One day an old Cherokee man sits down with his grandson to teach him about life.

“A fight is going on inside of me,” he says to the boy. “It’s a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil — he is full of rage, jealousy, arrogance, greed, sorrow, regret, lies, laziness, and self-pity.”

He continues, “The other is good — he is filled with love, joy, peace, generosity, truth, empathy, courage, humility, and faith. This same fight is going on inside the hearts of everyone, including you.”

The grandson thinks about this for a few minutes, and then asks his grandfather, “Which wolf wins?”

The old Cherokee simply replies, “The one you feed.” Lonerwolf

Sound Bite Wisdom

The two wolves meme is wrong on many levels. It is bad advice, gaslighting, and disinformation.

The advice from the meme or scroll or sermon (it appears in all these forms) is that the wolf you feed wins. That part of the story has some value, but it is paired with another idea that there is bad and good within everyone, and everyone should be fighting for the side they want to win.

One candidate for the source of the idea that what you concentrate on grows and what you ignore fades is Buddhism. In the Dhammapada it says (Acharya Buddharakkhita translating):

42. Whatever harm an enemy may do to an enemy, or a hater to a hater, an ill-directed mind inflicts on oneself a greater harm.

43. Neither mother, father, nor any other relative can do one greater good than one’s own well-directed mind.

Missing in this is any assertion that there is bad inside you, or any sort of statement that there is a fight going on internally. It is simpler to learn to direct your thoughts towards good, sanity, wisdom, and wakefulness, if you are one you. That becomes impossible once you buy into the idea that you are somehow divided internally and at war with yourself.

Here is an Ojibwe voice, with another call to wholeness rather than pushing some kind of internal struggle or division:

Sending tobacco prayers out to all, to be reminded that when we do something bad, it is not our ancestors’ doings. Rather, when we do something bad, it is because our spirits are sleeping and we do not know who is dancing inside our bodies. So stay healthy, do not put anything bad into your vessel of a body that houses your spirit and your ancestors, keep the Red Road of life. Breathe in Mother Earth’s breath and exhale your ancestor’s journeys.

Life is good today

Wisdom Lessons, Spirited Guidance from an Ojibwe Great-Grandmother. Mary Lyons, Greenfirepress, 2018

In the two wolves story we’re being told what is, how things are. Here is an insistence that there are two wolves within all of us, good and bad, and they are at war. This names a problem that doesn’t exist, conjuring it into existence.

This is mind-rape, or if you prefer a more genteel term, gaslighting. Someone is making a career out of inventing realities and imposing them onto their victims. With unbounded confidence, various Indian astrologers, doing business as Shivanda Guruji or Pandit Vishnu, will solve all of your black magic problems. A Christian preacher has a different costume, a different patter, and the same business model.

The story of the two wolves was published by Billy Graham in 1978 with an Eskimo grandfather, most versions circulating now claim it to be a wise old Cherokee grandfather’s advice. This story could not be from both peoples as people living in the high north had no contact with the people living in the eastern plains. There is nothing that supports the idea that it has any aboriginal source. This is a claim put forth without evidence, so Hitchens’s razor applies: it can be dismissed without evidence.

Everything that is known about this story tells us it was written by a Christian preacher and is modern. By boldly stating it to be Cherokee wisdom, what we have is an example of Десинформация¹. Disinformation is a sneaky type of lie, where at one and the same time the source of the lie is hidden, and the lie is crafted to be more likely to be accepted as it comes from a source chosen to be more readily believed by the target audience.

The version I quote at the beginning I pulled from Lonerwolf’s page as he has the closest take to mine that I have found, but he’s still clinging onto it, needing to salvage it. It would be best to look to sources of real wisdom, looking away from rot like this. In place of vague new-agey references to Taoism, have a read through the Chuang-Tzu. Instead of taking a rough guess about Buddhism, read through the Dhammapada. We should take a hard pass on Sound-bite Wisdom printed on scrolls and memes.

[¹]: In reality, disinformation is as different from misinformation as night is from day. *Misinformation* is an official government tool and recognizable as such. *Disinformation* (i.e. dezinformatsiya) is a secret intelligence tool, intended to bestow a Western, nongovernmental cachet on government lies. Let us assume the the FSB (the new KGB) fabricated some documents supposedly proving that American forces were under specific orders to target Islamic houses of worship in their bombing raids over Libya in 2011. If a report on those documents were published in an official Russian news outlet, that would be misinformation, and people in the West might rightly take it with a grain of salt and simply shrug it off as routine Moscow propaganda. If, on the other hand, that same material were made public in the Western media and attributed to some Western organization, that would be disinformation, and the story’s credibility would be substantially greater.

— Disinformation by Ion Mihai Pacepa and Ronald J. Rychlak, WND Books Inc. 2013