There is a famous saying that goes, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

This saying is related to one of the most famous short stories in English literature, “The Country of the Blind,” written by the renowned British author H.G. Wells, who is considered a pioneer of science fiction and gained fame for his works in that genre.

The story narrates the plight of a group of immigrants from Peru who fled Spanish tyranny. At that time, Peru, located in western South America, was under Spanish rule.

The story’s author describes a strange disease that spread in a remote village isolated from the world in the Andes mountains of Peru, causing the villagers to become blind. From that moment on, their contact with the outside world was severed, and they never left their village. They adapted to their blindness and bore blind children from generation to generation until all the villagers were blind, with not a single sighted person among them.

One day, while a mountaineer among the immigrants was practicing his hobby, his foot slipped, and he fell from the summit into the village. The man was unharmed as he landed on the snow-covered trees of the village. His first observation was that the houses had no windows, and their walls were painted in bright and chaotic colors. He thought to himself, “The person who built these houses must be blind.”

As he ventured further into the village, he began calling out to the people and noticed that they passed by him without noticing. It was then that he realized he was in the “Country of the Blind.” He approached a group of people and started introducing himself, explaining who he was and the circumstances that led him to their village, and how people in his land could “see.”

As soon as he uttered the word “see,” he sensed the danger of the situation, and a barrage of questions followed: What does ‘see’ mean? How? In what way do people see? The villagers mocked him and began laughing. They even went so far as to accuse him of madness and decided that some should remove his eyes, considering them a source of his delusion and insanity.

The protagonist, Nions, failed to explain the concept of sight and how to convey the idea of vision to those who cannot see. He fled before they could tear out his eyes, questioning how blindness could be deemed normal while sight was considered a disease.

“The Country of the Blind” represents any society dominated by ignorance, chaos, corruption, backwardness, poverty, violence, and intolerance due to unsuitable and prevailing ideas, where any enlightening call is met with rejection, suspicion, and violence.