Never Cry Wolf (1 October 2009)

You are probably familiar with the folk tale about a shepherd boy who was bored and decided to entertain himself by crying “wolf.” The villagers came running. The boy thought it was a good joke and played it again in a few days. The villagers came again, only to discover that they had been fooled again. When the wolf finally came for real, the villagers refused to believe that the boy was telling the truth. “Crying Wolf” is a fear-based appeal. In the States, as we struggle with “reforming” an antiquated and increasingly bankrupt health-care system, we’ve been hearing a lot of fear-based appeals. One side says, “Be afraid!” The other side says, “Be very afraid!” Both sides have their own versions of the wolf story, from higher taxes and “socialized medicine” to “pre-existing conditions” to “losing health insurance.” It’s enough to make the villagers go numb.

As the young shepherd discovered, the problem with crying wolf irresponsibly is that when a wolf really does appear, the cry is no longer credible—most of the villagers have become deaf to the cry. Those who still respond are those who are predisposed to fear-based responses. If you have a phobia of wolves, every time someone cries wolf, you have the phobic response, even if no wolf is present.

You may have known someone who was so phobic of snakes that he or she could not even look at a picture of a snake in a magazine without having a panic attack. Others respond to the cry of “socialist” the same way. They are afraid that health-care reform will result in a “government takeover of medicine,” even while they embrace the government-run Medicare program, send their children to government-run public schools, drive on government-planned-and-constructed highways, and are perfectly happy having criminals sent to government-run prisons.

As Farley Mowat discovered in his research of Canadian wolves (see his book, Never Cry Wolf), even real wolves aren’t that scary when you understand wolf behavior and respect their sense of territory. On several occasions, Mowat was face-to-face with “big, bad wolves” that showed him the same respect he was showing them. In general, the things that produce phobic-level fear in us are simply not that dangerous. Of course, it helps to understand the nature of whatever seems to be the source of the fear.

In general, the more you know, the less you fear. This is the principal reason to become well-informed about things that might have seemed scary when you thought about them in the abstract. The more you know about them, the less scary they seem. I saw a letter to the editor of a news paper not long ago in which a postal carrier was complaining about spiders in mailboxes and demanding that homeowners keep their mailboxes spider free. The writer was under the impression that spiders were waiting in the mailboxes just to bite the hand of those who deliver the mail. In actuality, spiders do their best to avoid humans and hardly ever bite us on purpose. With only a couple of exceptions, the same is true for snakes.

We should never cry wolf (or spider or snake) because wolves (and spiders and snakes) don’t deserve it. Left alone, they will leave us alone. Also, as the story goes, we should never cry wolf or otherwise use fear-based persuasive techniques because people—the villagers—will eventually stop listening. Many will simply tune out the cries, and others will want to know more. And, as you know more, you will fear less. When you make an effort to learn it, the truth really will set you free.

One thing you can count on: if it is a fear-based appeal, the chances are good that it isn’t true—it is probably just a young shepherd crying wolf to be amused by the villagers who come running.

joel@scs-matters.com
www.scs-matters.com