Imagine if the boy who cried wolf had actually seen a wolf every time, but by crying wolf he scared the wolf away. The villagers would show up, and there's this boy pointing at the forest and saying they just missed the wolf and weren't they lucky he had been there to warn them. And the villagers would probably take that badly, after the first time. They'd probably write a story about it.
Meanwhile, the boy is scared shitless. On the one hand, there's this fucking wolf who is getting more and more brazen. Maybe next time the boy won't be able to scare the wolf away. And then not only will the boy be in trouble, but the village will be in trouble. Meanwhile on the other hand he knows that if he keeps crying wolf, either the villagers will stop showing up at all, or they'll view him as a bigger problem than the wolf. Either way, the boy is going to be in deep shit there too.
You might forgive the boy for getting the fuck out of dodge. Let someone else watch for wolves. See how they like it. But he doesn't. He stays and watches, and the wolf comes back, and this time none of the boy's cries drive the wolf away because the wolf can sense that no one from the village is coming. And the villagers stand by and listen to the boy's increasingly desperate screams until it's too late.
Who's the hero of this story?
Now, if you were a villager who had just committed negligent homicide by wolf, which turned out to have been a very real risk, you could do two things. You could learn from this experience that sometimes warnings should be heeded regardless of whether they seem to be false alarms because it's better to go out to defend the flocks from a wolf a thousand times when there's no wolf than it is not to go once when there is. That's the sensible thing to do, certainly. The money is on overreacting if overreacting is low-cost and the risk of under-reacting is high.
Or you could write your story about this boy who fucked around and found out. That makes you look better, I guess. And it relieves you of responsibility for defense of the village and your livelihoods. The boy should have known better.
You may have figured out that I'm not talking about boys and wolves anymore.
We have a whole classic parable on the subject of not crying wolf, to the point where "crying wolf" is something of a dead cliché. In the English-speaking world, pretty much everyone knows what "to cry wolf" means, even if they've never actually heard the parable. We don't think about the story. We make the semantic leap from the phrase to "false positive." And we are taught over and over that crying wolf is always bad.
Which is why we find ourselves in situations like the one in which we currently find ourselves. We are victims of survivorship bias: we only remember the times when the warnings seemed unfounded because if they had been founded we wouldn't be here to notice. Fascism stalks the forest like a horde of hungry wolves, but because we only remember the times when fascism didn't eat us, we think all warnings are unfounded. Never mind that in most cases not only were the warnings founded but the action taken in response to those warnings was what kept fascism at bay.
Look at Y2K, which, if you're too young to remember, was something of a joke. It was regularly held up as a giant cry of wolf because, well, the world didn't end when the clock ticked over. Very little happened, really. So everyone breathed a sigh of relief and immediately set to work making sure that we forgot some inconvenient facts.
Y2K "didn't happen" because a lot of unappreciated work was done to keep it from happening. A lot. Far more than we were told in the general public. This was, after all, the era of Reaganomics, when the Democrat who was in office was about as conservative as a lot of Republicans were, where it seemed like everyone had a hardon for gutting government spending and bureaucracy. So the unsexy work of making sure that the world didn't end was just waste, right?
What about September 11, about a year later? Turns out that there were large numbers of boys who had been crying wolf about Al Qaeda for years, but a lot of unappreciated work was done in an attempt to keep that wolf at bay. It wasn't going in guns blazing, and it wasn't necessarily the ideal way to do it, but it also wasn't sexy so no one paid much attention.
Pandemics past have been averted and turned into jokes. Swine flu? Huge joke. Bird flu? Nothingburger. All wolves which failed to eat us, largely because someone cried and then unsexy work was done because of that warning. But we don't need the CDC. It's a waste of taxpayer dollars. After all, what has it ever done for us? There was never a wolf to defend against.
We teach our children what we want them to know. And what we want them to know is that it's always worse to be an inconvenient Cassandra than a dead Tiresias. It's better to hold your tongue and let the wolf eat everything than it is to give a warning too soon, before you can see the whites of its eyes as it were. Keep your powder dry. Don't be too hasty.
And what's the life of one annoying boy, after all? And another. And another. Something keeps eating the boys you send out to watch the sheep, but as long as they don't cry, you don't have to deal with that. Teach your children silence. There might not be a wolf after all.
[EDIT TO POSTSCRIPT: There's good stuff in the replies. I know that fedi makes it hard to see replies sometimes, and I know that frequently replies are unreadable garbage anyway, but in this case several excellent points have been raised by people other than me which don't really work without context, but you're reading this so you have context, so go read them.]
Trivial Einstein
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