Crying “Wolf!”

When warnings prove false, how should society react when they recur?

An Old Fable

We all know the fable of the boy who cried wolf. As a practical joke, he yells “wolf” in the town square, and everyone rushes to defend their flocks. When his warning is exposed as a lie, the boy is no longer trustworthy and the next time he cries wolf–this time telling the truth–no one believes him.

The main character of the narrative is obviously its namesake: the boy who cried wolf. The basic moral that most people draw from it is one-dimensional: if you lie, people will lose faith in you. But we often forget that there is a more important parallel dimension to this story: the reaction (or lack thereof) from the townspeople.

A Missed Opportunity

The first time the boy cries wolf, the townspeople act as any responsible society should: they react to the threat of danger as quickly as they know how, given their lack of planning. Unfortunately, they do so in vain. Afterwards, they no-doubt admonished the boy for troubling them, but little else.

This is the first strike against the townspeople: they fail to recognize that their vulnerability to wolves is heightened by the fact that they lack any reliable means of tracking wolves better than the shout of a young boy in the town square. Should they not have recognized that their system was fundamentally flawed, and set out to create some social system designed to create reliable alerts for predators in the area? This important opportunity to address a glaring shortfall in the community emergency-response system was missed, and the wolf’s later arrival was catastrophic as a result.

Assumptions

The townspeople also missed an opportunity when the boy cried wolf the second time. Just as they failed to investigate his story adequately the first time, they repeated their mistake the second time, and to disastrous results. This is an example of a fundamental human behavior. One of our most basic assumptions about the world is that the world is consistent until proven otherwise.

If we drop a ball and it bounces, we assume that dropping the ball a second time will yield the same result. This is how we learn to understand the world, and rightly so! If we questioned physics every time we bounced a ball, we would not be very good basketball players! So the townspeople made an important erroneous assumption: “if the boy lied before, then he must be lying now.” This is a perfectly rational response, but a dangerous one, especially in life-or-death situations such as this! No doubt the townspeople learned a valuable lesson through this whole ordeal.

Looking Forward

This leads one to wonder what would happen if the boy were to cry wolf a third time. Would he be ignored or heeded? Would there be mass confusion, or would someone take the time to verify his claim? When repeated warnings fail to come true, how are we to react to them?

I think the answer in the case of the townspeople is to recognize a need for a wolf-sighting protocol within the town, so that wolf sightings can be quickly and accurately verified and communicated for appropriate action. But what about more modern struggles like global warming, overpopulation, agricultural instability, deforestation, finite oil supplies, the threat of terrorism, the threat of global conflict by the likes of Iran, North Korea, or even Russia or China?

Anecdotes

Anti-environmentalists love to quote Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book “The Population Bomb,” because it is a classic “boy cried wolf” scenario. In it Ehrlich states that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1980’s due to a global “population explosion.” His predictions proved false, and the world laughs at yet another Chicken Little. Is it really so far-fetched that populations may eventually outgrow our capacity to support them? Perhaps instead of admonishing this boy who cried wolf, we should be examining our own plans for such disasters.

What about scientist’s fears of a “second ice age” or a “little ice age” in the 1980’s? Should we ignore fears of human-induced global warming now because older opposing theories have fallen out of favor? The fact is that we do not have an adequate understanding of our global climate. But does this mean we should ignore all science on the subject? Perhaps we should be exploring how we would react if the allegations were true.

The 1973 oil crisis caused a complete change in the automobile industry in America. Large “land yachts” instantly fell out of favor, and compact-auto makers like Toyota gained their initial foothold in the US. Large V8 engines commonplace in American autos were replaced by leaner, more fuel-efficient vehicles, but only temporarily. Gradually marketing led us back to full-size cars and eventually to SUV’s and the emergence of the “consumer” branded GM Hummer series, getting about 10MPG. Now that oil is in another costly blip (adjusted for inflation, today’s “blip” is worse than the ‘73 “crisis”), America is driving right on through. Perhaps instead of waiting for a real wolf to arrive to cut the US off from its oily black lifeblood, we should be exploring how our economy could survive if we suddenly had to do without mid-eastern oil.

Agriculture is a very delicate science. History is full of examples of societies who create living standards when times are good, and are then devastated when temporary climate changes cause low crop yields. Jared Diamond’s book titled Collapse is literally full of historical examples of this phenomenon. Like the predictability of dribbling a basketball, they assume that if crop yields are consistent for decades at a time, that they will continue to be so. Perhaps this is not wise.

The Root Cause?

The archetypal terrorist is a poor young single male of 20-25, usually still living with his parents, no job prospects and consequently no hope for marriage and family life–almost identical to an urban drug dealer or illegal immigrant. But we have defeated other state-enemies in the past by using economic sanctions and military might, so we assume that the same tactics will work for this entirely different enemy. We have not learned from our experience with the War on Drugs and the struggle against illegal immigration that brute force is much less useful than socio-economic changes in fighting these young, poor drug dealers, and so we will repeat our mistakes on Islamic terrorists, and continue to repeat it until we solve the root cause of the problem.

The root cause is not the boy, its the lack of informed, considered planning by the townspeople. We have a tendency to see the root cause of terrorism as “terrorists,” of illegal immigration as “illegal immigrants,” and of “drugs” as “drug dealers,” rather than the real causes of poverty, hopelessness, and idleness. Instead of punishing the boy and getting on with life, we should be examining ourselves and our own ability to deal with a problem much larger than a particular wolf. We must address the reasons why wolves come to our flocks in the first place.

This points to the third way in which the townspeople failed: they did not recognize that without herds of delicious sheep wandering unprotected in the fields, there would be no reason for wolves to come around. This might seem like a silly thought, but this kind of root-cause analysis can be extremely helpful in devising effective solutions to a complex problem. Is there a way to get the benefits of sheep without the problem of wolves? I don’t know. But it must be considered.

To site another example from Collapse, in Australia the British colonies brought sheep with them, as one of the staples of the British lifestyle. It turns out that sheep are woefully maladapted for the Australian environs, and they did billions of dollars of irreparable damage to the little good farming land that Australia has. On the other hand, Kangaroos are endemic to Australia, and adapted perfectly to its unusual conditions. They are lean, delicious, and abundant, yet the Euro-centric mindsets of Australians (and their foreign clientèle) prohibit the consumption of “cute” kangaroos. Perhaps in this situation the solution to the “wolf” problem is not the boy, or even the wolf: the problem might be the sheep!

Not as simple as we’d like.

The boy who cried wolf is a multi-dimensional story about a boy’s loss of trustworthiness and a town’s inability to adapt to the challenges brought to light by his actions. The correct reaction would certainly not be to believe every boy who cries wolf! But the townspeople needed to adopt efficient systems to quickly reliably verify each threat, and to take each one as seriously as the last.

All relevant data for each wolf sighting should be verified on its own merits and centrally announced so that the public can react appropriately to the particulars of the situation, making sure to address the root-cause of the problem wherever possible. I might also submit that individual ratings-driven commercial news outlets can not be the sole source of understanding on these important issues. We should not believe every boy who cries wolf, but we should consider the root causes of each one seriously, fervently, and diligently.