The Emperor’s New Clothes, the Court’s Old Lies

G. once told us the rest of the story for the Emperor’s New Clothes.  It’s good.  I went back and it predicts Black Lives Matter.

I want to talk about the back story.

Swindlers come in, talk up their new clothes, tell lies about how only good people can see the cloth, and then social pressure and lies do the rest.  Everyone pretends to see it and half-believes that everyone else has.

You can believe that in a story.  It wouldn’t happen that way in real life.

Unless the court were already used to lies and  manufacturing opinions and fashion and trying hard not to be caught out with the wrong set of beliefs. 

There are cynics and doubters, but they are cynical and doubters about everything.  They do it as rhetoric.  It’s a pose for them, a fashion statement.  It’s not something that makes them act.

One courtier whispers to another, “You know of course that half these people who see the clothes don’t see them.”

The other courtier titters.  “More than half.  All.”

“Wouldn’t it be too delicious,” says the first courtier, “if those tailors were just scamps?  By sheer audacity they just claimed to create clothes and then everybody falls in for fear of being the odd man out who doesn’t see them.  Wonderful!  One is almost inclined to admire them. . . . Except,” the first courtier added with a knowing wink, “if I hadn’t of course seen the clothes myself.”

“Of course,” said the second courtier.  And they parted ways, both feeling the warm glow of self-congratulation for being such knowing fellows.  Both already still half-believed in the clothes.  Both were thinking about how to deny or twist the conversation should the other out them as a non-believer.

G. was right that editors and journalists would be involved.  This is the kind of court that cares a lot about manufacturing opinion and controlling information.  Of course there are editors and journalists involved.  There are also experts, and committees, and carefully controlled bureaucratic procedures for determining what is “truth” and many other procedures that are manipulated.  The consensus is all important, and therefore too important to be allowed to develop on its own. Fashion rules, and therefore the fashionable fight perpetual social war to  maintain the boundaries of what is fashion and what is not.

A lot of people have said that the modern enemy is the manipulation of procedural outcomes.  That is true, if you realize that media and fashion and consensus and Science These Days are also procedural outcomes.  Any way of running things that doesn’t involve skin in the game.  That doesn’t come from the personal, the local, the heartfelt.

The cynical evil manipulators who do all this cynical evil manipulation mostly intentionally.  But they are not above it.  They are manipulated by their own lies.  They believe in the strength of the consensus they have manufactured.

They do more than lie.  The lie is just the beginning.  They know the lies, but somehow they still half believe them, because the lies validate their crimes and their abominations.

That is the kind of court it is.

Turn, all ye Gentiles, from your wicked ways; and repent of your evil doings, of your lyings and deceivings

There is a possible hopeful outcome to the Emperor’s New Clothes.  It is not likely, but it is possible.  What happens is the boy yells that the Emperor is naked.  And the courtiers are outraged.  They have come to see their structures of lies and consensus as something moral.  It is not just dangerous to them that the boy denied the clothes.  It is wrong.  The boy is not just a problem.  He is problematic.

So they overreact.  They stone the boy right there.  The Emperor, the dupe, is shocked.  Their newspapers bellow that the boy deserved it and also that it never happened.  They assemble tribunals where they force the citizens in line to come and see a naked man and face to face each must proclaim that he is clothed.  Because they are evil, because they are angry at the citizens, they increase the humiliation by having the naked man jiggle himself obscenely at them.  Maybe he leers at the girls.  Maybe he leers at the boys.

What comes next is important.  It must happen but it isn’t bound to happen.  What comes next is the citizens and some small portion of the court are horrified and furious and they repent.  Not from believing lies, because that can happen to everyone.  It does happen to everyone.  Everyone who reads this believes some things that are false.  But because they participated in lies.  They said things and believed things because they were expedient.  They took the dark joy of bullying someone for not getting with the program.  They went along with nonsense because it was safe.  They trusted people they knew could not be trusted.  They shied away from doubting what they were told.

When they realize and repent, that is what makes all the difference.

In this outcome, the courtiers who won’t repent go to the gallows or more likely just the madhouse or the poorhouse still angrily shouting, ‘the consensus!  the experts!  the fashion!  the official procedure!” without understanding that it no longer works.  They are angry because they feel–they know–it ought to work.