At the king's court, there were many obedient and hardworking servants, except one. Unlike the others, this servant was lazy and greedy, unable to ever finish any task assigned to him. One day the king, who up to then had been extremely tolerant, finally got fed up with the servant's stupidity and ordered the treasurer to reduce his salary drastically.
Soon it was payday, and all the servants were enthusiastically awaiting their wages. When the stupid servant was handed his reduced amount of money, he couldn't believe his eyes and flew into a fury. Instead of finding out why he had been admonished, he began to curse and blame the cook for slandering him. The cook, who had been the one to hand him his reduced wages, told him that he was innocent and only the messenger. “If you truly want to find the real reason for your punishment, why don't you take a look at your own behavior? You'll soon discover who's the real culprit,” he advised the servant.
The servant, however, turned a deaf ear to this good advice and sat down to write a letter of complaint to the king. He began the letter by praising the king, but his vicious tone did not go unnoticed. The king in his infinite wisdom chose to ignore the letter altogether.
When the servant never received a reply, he became suspicious of the messenger to whom he had entrusted his letter and thought that he had betrayed him. Soon again, he flew into a rage and cursed the messenger, making an even greater fool of himself than before. Unwilling to give up, he wrote more letters to the king each week, all of which went unacknowledged. After several months, one of the king's emissaries who was familiar with the case pleaded with the king to respond to his servant and release him from his self-inflicted torture.
“To respond to him is easy for me and to forgive him his laziness and stupidity, even easier,” replied the king wisely. “Yet I choose not to infest the other servants with the same ailments that he suffers from, namely weakness of character and absence of intelligence. Therefore, I say to thee, the answer to fools is silence!”