What happens when no one learns the hard way anymore
I was born in the dying days of the Sixties. Both my parents belonged to the War generation—the so-called Silent Generation, because as children they had been instructed to shut up, behave, and not trouble the grown-ups.
They were silent for another reason as well: they grew up in the war or its immediate aftermath. Their childhood and youth were governed by scarcity—need, hunger, insecurity, a hard life. On Maslow’s pyramid they occupied the low rungs, scrabbling to cover food and shelter. There was no disposable wealth or time to climb higher. Need kept them anchored there pretty much until I appeared.
I am the firstborn—the eldest of seven. My parents worked bloody hard to give us a decent life and, by contrast, our childhoods were golden. No lavish extravagance, but no gnawing want either. We were real children: hurled through trees like apes, digging holes to see what lay on the other side of the world, building treehouses, pedalling as far as our legs would take us. We never went hungry; the question of tomorrow’s meal did not haunt us. Fashion trends weren’t on the menu, but neither did we wear tatters. I owe my parents that.
We also learned early that if you screwed up, you were largely on your own. Our parents worked all the time to keep need away from us; they couldn’t helicopter-parent seven kids. I’m one of the earliest Gen-Xers, and the label “latchkey generation” fits. Our bruises were our tutors; scraped knees were the tuition fees. No one bubble-wrapped the world for us—that turned out to be an advantage. We learned to read risk young, to decide without convening a panel of adults. Today, many children grow up swaddled in cushions—physical and psychological—and then act shocked when the world refuses to comply.
We learned fast that actions yield outcomes, some of them unpleasant. And we knew, deeply, that we didn’t want our parents to intervene—not because they would lose their minds (that was rare), but because my father’s quiet disappointment stung worse than any shouting. If you couldn’t tolerate the consequence, you had better refrain from the action. Yes, we shook the tree to see what fell, and often something nasty did. That’s how you learn: through bad experiences and by suffering the consequences.
When my younger son was still small—beyond infancy, already talking—he discovered that the big light fixture in the sleeping room contained irresistible little glass bulbs. He stuck his fingers among the decorative bits and touched one. These were old incandescent bulbs, not LEDs; they heat like a frying pan when switched on.
He touched, he got burned, he screamed as if a leg had been severed. We tended the burn; a beautiful blister rose. Lesson learned. He never touched bright things like that again and had no future beef with hot surfaces. He understood that when mummy and daddy said no, it wasn’t malice—it was prevention.
That small blister did more for his education than a dozen picture books on “safety awareness.” Pain, properly delivered, is one of evolution’s most efficient feedback mechanisms. It’s honest. It doesn’t bargain. It doesn’t care for feelings. It instructs.
That, in essence, is consequence—and today I feel it has gone missing.
Look around. People behave as if there were no tomorrow and nothing matters. You’ve got YouTube empires built on escalating idiocy: people planning how to be more crass, stupider, more performatively reckless. A young influencer flies to some foreign country to defile what others hold sacred and expects no real penalty—because long enough, there were none.
Social media supercharged consequence-free idiocy. In a saner age, public foolishness bought public humiliation. Today, the bigger the transgression, the larger the audience. The mob doesn’t lob rotten tomatoes anymore; it tosses likes and sponsorship checks.
And it isn’t just online clowns.
It’s geopolitics, too.
The world today divides into three kinds of countries: those playing professional victim, those riddled with guilt, and those hell-bent on exploiting any leverage because they expect no meaningful blowback—only words and hollow gestures. Victims will use any opening to force concessions, often material: cash, sanctions relief, economic favors.
When Russia sent its “little green men” into Crimea, the global reply was a theater of stern words and wrist-slaps. When China built artificial islands in the South China Sea, diplomatic communiqués multiplied and nothing meaningful changed. When the West flattened Libya without a plan, the architects of the chaos went on lucrative speaking tours. Nobody paid a price proportionate to the damage.
For decades, many powerful actors have enjoyed near-impunity. Like people, nations learn from consequences. When lying, cheating, or brute force carries no cost, why desist? It often works. If a state plants irregulars in its neighbor and the world shrugs, next time it pushes harder. The process escalates until something breaks.
When large swathes of our political and cultural class insist that biological reality is negotiable and there will be no rebuke from the majority, why would the pushers pause? We don’t point out abuse, idiocy, and crime because we fear being singled out. We instinctively know we’ll stand alone against a roaring crowd—and who wants that?
