The Man Who Didn't Cry Wolf

Once upon a time there was a man who thought only of himself.

“You should think of others,” someone must have told him once, perhaps when he was young, when it was still safe to tell him things he didn’t want to hear.

As he grew older, when he was told something disagreeable, he just refused to believe it. 

“That’s not true,” he would say. If he was told again that it was true, he got angry. No one wanted to be around him when he got angry, so his circle narrowed to those who always told him what he wanted to hear. Which was only good news.

Naturally, he believed them. And because the news was always good, and told to him, of course he began to see that he himself was the cause of the good news. Over time, it became an article of faith to him that bad news would mean he had failed, unimaginably, to cause it to be good news.

No one wanted to tell him he had failed, so no one told him bad news.

Bad news was not only withheld from him, he was protected from its consequences. He had a huge staff of servants eager to do his bidding, because he paid them very well. They made sure he never heard the bad news, and that it never hurt him.

The bad news did hurt others though, and they threatened to tell him about it. So his servants had to work especially hard not only to not let the bad news be conveyed to him, but to convince anyone who might tell him that it wasn’t bad news at all, it was good news, and they should be thankful that he was the source of it. 

If anyone wasn’t thankful, they were dealt with. Many of them were deported or otherwise banished from his presence. The ones who couldn’t be deported or banished, at least not yet, were discredited. They were called out as heretics, and the faithful, the true believers, turned on them and silenced them.

He began to believe he was not only infallible but also invincible. He ordered his servants and all others who came in contact with the public to humiliate and destroy anyone who opposed him.

One day, the wolf came. He had not cried wolf, like the boy in the story, because he did not believe wolves existed. No one had dared tell him they did. So when the wolf cornered him in his bedroom, he was completely unprepared. He was defenseless. 

It’s not known whether he put up a fight. There was nothing left of him by which to judge whether he had been valiant or cowardly. He had had no practice at being either, shielded from reality as he had been all his life. 

His remains, such as they were, were found in a corner, regurgitated by the wolf, which had apparently found him unappetizing. Of course, were he still alive, no one would dare tell him that.