dear garden,
I think I learned the wrong lessons from the boy who cried wolf. It’s an old fable amongst humans. There are a lot of variations, but the basic idea is the same.
A young shepherd boy lives in a village, and he repeatedly lies that a wolf is attacking the village’s flock of sheep. The villagers repeatedly rush to help, but repeatedly find that there’s no wolf. One day, there actually is a wolf, so the shepherd goes to ask for help, but none of the villagers believe him anymore, so nobody helps and the wolf eats all the sheep. Sometimes the wolf also eats the shepherd.
It’s silly because any self-respecting shepherd probably should’ve been able to fend off or eliminate a wolf, for example using a sling. So if it was just one wolf, and the shepherd was that helpless, then either the village failed to teach him how to fend off animals, or the village doesn’t know how to fend off animals, in which case they’re probably all goners anyway. It would also probably take a while for a wolf to kill off a whole flock of sheep, even a small one, so there’s a chance the shepherd is just kind of sitting there watching it happen over a few hours or something.
Anyway, the lesson is that if you lie a lot, then people won’t believe you anymore even when you tell the truth. And I guess that’s a fine lesson and all, and it’s probably good to avoid lying in general anyway. That’s the lesson I was originally taught alongside the story.
But this story also basically says that not a single one of the other villagers believed him this time, and then because of that, they lost all their sheep. So an alternative lesson could be that at least one should’ve believed him regardless, just in case. After all, the entire village suffered from the incident: for most of the villagers, keeping the sheep alive was probably of higher priority than shunning that one guy who keeps lying about wolves. So when the guy is crying and begging on his knees and peeing his pants and stuff, maybe someone should take a look, just in case there’s an actual problem.
A pretty valid counterpoint would be that there’s a tradeoff. Sending one person to verify each time could work if the shepherd only lied about a wolf once in a while, maybe up to once every few hours or days, depending on how much free time people have. Or maybe it would work if everyone could tell when he’s really serious (because he doesn’t pee his pants or beg on his knees when he’s pranking them). But if the shepherd were truly malicious, then he could theoretically spew a nonstop stream of lies, looking as pathetic as possible every time, constantly wasting everyone else’s time and preventing them from doing actual work. He could flood everyone with errands to go check on whatever he felt like lying about at the time. That would probably be disastrous for the village too, if the shepherd could pull it off, since none of the important work would get done if everyone was always busy checking on imaginary problems.
But the easy solution to that is the third lesson, that if the shepherd is really such a big problem, just make someone else watch the sheep instead. People can even take turns. This can be done for anything he regularly lies about and is important enough that someone has to go check on it. After all, if it’s important enough that you need to divert attention to it, then you should probably keep a reliable eye on it anyway. If the shepherd is truly malicious, just stop relying on him, and let other people take over the duties. I can only assume the villagers continued letting him watch the sheep even after they stopped trusting him because of resource constraints (“literally nobody has any time to replace him”), nepotism (“he’s one of us”), or sheer stupidity (“surely we can still trust him with the sheep, even though we don’t trust him with words at all”).
So the lessons are:
1. if you lie too much, people will probably stop believing you
2. even if someone lies all the time, you actually shouldn’t stop believing him entirely, because he might be telling the truth about something that might be bad for you
3. you should probably just replace and remove the people who lie too much, although you probably won’t because you’re a goober who doesn’t know how to break off a toxic relationship for your own good you absolute nerd
Actually, that’s kind of funny, if you think about it. So, say the shepherd is malicious. He lies about the sheep, and someone trustworthy gets assigned to watch the sheep, since the sheep are important. The next time he lies about the sheep, nobody listens because there’s already someone else watching the sheep. So if he wants to waste everyone’s time, he has to come up with another lie; he lies about the well and the roofs and the fences and the crops. These are all pretty important things, so everyone in the village is asked to be extra vigilant for any issues with the well and the roofs and the fences and the crops. After that, they don’t really care if the shepherd reports a problem with any of those, either, because chances are someone else will report if there’s a real problem.
The shepherd finds more and more niche problems to make up, and in response, the villagers record more and more specific bad scenarios to watch out for. Eventually, the shepherd runs out of things to lie about, because every other problem he makes up (“the soup is too sweet today!”) is deemed not important enough to investigate. Now the village has basically improved its safety and efficiency thanks to the malicious shepherd, at the cost of one working-age population (since the malicious shepherd probably isn’t doing any useful work for the villagers).
4. (replaces 3) you should lock people up and listen while they spout lies nonstop, for ideas on what you could do better
anyway, so, i really don’t think that’s the lesson i was supposed to learn from the fable
ramble garden 