This is mass gaslighting. When the crowd applauds nonsense and everyone fears being the lone dissenter, reality bends. Truth doesn’t vanish; it goes underground, festers, waits.
But silence breeds more than private shame. If you repeatedly accept the lie—if you mouth it for peace—you risk coming to believe it. Repeating a narrative doesn’t need cerebral horsepower; it needs repetition. Regurgitation is cheap.
Ignoring a problem won’t make it vanish. Allowing a large segment of the populace to run amok consequence-free stokes anger, raises costs, and breeds resentments among the majority. One day the wall of silence collapses with a thump. Journalists will call it “unexpected,” though media live on the largesse of the money-givers; they cannot perceive the undercurrent even if they wanted to. They’re part of the elites, and elites practice omertà well.
The harshest remedy for a consequence-free society is more of the same. The curse must run its course; it must maximize madness, pain, and damage until blowback begins.
There’s a scene in the Australian series Mr. Inbetween where Ray, a professional thug, attends a violence prevention course. When asked why he beat two young men who were harassing people, he says he did society a favor. The facilitator asks whether he enjoyed it. He answers: he only beats assholes. When told the world is full of assholes, he replies, “The world is full of assholes because we let them get away with it.”
It isn’t the abusers who are the problem—they’ll always exist. It’s our refusal to assign consequences that invites their behavior. The antidote is restoring price to abuse.
When sons of immigrants form gangs and beat up schoolmates, a working consequence would be to suspend welfare to their families temporarily. Guess what their fathers will do. They will find the language to make them conform to the rules of life in a civilized society.
When gangs groom girls for prostitution, ringleaders need more than short sentences; their networks must be drained.
When activists glue themselves to roads and critical infrastructure, they should face stern punishment; their organizations should be fined, dismantled, sometimes criminally punished.
Consequences are not cruelty; they are civilization’s immune system. A society that refuses to punish abuse is like a body that refuses to run a fever. The infection spreads—quietly at first, then catastrophically.
I have paid the price for being off-mainstream my whole adult life. I don’t whine about it. Those consequences made me more mature, more tolerant, more self-governing. I learned to autoregulate. It works—well enough. But social autoregulation is rare. We cannot build a society on the assumption that everyone will self-correct.
When humans moved from small tribes into cities, society stratified. Roles multiplied and, in return, civilization absorbed many consequences that in small groups would be exacted immediately. That slack allowed some to ascend Maslow’s pyramid. Scale blurred the feedback loop; consequences became abstract, delayed, or outsourced. Civilization flourished in that gap—and rotted in it.
In a tribe of fifty, a thief is caught and punished before sunset. In a metropolis of five million, the thief may become a banker, a bureaucrat, or a lawmakers’ consultant. Scale dilutes feedback; it dilutes responsibility.
Modern democracies contain their own tyranny: the tyranny of majorities. When a manipulated majority wills something, it is declared real. Small groups bend the many to their ends because they can—facing little, if any, consequence.
When politicians enact ruinous policies that wreck lives and property, the worst that happens is retirement.
The real consequence people fear today is social opprobrium—being ostracized from the herd of approved talkers. Paleolithic man survived on the savannah by honing one instinct: don’t stand out; when danger comes, run. The amygdala treats a birthday toast like a hunger-driven panic; it cannot tell a smile from a lion.
Consequences are the price of freedom. Authoritarians despise freedom, so they promise safety: be obedient and nothing will befall you. It’s a lie, but the real terror there is sticking out in a system that might actually kill you. There, the amygdala serves you well.
The lack of consequences—real or imagined—only accelerates the snowball. In Man of Steel, Zod tells Kal-El that “whatever happens needs to run its course.” If we refuse to accept the consequences of everyday mishaps and uncomfortable truths, a flood will come. The worst flood is the river of regret you will face when you’re too old to act. No matter how swollen your present snowball is, start now. It’s solitary work: accepting the world on its own terms.
In HBO’s Chernobyl, Valery Legasov says in court that lies become threaded through a system until the bill comes due. The Soviet Union paid its bill with catastrophe; history bequeathed that debt to humanity.
History has a way of presenting unpaid bills. Societies that postpone consequences meet tomorrow with interest. And tomorrow tends to arrive suddenly.
