#Wolf outline series#
The city was not allowing megaphones and sound systems to be used in the park, and there had been a series of mass arrests. Her evidence that this evil future was now upon us was the aggressive way that Occupy demonstrators were having their freedom restricted. This was the subject of her book The End of America, which outlined “ten steps” she claimed every government takes on its way to outright fascism.
She had written several articles arguing that the crackdown on Occupy demonstrated that the United States was tipping into a police state. Naomi Wolf, once a standard-bearer of 1990s feminism, had intersected with the protests as well, and I suppose that’s where the confusion began. But while I was there, organizers asked me to give a short talk about the shock of the 2008 financial crisis and the raging injustices that followed-the trillions put on the line to save the banks whose reckless trades had caused the crisis, the punishing austerity offered to pretty much everyone else, the legalized corruption that all of this laid bare. I was mainly there to conduct interviews about the relationship between market logic and climate breakdown for what would become This Changes Everything. One commentator claimed that Aesop fought at the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BCE, but since by then he had been dead for nearly a century one can’t imagine he was much help.To stressed-out, BUSY PEOPLE inundated with thumbnail-size names and avatars, we’re just a BLUR OF NAOMIS with highlights going on about Bill Gates.Īt the time of the bathroom incident, I had visited the Occupy plaza a couple of times. Nevertheless, legends grew up around the storyteller. Aesop’s Fables may have been the work of many hands, part of an oral tradition that gradually accumulated. If he did, it was probably in around the sixth century BCE, several centuries after Homer, if Homer himself ever existed. William Caxton printed the first English translation of the Fables in 1484, enabling such phrases as ‘sour grapes’ and ‘to cry wolf’ to enter the language.Īs with Homer, we can’t be sure an ‘Aesop’ ever actually existed. Several centuries earlier, Hesiod – who is now best-known for his two poems, Theogony and Works and Days (a fascinating poem which we have analysed here) – had written one about a hawk and a nightingale, while a poet named Archilochus penned several, including one about an eagle and a vixen, and one about a fox and a monkey.īut Aesop would turn the fable into a popular form. Teachers and parents need to teach children that honesty is valued.Īesop wasn’t the first person to write animal fables. It is not enough to teach children that lying is wrong, and this is where the limitations of ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ show themselves. In other words, the study suggests that what children require is not a reminder of the threat of punishment for telling lies, but affirmation that telling the truth carries the promise of reward. For small children, the main worry with telling a lie is not losing people’s trust (although of course this is a factor in Aesop’s story) but in getting punished for your lies.īut the story of George Washington and the cherry tree is more effective in encouraging honest behaviour among children because the young George receives positive praise and respect for telling the truth. So the moral weight of ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ carries no shock value and imparts no new warning to them. Why is this?Īfter all, the boy in Aesop’s fable suffers a terrible punishment: in the most extreme versions of the story he is eaten by the wolf himself, so his lies cost him his life, but even in the more mainstream version cited above, he still ends up in serious trouble with his master, because his actions lead to the wolf getting away with attacking the flock.īut as Bronson and Merriman observe, the fact that liars get punished when their lies are found out is not news to children.
Indeed, ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ even encouraged lying in its respondents. The researcher who carried out the experiment even anonymised the central figure, in case the reputation of George Washington was a contributing factor, but even when the boy was made just an ordinary child rather than the future President of the United States, the story was still more effective in discouraging lying in children. The George Washington story, according to this study, reduced lying by 75% in boys and 50% in girls. They cite a study which showed that the famous story of George Washington telling the truth to his father (over chopping down the family’s cherry tree) – a story which is as grounded in reality as ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ likely ever was – was considerably more effective in convincing children that it was a bad idea to lie.
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