If you chain a baby elephant with a barbed wire snare to a deeply driven stake it quickly learns that to try and resist its restraints brings pain. Soon it submits meekly and somewhat fearfully to its incarceration. The elephant grows but the stake remains the same; its hide thickens but it remembers the pain and never again attempts to escape as the mahout cruelly forces the giant beast to do its bidding. By full growth the elephant is restrained by little more than a toothpick in relative terms, but still it does as bid. Until the day it is pushed too far and, enraged, forgets its chains and goes on a rampage.
Source: When he is King – The last few straws – Batsby