The Boy Who Cried Wolf
A shepherd boy has fun teasing the local farmers, but comes to regret it.
Floods! Food shortages! Spies! Invasion! Such cries we read daily in British newspapers. If they fall on deaf ears, Aesop of Samos would have said that the newspapers had only themselves to blame.
ONCE there was a shepherd boy, who repeatedly climbed up the fell-side and shouted: Help! Wolves! The farmers would come at a run to the sheepfold, only to find it was all a lie. Time and again he did the same thing, and time and again the farmers found it was a lie, so they turned and walked away.
Then one day a wolf really did slip into the sheepfold. The boy wailed: A wolf! Come quick! but no one believed him. No one came to help. The wolf had complete licence to do as he pleased, and he gobbled up the entire flock.
And the moral of that is, that among the many good reasons for not telling lies is the fear that no one will believe you when you tell the truth.*
See also Lord Salisbury on ‘Never Trust Experts’.