‘has delusions’. Yacob can see how much his daughter loves Nunez, however, so he speaks to one of the other elders, a doctor, who examines Nunez and says that the problem with Nunez’s brain seems to stem from his eyes, which are unlike those of the blind. He proposes a surgical operation to remove Nunez’s eyes so he will be cured and can then marry Medina-saroté.
Nunez resists the proposal at first, but Medina-saroté tells him he should go through with it for her, so they will be allowed to be together. Although she seems to understand Nunez’s gift of sight, she knows that her father will not allow them to marry unless her would-be husband is ‘cured’ of his ability to see.
He agrees to this reluctantly, but when the day arrives for the operation to be carried out, he finds he cannot go through with it, so much does his sight mean to him. So he leaves the village and begins the long climb up the mountains so that he might escape the Country of the Blind and get back to Bogota and civilisation. The story ends with him lying ‘peacefully contented’ under the stars when night comes.