Crying Wolf Too Often

Surely we are all familiar with the story of the boy who kept crying 'Wolf!' when there wasn't one with the result that eventually nobody believed him and then one day there was an actual wolf. Of course everyone ignored his cries that there was a wolf with predictable results.

I realize that I have been thinking quite a lot over the past couple of years of how, like falsely saying there's a wolf, many of the principles of our society are not strategies intended for long term use and in fact cry wolf. I've referred to the way capitalism negates itself when carried to its natural conclusion, for example. Specifically the mythology of capitalism is that it encourages competition and anyone can get in on the act if they want. And so we have endless copies of the same businesses making the same products. But it also includes its downfall, because if there is actual competition there is nothing to stop the consumer choosing where to shop and putting some of the businesses out of business.

And so this is why the competition aspect easily flips into a monopoly (Amazon, anyone?) before progressing into fascism and force. The choice supposedly built into capitalism is an illusion, or rather a lie.

Perhaps the best example of this is the UK's privatised water companies, where in fact nobody gets any choice and can't not use them.

The theme of entities lying is built into religious and spiritual traditions across the board. For example Christians call their Satan the father of lies. And this idea of an untrue threat or promise can be found in hero myths.

It's most present to us moderns in social media, which is perhaps the best example of why lying and building systems on illusions doesn't work. You would have to be incredibly naive in 2024 not to be at least aware that accounts on social media may not be telling the truth and may not even be real people. It's so prevalent that I don't think there can be anyone unaware that media and social media manipulates things now. The almost laughably bad AI has also added to this.

This is exactly the same phenomenon as the boy crying wolf: you just can't keep on lying because people notice.

In this General Election year there's a lot of scare mongering going on about how the Tories are going to use disinformation in their campaign. I honestly can't understand why: beyond the +/- 25% who are so stupid, bigoted or blinded that they would vote for them anyway, in Britain the words Tory and liar are now synonymous. And this purely because of their prolific lies. 

The reality is that lying does not gain any cause or business a huge following alone (of course motivation is always more complex than I'm painting it here because I'm focusing on fibbing, monopolies and the way our institutions are not built on sustainable foundations).

The moral of the story is that sometimes if a situation feels like it can't be changed the thing to do is just let it progress as it is. Our overlords are not geniuses and it's very unlikely they'll have thought out the consequences of their actions.

And then have a good laugh at them. This is very important because it's an important banishing ritual in chaos magic.