A village hired a boy to watch its flock, and being a modern village, it did not ask him to cry wolf. It asked him to cry the opposite.
Every hour, the boy called down from the hill: “Compliant!” And the village, hearing it, went about its business. The cry was pleasant and regular. The village council minuted each one. Visitors remarked on how well-governed the flock must be, to be pronounced compliant twenty-four times a day.
In time the boy found that the crying was the whole of the job. No one climbed the hill to see what the cry referred to. No one asked what he was checking, or how, or whether the checks had anything to do with wolves. The word had detached itself from the hillside and floated down to the village as a sound, and the sound was what the village consumed.
So the boy — who was not lazy, merely rational — stopped watching and kept crying. The cries continued on the hour. The minutes continued to be taken.
The wolf, when it came, moved through the flock at its leisure. It had, in fairness, no way of knowing it was interrupting anything.
Afterward the council reviewed the records and found them immaculate: every hour accounted for, every cry logged, an unbroken chain of compliance stretching back two years. The village had perfect evidence of the announcements and none of the watching. They had paid for a shepherd and audited a clock.
The boy kept his position, the council having concluded that the process had been followed.
Moral: A signal can arrive perfectly while everything it was meant to signify has already been eaten. When the word “compliant” costs nothing to say, it says nothing — the question is what the crier must witness, and what happens to him when he cries it falsely.