Kids are impulsive creatures, and the desire of the moment: to watch a horror movie; to eat another ice-cream; is non-negotiable. What you want is what you want.
Or, as the Spice Girls put it: "what you really, really, want".
Sadly, or perhaps thankfully, the world does not accede to our every command. Slowly, and with varying degrees of resentment, children learn to accept that "No" means "No."
Horror movies are for teenagers. Too much ice cream makes you feel sick.
Even so, to those on the receiving end of these parental injunctions, life can seem desperately unfair.
Eventually, however, the cumulative lessons of experience lead us to the reluctant conclusion that, in Mick Jagger’s words: "you can’t always get what you want".
That is to say they lead most of us to that conclusion. There are always some who through class privilege, favourable genetic inheritance, or just plain dumb luck, get what they want much more frequently than is good for them — or us.
For these fortunate sons and daughters, the number of people in their lives brave or foolish enough to say "No" isn’t very large. Consequently, they grow up expecting "Yes", and most of the time "Yes" is what they get.
For the most part, a strong expectation of always receiving affirmative responses to personal commands is a reflection of the money and power required to elicit them.
In general, only one thing is strong enough to overcome these "Yes" people’s deep-seated aversion to contradiction — fear.
Frighten them enough and these lions of privilege will very quickly become lambs of compliance. Just don’t be around them when the fear wears off.
Covid-19, when it began killing people all over the world in large numbers, frightened just about everybody — even the rich and the powerful.
Nobody could be really sure in those first weeks and months of the global pandemic if it wasn’t going to be the Spanish flu of 1918-19, or even the Black Death of 1346-53, all over again.
The former, which my own grandfather, a medical officer in World War 1, battled against, killed tens of millions worldwide. The latter wiped out between one-third and half of the human population of Eurasia.
Perhaps the most telling image of the Black Death, one which subsequent generations of artists never tired of, was that of the dark figure of Death sweeping all before him. From the loftiest monarch to the lowliest peasant, sparing neither the godliest of clerics nor the wealthiest of merchants, Death’s relentless scythe laid them all low.
Even those fortunate few with the resources to immure themselves in an isolated rural villa couldn’t be sure that the plague would pass them by.
Nothing breeds social solidarity like universal fear. For a while, even here in New Zealand — about the closest a country can come to an isolated rural villa — Covid-19 made just about everyone not only willing, but keen, to take "No" for an answer.
Even the wealthy rushed to comply with the new and draconian Covid Regime. Loyal players in the "Team of Five Million", they closed the doors of their businesses, locked themselves down, put a teddy in the window, wore a mask.
Suddenly, everyone was a socialist. The state stood behind the business community and paid the wages of their employees.
Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s young Labour prime minister, dismissed by the Right as a "pretty communist" was, for a while, transformed into a secular saint and became an international heroine. At the end of 2020 more than 400,000 Nats swapped sides to vote for her.
By 2022, however, it was clear that Covid-19 was neither the Spanish flu nor the Black Death. Vaccines had arrived, and fear had departed.
Ashamed and embarrassed, the "Yes" people turned on the disintegrating Labour government with all the fury and venom of which the rich and powerful are capable when liberated from the unfamiliar camaraderie of fear.
Jacinda and Labour had done nothing but harm. They’d been warned, but they didn’t listen.
In the end, they showed their true authoritarian colours. "No" was their answer to everything.
All changed now, thank God. Once again, New Zealand has a "Yes" man in charge.
■ Chris Trotter is an Auckland writer and commentator.
