A wasp called Pin Tail spends a long time looking for a deed that will make him famous forever.
He settles on one. He enters the king's palace and stings the little prince in his bed.1
The prince wakes screaming. The king and his courtiers rush in. The wasp keeps stinging. The courtiers try to catch him and each one is stung in turn. The whole royal household arrives, the news spreads, people flock to the palace.
The city was in an uproar, all business suspended.1
Complete success. Every measure Law 6 supplies has been met — he is the only thing anyone in the city is attending to.
And then the fable's last clause, which Greene reproduces and does not comment on:
Said the wasp to itself, before it expired from its efforts, "A name without fame is like fire without flame. There is nothing like attracting notice at any cost."1
Before it expired.
The wasp dies. Not later, not as a consequence of retaliation — from the effort of the stinging itself. The technique that produced the attention consumed the creature performing it, and the fable puts the death and the triumphant motto in the same sentence.
Greene sets this in the margin beside Barnum's near-lynching in Annapolis, as an illustration of notoriety of any sort will bring you power. Read as intended, it is a fable about the value of notice at any cost.
Read as written, it is a fable about the cost.
The moral the wasp delivers is the moral of Law 6. The narrative surrounding it is a refutation, and the two are eleven words apart.
Take the outcome seriously rather than as a fable's convenient irony, because the accounting is precise.
The attention was total. The palace, the household, the city. Business suspended. No showman in this book achieves a higher share of a population's attention than Pin Tail achieves in an afternoon.
The attention was anonymous. Nobody in the city is talking about Pin Tail. They are talking about a wasp. The uproar is entirely about the event and carries no name at all — which is the failure the motto claims to have solved.
The attention was terminal. He cannot be present for the second act. Whatever the notice was for, it arrives after he is unavailable to use it.
So the fable is not making the ordinary point that fame is dangerous. It is making a sharper one: the wasp achieved maximum notice, zero identity, and no capacity to convert either — and died believing he had done the thing he set out to do.
Greene's Law 6 is about attaching your name to attention. Aretino's satires made Aretino known. Barnum's hoaxes made Barnum known. The wasp made an incident known and nothing else, and that distinction is exactly what the fable is built to dramatise.
This is the fourth complete fable in this build to be set in the margins of a law it partly contradicts, and the pattern is now stable enough to state.
Law 2 carries the African snake-farmer-heron tale, whose escalating chain of punished kindnesses is bleaker than the chapter's psychological account of ingratitude.
Law 3 carries Jehu at the temple of Ba'al, a mass killing filed beside a boxing con as an equivalent illustration of the smoke screen.
Law 5 carries La Fontaine's plague assembly, whose moral — the court will paint you white or black by your estate — denies the chapter's claim that reputation is built by the individual.
Law 6 carries a wasp who dies of the effort and calls it a philosophy.
In every case the marginal narrative is more pessimistic and more structurally complete than the body text it decorates, and in every case Greene reproduces it without remark.
Which raises a question about the book's construction rather than its content. The fables were selected by someone — they are apt, they are well chosen, they land on the right page. But an anthology's structure lets a compiler place a counter-argument in the margin without ever having to answer it, and the reader's eye treats marginal material as ornament.
The most honest material in this book is in the gutter, and the format is what allows it to be there.
You are about to do something conspicuous — a public disagreement, a stunt, a piece of deliberate provocation — and it will work.
Run the wasp's ledger before you do it, because his three failures are the three that actually occur.
Will the attention carry your name, or just the event? This is the common failure and it is not obvious in advance. A striking action gets discussed as an action. If people can describe what happened without being able to say who did it, you have suspended the city's business for nothing.
Will you still be in a position to use it? The wasp's attention peaked at the moment he became unavailable. The professional equivalents are ordinary: the resignation letter that goes viral after you have left, the argument you win on the way out, the exposé that ends your standing in the field it exposes. The notice arrives and you are not there to spend it.
What is the recovery cost, and have you priced it or only the payoff? The wasp's calculation contained a benefit and no expenditure. He was not wrong that stinging the prince would produce an uproar; he simply never asked what stinging that many people would take out of him.
And the general form, which is the fable's real content: enthusiasm for a plan tends to price the effect and not the effort. The wasp's motto is a genuinely good piece of strategy. It is also the last thing he says.
Strongest support. A complete narrative with its own stated moral, a specified mechanism (escalating provocation recruits an audience), and a structural feature — the death clause — that makes it self-critiquing in a way the body text is not.
