The Monkey Who Guarded the Mangoes

During a severe famine that left most of the forest's fruit trees bare, a troop of monkeys discovered one grove of mango trees still bearing fruit, and, wisely wanting to ration it carefully rather than let everyone strip it bare in a single desperate free-for-all, appointed one trusted monkey to guard the grove and distribute the fruit fairly each day.

The appointed guardian, alone with the grove and unsupervised for long hours each day, quickly began eating the ripest, sweetest mangoes himself in secret before the others arrived, then distributing only the smaller, less ripe fruit to the rest of the starving troop, who assumed this was simply the natural quality of what remained.

A sharp-eyed young monkey, noticing juice stains and discarded ripe peels hidden behind a rock near the guard's usual resting spot, quietly investigated and exposed the deception before the whole troop. Rather than simply punishing the guilty monkey and moving on, the troop's elders instituted a new system entirely: guard duty would now rotate daily among several monkeys who would watch each other as much as the grove, since they had learned that trusting any single individual with unsupervised power over a shared resource, however trusted he seemed at first, was itself the real mistake — not the monkey's greed, which was predictable, but the system that gave one hungry creature unwatched access to food everyone else depended on.