SENTIENT TIMES Dec/Jan 2002

The Emperor is Naked

By Don Kyhote

There is much to be mined in fairy tales. Fairy tales are about things that never happened but are always with us. A truth we are reluctant to acknowledge can be insinuated into the mind by the account of an event that never happened. Hans Christian Anderson’s The Emperor’s New Clothes tells just a story. His emperor is a fiction, unnamed and unplaced in time, but he is also all of us at all times—and no fiction.

The swindlers who fleeced the Emperor in Anderson’s tale created a neat logical trap. The exorbitantly priced and nonexistent clothes they tailored had the wonderful quality, they said, of being invisible to anyone who was “hopelessly stupid or unfit for his office.” Given the Emperor’s acceptance of this criterion of reality, his loyal subjects were psycho-logically bound to see the invisible.

The virtual taboo against discussing the basic assumptions of our current national-istic thinking seems to me to indicate that we have become psychologically bound to clothes that only those defining themselves as patriots can see. If you can’t see the glorious vestments you are “unpatriotic and unfit to be one of us.”

“You are either one of us or one of them—one of the good or one of the evil.” Such pristine clarity from such a simple-minded delusion.

Every generation brings new swindlers (many of them, curiously, self-deceived) and more new clothes for credulous emperors. At any point in time a sizable wardrobe of such clothes is being paraded in the marketplace of ideas. There are far too few children, too few iconoclasts (to use another image), to keep up with the busy loom of the weavers of invisible cloth.

In Anderson’s story the child’s outcry leads to a rapid erosion of faith among the spectators: truth strips the Emperor naked. Unhappily, in real life, majority opinion frequently overwhelms perception.

Some of the experiments carried out by social psychologist Solomon Asch show us just how difficult the communication task is that we have before us. Asch asked a small group of college men to identify the longest of several lines drawn on paper. Unbeknownst to one of them, all the others had been instructed to agree on a preposterously wrong answer. Choices were announced in open meeting. As the responses forced the “odd man out” to become aware of his position, he not infrequently gave way to the majority and expressed his agreement with them. It does not take an Inquisition or a national disaster to make heresy painful. (“Heresy” comes from a Greek word meaning, “to choose for oneself.”) Out of the 123 men subjected to this ordeal, 37 percent conformed. I suspect the results would be even more shocking today if Asch were to repeat his experiment after decades of a mass media managing conformity.

We don’t need Asch’s experiments to tell us that all too often in real life Anderson’s child would be forced to yield to “adult” opinion.

A cowed opposition in the U.S. and worldwide is not a sign of solidarity, it is a dangerous sign of grave concern that we are becoming psychologically bound to conforming to the powerful no matter how preposterous its position. Watching the Congress respond to one hollow platitude and cliché after another from Mr. Bush was an eerie reminder of those German politicians (both supporters and terrified opponents) rising to the vitriol of Adolph Hitler a half a century ago.

It is one thing to rally around our flag and country and the ideals for which they stand and quite another to give a blank check to a nakedly bankrupt administration. Those in charge of our country are disconnected from the needs of the American people and isolate us from the community of nations. They have removed us from being a rational participant in a global discourse of sane moral reasoning.

Representative Barbara Lee showed the courage of Thoreau’s “majority of one” in the face of nearly unanimous error by crying out for reason. There are many naked emperors parading the streets of public communications, and we need a few people who have the confidence of Anderson’s child in their own senses and judgment.

Now more than ever this country needs a loyal opposition—to unite behind what needs to be done and stand against what should not be done. It is our duty, as patriotic Americans, to be heretics pointing out the naked emperors of our time. It is our right, nay our responsibility, as long as we pretend to be living in a free, democratic society, to vigorously and openly challenge what is being portrayed to be, “in the national interests.” To deny that right threatens the very strength of our system—its commitment to unfettered thought and expression.

The right to dissent is the strength of our country not its weakness. Weakness is in the position that can’t defend itself against sane rational discourse. Mandating a patriotism that requires unity behind naked emperors is not a mark of confident and secure leadership. It is a sign of the fear of exposure that no amount of invisible cloth can hide.

Don Kyote, an educator, supporter of those who speak truth to power, and environmental activist, has been confronting the status quo for his entire professional career.

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