What is the moral of the story "The Country of the Blind"?

I can think of three possible morals to the story “The Country of the Blind.”

Don’t judge a book by its cover. Or: don’t presuppose that you know everything about a person, just because you know recognize one important feature. Nunez is a sighted man, and he lands in a village where everyone is blind. He immediately believes he’s got an advantage over them. He thinks he can tell them about the outside world and what it looks like. But they’ve developed their own culture and system of beliefs. He learns the hard way that in the Country of the Blind, the one-eyed man can never be King.

It was marvelous with what confidence and precision they went about their ordered world. Everything, you see, had been made to fit their needs.

This advice works both ways. The villagers should not assume that Nunez is a totally different kind of being, with the raw intelligence of a mere child, just because he uses words like “see” and “blind.”

Embrace diversity and tolerance. This advice follows on the first, and again, it works both ways. Nunez could be more tolerant of the villagers at first. They, in turn, could allow him to be different and to keep his eyes.

Slowly Nunez realized this; that his expectation of wonder and reverence at his origin and his gifts was not to be borne out; and after his poor attempt to explain sight to them had been set aside as the confused version of a new-made being describing the marvels of his incoherent sensations, he subsided, a little dashed, into listening to their instruction.

Be true to yourself. Sight is important to Nunez. More important than love, as it turns out. The young woman he’s fallen in love with, Medina-sarote, expects him to have the surgery to remove his eyes, so that he can be cured of his idiocy.

“They will hurt you but little,” she said; “and you are going through this pain – you are going through it, dear lover, for me. … Dear, if a woman’s heart and life can do it, I will repay you. My dearest one, my dearest with the tender voice, I will repay.”

But just because a loved one asks, and just because each individual gives up a little something in order to become part of a couple, doesn’t mean you must ever abandon who you are at your core. Nunez realizes this in the end.