Fire Doesn't Lie

You only need to touch a flame once. It doesn't argue. It doesn't dither. It doesn’t offer a softly-spoken warning followed by a leaflet and a workshop on "personal responsibility". It just burns. And that lesson is permanent. The fire isn’t out to make a point – it is the point. No excuses, no appeals, no "but I didn’t know." Physics doesn’t do nuance.

Now compare that to the old back-of-the-hand school of parenting – or the slipper, the cane, the scowl of a headmaster with Napoleon syndrome. Here we’re told, is how civilisation is preserved: through the sudden application of pain by someone older, stronger, and – in theory – wiser.

But the problem isn’t just the bruising. It’s the logic. Because punishment only works if it’s certain. And unlike the flame, corporal punishment is anything but. Sometimes you're caught. Sometimes you're not. Sometimes Mum’s had a bad day, sometimes she hasn’t. Sometimes the teacher's watching, sometimes he’s too busy shouting at Year 9.

So the child learns – not morality, not empathy, not reason – but gambling. They learn to calculate: can I get away with it? Will anyone see? What’s the penalty if I do? They don’t learn don’t do it – they learn don’t get caught. It’s not moral education – it’s early-stage fraud training.

And here's where it gets darker – because it’s not just corporal punishment that does this. Every imposed punishment suffers the same defect. The detention, the driving fine, the prison sentence, even divine retribution from some sky-based accountant – all of it hinges on the risk of detection, not the wrongness of the act.

What you end up with is not a society of decent people – but a society of risk managers. People who behave only when watched. People who equate justice with enforcement and morality with monitoring. It doesn’t build a conscience – it builds a surveillance strategy.

The person who refrains from theft because of a CCTV camera is not good – they’re cautious. Take away the camera, and see what’s left. A man who only tells the truth under oath is not honest – he’s legally literate.

Punishment, in this light, isn’t education – it’s behaviour modification under threat. The stick without the carrot. And the child – or adult – doesn't grow a moral compass. They grow antennae, twitching for signs that the coast is clear.

Natural consequences don’t play this game. You speed round a bend on a wet road, you crash. You gorge on sweets, you vomit. You light a cigarette in a hay barn, it goes up. There’s no authority figure lurking – just reality, indifferent and instructional. That teaches.

Corporal punishment doesn’t. Nor, frankly, does most punitive justice. They both say: "Obey, or else." The fire says: "Ignore me, and you’ll suffer – not because I want to punish you, but because that’s how things are."

That’s why natural consequences breed wisdom – and imposed punishments breed resentment. You can argue with a parent, or a judge, or a God. You can blame them. You can even fight back. But you can’t negotiate with gravity, or flames, or nettles. They’re immune to your excuses.

And that’s the heart of it. The fire never lies. But those who punish often do – they lie about fairness, about consistency, about justice. And worst of all, they pretend they’re teaching when all they’re doing is threatening.

Ah, but someone will say – “It worked for me.” Yes, for some people, the cane “worked”. But let’s be clear what that means. For some, it worked because they already believed the rules. The punishment just confirmed what they already felt – that they’d done wrong. It was punctuation, not education.

For others, it worked because they were naturally cautious. Fear, for them, is enough. But then, they were never the ones who needed the cane in the first place.

For a few, it became a kind of badge of belonging – a twisted rite of passage into the tribe of the compliant. I took my beating like a man. Well done. So did your dog.

And for some, it offered closure – a crude, bodily form of atonement. A ledger balanced through bruises. But the pain alone didn’t teach. The pain just marked the page. What taught – if anything did – was already present: guilt, temperament, structure, culture. The cane was just theatre.

And for many, the play ended badly. It bred not discipline but duplicity. Not reflection but rebellion. Not morality, but muscle memory – with a side-order of seething resentment that would later be passed down like a family heirloom. One hand to the next.

So no – the cane didn’t teach you right from wrong. You either already knew, or you learnt it despite the beating, not because of it.

In the end, only one teacher never lies, never blinks, never changes the rules. The fire. It doesn’t moralise. It doesn’t judge. It just tells you what happens when you’re careless – and that lesson, unlike punishment, doesn’t depend on who’s watching.

Because real learning doesn’t need fear. It needs reality. And fire, unlike authority, never forgets to show up.