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The Gingerbread man


The gingerbread man is a widely told story in Europe. In Slavic countries, it is a 'Kolobok', a round dough ball baked in the oven. 

The basic story is that an old woman bakes the gingerbread man, who, upon being taken out of the oven, runs away. It is chased by the old woman, her husband, various people and animals but none can catch him. The gingerbread man runs until he reaches a river, which he cannot cross. A fox comes along and offers to let the gingerbread man cross on his back. The gingerbread man accepts. Halfway across the fox suggests the gingerbread man move to his neck, then his head, then his nose, whereupon he flicks the gingerbread man into the air and eats him. End of gingerbread man.

The gingerbread man can be thought of as some kind of potential - it is food that should be integrated into a human. However, it comes to life, and in the case of the gingerbread man, this could be because it was given eyes and a mouth - that is, given an identity. In the case of the Kolobok, it is prepared from the scrapings of the flourbin and left on the sill to cool: it has a marginal identity and is left in a transitionary space (the windowsill). Marginal things don't fit the system and are by definition going to do odd things.

We thus have a wild form of potential, brought to life by the actions of the baker. None of the village can capture the gingerbread man, and none of the wild animals can catch the Kolobok: it is untameable, unable to be mastered by strength. This is captured in the song that both the Kolobok and gingerbread man sing, which taunts his pursuers by pointing out that no-one can outrun him. The origin of the word 'Kolobok' is uncertain, but Wikipedia gives the following possibilities:

connected with Proto-Slavic: *klǫbъ ("Something twisted, has a round form, similar to a ball", "club");

has aperiance in Latvian: kalbaks ("a piece of bread");

from Proto-Slavic: *kolo ("circle", "wheel"), that is, "that which is round and rolling";

from Greek: κόλλαβος ("kind of wheat bread, pie");

Which are interesting, because they include references to circles, wheels and balls. All of these ideas fit with the idea of a peripheral figure, and the edge of the wheel is that which runs the fastest. 

Only the fox is able to catch the gingerbread man, who is stopped by a river, a form of chaotic transition that will lead to a higher state of being. In the case of the Kolobok, the fox asks the Kolobok to sing his song while sitting on his tongue. The fox is also a marginal figure, a trickster, stealer and deceiver, something adapted to live on the edge of the world. Only he is able to master the wild potential of the edge, and that only by trickery, because nothing can outrun the gingerbread man. And it should also be mentioned that the gingerbread man and kolobok are rather prideful, so confident in their speed that they don't for an instant consider the danger of the fox.

We can see this pattern in such things as cryptocurrencies, and large internet companies. The system allows for some massive form of potential to be unleashed and set rolling down the road. No-one can tame the waves of bitcoin or the algorithms of Facebook. We haven't yet reached the end of these stories, but you can see glimpses of how fools and other marginal figures perform better in this world than normal people. 

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