My problem with this is, that like a number of Kafka's parables, the more I think about it, the less I understand it.

There is a mouse, and a mouse-trap, and a cat. The mouse is running towards the trap, he says, and the cat says that to avoid it, all he must do is change his direction and eats the mouse. What? Where did this cat come from? Is this cat chasing the mouse down the hallway? Well, if he is, then that's pretty darn awful advice, because if the cat is right behind the mouse, then turning to avoid the trap just means he's eaten by the cat, so either way he is doomed.

Actually, given Kafka's novels, so often characterized by double-binds and false dilemmas, maybe that's the point: that all choices lead to one's doom, and the cat's true observation hides the more important observation that the entire system is rigged.

('"Alas", said the voter, "at first in the primaries the options seemed so wide and so much change possible that I was glad there was an establishment candidate to turn to to moderate the others, but as time passed the Overton Window closed in and now there is the final voting booth into which I must walk and vote for the lesser of two evils." "You need only not vote", the system told the voter, and took his silence for consent.')

On the other hand, it's a perfectly optimistic little fable if you simply replace the one word "trap" with the word "cat".

"Alas", said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the cat that I must run into."

"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.

This is much better than my moral.