Half the reason for the title comes from a comedy pun: seeing the phrase "enter with caution" and misreading it as "lover." Yesterday was about lovers, so today it might as well be about warnings. The connection is mostly accidental.
What really prompted this is an old criminal-law thought experiment.
A man’s orchard has been repeatedly raided by thieves. After enduring it for a long time, he decides to install an electrified fence around his own property. That very night, someone comes to steal fruit, touches the fence, and is electrocuted to death.
Has the orchard owner broken the law?
Obviously yes. But the interesting part is why.
In criminal-law discussion, the usual explanation is that he knew someone was likely to come into contact with the fence. He should have foreseen the danger, yet he allowed the outcome to happen. So the charge would be negligent homicide.
And that is exactly where people start arguing.
If he clearly knew what might happen and still went ahead, then why not call it intentional homicide? After all, when he set up the fence to stop the fruit thief, didn’t he already have the thought: good, let this thing kill him?
I still run into people who insist on fighting over this kind of distinction. I used to explain it patiently. Now I’m getting lazier, so sometimes I just follow their logic all the way down: right, right, this person deserves to die anyway—why don’t we go one step further and propose a legal system where each sin gets its own death penalty?
Then a new variation appears.
What if he had put up a sign on the fence that said: Enter at your own risk?
Would that allow him to dodge liability?
Years ago, while walking with my wife, she asked me something similar. Looking at the electric fencing on the walls of government compounds, she wondered: if someone were electrocuted there, how would that be handled? Would that person have just died for nothing?
It is a genuinely interesting question. But then again, who casually climbs the wall of a state institution for no reason? Even without touching the fence, that person would probably already be committing an offense serious enough to be clearly named and cleanly prosecuted. And once you start from there, all sorts of strange hypothetical scenarios start growing on their own.
What if two people were fighting and one of them got shoved onto the fence? The odds are tiny, of course. Those fences are usually mounted high up, as if the place were a modern Forbidden City and common people had no business getting close. But fine—what if someone were launched into it by a human cannon?
The point is that when the fence belongs to a state organ, the law has already granted it a certain authority to use that kind of protective force. A normal person is not expected to trespass there, much less touch the live wires. Even without a warning sign, that protected status does not disappear.
A private individual is different.
You can put up a "Do Not Enter" sign. You can lock the walls and secure the perimeter with every kind of hardware you want. If someone still trespasses and dies because of an electrified fence you installed on your own, you still bear responsibility.
And that is where the real tension begins.
For a great many people, moral reasoning never gets taught beyond a black-and-white model: however serious a wrong someone may have committed, once that person occupies the weaker position and dies at the hands of power, every flaw on their side is treated as irrelevant, or even forbidden to mention.
So let’s keep adding pieces.
Suppose the intruder is a homeless man who has not eaten for three days. He slips into the orchard just hoping to find a little fruit to survive on. He is not a vicious person. Whenever he gets enough to eat, he leaves. He does not smash trees or ruin the place.
The orchard owner, meanwhile, is arrogant and harsh, the sort who chases him away with a pitchfork. He controls hundreds of acres, yet refuses to spare a few pieces of fruit for someone starving.
Later he installs the electric fence. There are warning signs everywhere. But the homeless man cannot read, does not understand what the signs mean, and is electrocuted to death.
If you ask people to judge the two sides now—to say who was right and who was wrong—most of them will suddenly feel that justice has become perfectly obvious.
Fine. Add another layer.
This is not an ordinary orchard after all. It is a research base for genetically modified fruit, backed by the government. In other words, the site itself is authorized to use electrified security fencing. The manager happens to have a terrible temper, but he can still claim that what he did was part of protecting experimental trees from damage.
The moment the word "government" enters the story, the whole thing becomes dangerous in another way. For some people, once the two keywords are government and ordinary citizen, the conclusion is already settled: the government must be at fault, while whatever the citizen did is understandable, forgivable, maybe even something the government forced them into.
But let’s add one last piece.
The homeless man is actually the orchard manager’s older brother.
When they were boys, the two of them secretly went swimming by the river. The older brother was swept away by the current. Terrified that the family would find out they had sneaked off to swim, the younger brother hid the truth. He told everyone they had become separated at the market.
He carried that secret for the rest of his life.
Their parents exhausted themselves searching for the lost son and eventually both died. The younger brother lied for so long that he ended up deceiving himself as well. By now he seems almost cursed: no happy marriage, a child lost to misfortune, and a lonely life spent as keeper of this orchard.
The proposal to install the electric fence was his idea. The homeless man had stirred in him an inexplicable irritation, a pain he could not name. And now, with that single scream, the pain has changed shape. It has become another curse tied to him forever.
At that point, this is no longer a criminal-law classroom problem.
It has turned into a lesson in how fiction works: keep adding contradictions, and eventually coincidence stops being an objection and becomes the engine of the story.