Tension — the fable refutes the law it illustrates. There is nothing like attracting notice at any cost is spoken by a creature who has just paid the cost. Greene reproduces both halves and treats the motto as the content.
Tension — attribution. Sourced only as INDIAN FABLE — a country and nothing else. Better than the continent-level "AFRICAN FOLK TALE" at Law 2, and considerably worse than the named, dated European quotations on the same pages (Aretino, Castiglione, Warnke). The sourcing across this book's marginal column is inconsistent in a way that tracks the material's origin.
Tension — the fable may not be about attention at all. Read in its own tradition it is more plausibly a warning about the futility of vanity, which is close to the opposite of Greene's use. He selects it for its motto and the motto is the part a moralist would treat as the error being illustrated.
🚩 SINGLE SOURCE · 🚩 SECONDARY WITHOUT PRIMARY · 🚩 TRANSLATION DISTORTION — a fable given no tradition, region, collector, date or translator, reproduced by a Western popular author in support of a reading its own narrative undercuts. [POPULAR SOURCE].
Open questions.
Greene's Attention Without Discrimination — the body text this fable sits beside — carries the law's absolute: the quality of the attention is irrelevant, and better to be slandered and attacked than ignored.
The wasp agrees with the absolute and demonstrates its missing term.
Greene's claim is comparative: attention beats obscurity. The fable does not dispute that. What it adds is that the comparison is being made between two states while ignoring the transition between them — the stinging, which is where the wasp's resources went.
Which is the same gap as the Lola Montez Reversal in the same chapter, arriving from the other direction. Montez shows the attention can be reversed by someone who outranks you. The wasp shows it can be unaffordable even when nothing goes wrong and nobody opposes you.
Between them, Law 6's absolute has two failure modes and Greene marks one of them, in a Reversal, four pages later.
→ psychology · Emotional Mastery as Power Foundation
The Preface page holds Greene's real position on feeling: not suppression — feel it fully, express it carefully, and never let it hold the pen on a decision.
The wasp is that failure at its purest, and the fable is unusually precise about where it occurs.
Pin Tail "was long in quest of some deed that would make him forever famous." The desire came first and ran for a long time; the plan was found afterwards, to serve it.
Which is the sequence the Preface warns about. The emotion did not corrupt the execution — the stinging was well executed and achieved exactly what it was designed to achieve. The emotion selected the objective, and an objective chosen by a need is not evaluated against costs, because the need is not interested in costs.
The insight neither page yields alone: a plan that emerged from a want will be assessed on whether it satisfies the want, never on what it consumes. Which is why the wasp's motto is coherent and his death is not a contradiction he could have noticed. He got what he was after. The accounting was complete on the only ledger he was keeping.
And it supplies the practical test the Preface page implies but does not state: not am I being emotional about this decision, but did this objective arrive before or after the desire that it serves? The first is a plan. The second is a discharge with a plan attached.
→ creative-practice · The Validation Lag
That page documents recognition arriving only after an external authority has vouched for work the audience already had access to — two years of silence, then a newspaper profile, then praise.
Put beside the wasp and the two identify opposite failures of the same system, which is what makes the pair useful.
The validation lag is recognition without an event: the work exists, it is good, and nothing happens because no authority has certified it. Attention withheld from something real.
The wasp is an event without recognition: maximum notice, instantly, attached to no name. Attention granted to something that cannot hold it.
Between them they identify what is actually scarce, and it is neither the work nor the attention. It is the attachment — the mechanism that binds a burst of notice to a durable identity, and it is supplied by third parties rather than by the actor.
Krisang's newspaper did it. Barnum's press coverage did it. Nothing did it for the wasp, and nothing could have, because he had no name in circulation for the incident to attach to.
Which reframes the whole of Law 6: the chapter teaches how to generate events, and events are the cheap half. The expensive and largely uncontrollable half is whether anything sticks to you afterwards — and Greene's own exemplars all had a name already circulating before their famous stunts.
Sharpest implication. The wasp achieved a higher share of a population's attention than any showman in this book and got nothing, because the uproar carried no name. He suspended the business of an entire city and died of it, and the city was discussing an incident. Which is the distinction Law 6 assumes and never states: generating an event is cheap and largely a matter of nerve; having the event attach to you is a separate problem, solved by other people, and no amount of stinging solves it.
Generative questions.