Once there was once an Emperor whose entire office was dedicated to his wardrobe. He had no interest in the people or in governance, though around about the time a rumour began to circulate that his grip on power was slipping, two scoundrels calling themselves weavers-by-appointment came to town and let it be known they could weave a cloth so magical and fine only those with the highest IQ, the greatest competence and the very best credentials could see it.
Naturally the Emperor employed them on the spot and so they set up their looms in the west wing of the palace and burned candles day and night to show how busy they were. Eventually they announced the clothes were ready and the Emperor sent around the first minister to have a look and report back to him. Of course he could see nothing but felt it best to keep quiet just in case it cost him his job come the midterms so he went back and told the Emperor that the clothes were just wonderful. The colours! The patterns! The quality of materials! The Emperor then sent his second minister who’d already overheard what the first minister had said. When he discovered he couldn’t see a thing he became deeply troubled, feeling that he must indeed be stupid and unfit for his post, but he too was up for re-election so he kept his mouth shut and told the Emperor what he wanted to hear.
Then the Emperor paid the weavers a visit himself, praising the fine silks, ‘nobody knows quality like me, I have all the best clothes’, he bragged and arranged for a procession through the streets to show off his new finery. My how fine! And job numbers are up. The economy is in such good shape. The straights of Hormuz are open and gas is less expensive than it’s ever been. Suddenly a child piped up, ‘He’s naked! Gas is four and a half dollars a gallon and the Epstein files are still being hidden from us.’ There was a moment’s commotion. The Emperor was vexed, for he knew that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on! And so the lords of the bed-chamber took even greater pains than ever to appear holding up his train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold.
In Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, the Emperor and his courtiers collude in maintaining a deception that becomes increasingly humiliating and dangerous. Each person has an opportunity to end the charade, yet each helps perpetuate it. The covert purpose of preserving status, avoiding exposure and maintaining belonging overrides the honest responsibility of seeing and speaking the truth.
Having said that, the fact that the procession continues despite being outed by the child who has yet to give his power away and whose integrity is still in place suggests some subtleties to this cautionary tale worth further unpacking.
When Ghandi was released from house arrest in 1947 a reporter at the gate shouted out, ‘What do you think of western democracy?’ Ghandi replied, ‘I think it would be a very good idea.’ Ghandi was pointing to the same thing as the child in the story, an illusion is afoot. The undaunted procession in our story suggests this illusion is extremely persistent. Let’s use the story as a template to think about why it is that we only have the illusion of democracy and how this is perpetuated by the myths we tell ourselves about human aggression. Let’s also hold in mind the possibility that the two tricksters who pull the wool over everyone’s eyes might’ve had their scam put to them by the Emperor in the first place, just so he could walk down fifth avenue naked and get away with it…..
From Elena Gorokhova’s memoir, ‘A Mountain of Crumbs’ (2009) ‘They lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.’ The deception persists not because everyone believes it, but because everyone behaves as though they believe it.
It might reasonably be suggested democracy does not fail simply because people stop wanting it. The rationale might be offered that it also fails when institutions are too weak to withstand powerful interests, when elected leaders undermine constitutional constraints, or when military and external actors prevent political stability from taking root. Though it could also be said such undermining and untoward events unfold in ways which express an unconscious purpose, even when we neither recognise nor desire that outcome. A repeated failure, a seemingly accidental misadventure, or a pattern of self-defeat might therefore be understood as meaningful rather than purely coincidental.
This is not to say everything which happens externally is unconsciously wanted. It’s just that our apparent failures may be organised in ways which help sustain less obvious outcomes. Nor does it imply people unconsciously desire their own suffering, though it does suggest people are prepared to endure unaccountable degrees of suffering if some as yet unidentified metric might be preserved or sustained in the process. What might that be? We’ll turn to this conundrum in a minute but let’s begin with a small sample from the staggering list of human failure to collectively give ourselves what we say we want.
Historically, we have the compelling collapse of the Roman Republic giving way to tyrants like Tiberius, Nero, Commodus and Elegabolus. More recently we have the utter failure of the French Revolution to produce any democratic governance, despite being handed the opportunity on a plate, an opportunity which strangely culminated in Napoleon Bonaparte’s being crowned Emperor within a mere ten years of Louis XVI’s execution. Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. In Russia the revolution replaced Emperor Nicholas II with Lenin, who was arguably worse, and then by Stalin who was definitely worse. The Qing dynasty of China was ultimately replaced by Mao Zedong who made the former imperial leadership look like a Boy Scout jamboree. Fast forward a few decades and in Germany the Weimar Republic was replaced by Hitler, the Spanish Republic by Franco, and King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy by Mussolini. After the war Korean liberation from Japan produced Kim Il Sung, Guatemala’s democracy was overturned by a CIA backed ‘initiatives’ in ’54. In Europe Hungarian efforts were crushed in 1956 and then Czech efforts in ’68.
In our lifetimes the list of failed or undermined democracies is as long as your arm. Chile President Salvador Allende was overthrown by Augusto Pinochet a dictatorship that lasted until 1990. In 1967 Greece suffered a military coup. Pakistan had three (1958, 1977 and 1999) Then, like a murder of crows against dark skies there was Congo (1960), Nigeria (1966), Indonesia (1965–1967), Iran (1953), Dominica (1963), Zimbabwe (1981) Egypt (2011–2013), Libya (2011 onwards), Yemen (2011 onwards),Tunisia (2011–2021 onwards), Myanmar (2011–2021), Belarus (1990s), Haiti (1991), Russia (1991–2000s). Hong Kong (1980s–2020s). Sudan (2019–2021). Afghanistan (2001–2021). I sure I’ve missed a few…
Now, you might say that’s a lot of jolly bad luck. I would prefer to say that despite our pretensions to democracy we humans have a taste for tyrants, amply demonstrated by the perennial shenanigans of the current leader of the free world Donald Themistocles Trump. A man less suited to democratic leadership, more contemptuous of his sacred oath, is hard to consider. And yet 70 million Americans thought that electing a racist bankrupt with a penchant for girls ‘on the younger side’, a man who demands peace prizes whilst threatening entire countries with annihilation, was a good idea. What gives? How did that even happen? It beggars belief… unless, unless we consider that there is more going on in the collective psyche than the wish to be governed with benevolent compassion.
And what might that be?
You might well reason that having someone’s boot on your neck is an unenviable prospect, and yet… to identify with that same powerful other irrespective of their boot or body odour is to belong to a system of shared meaning. Philosopher Martin Heideggar calls it the ‘sweaty warmth of the They’, arguably way more important than the momentary humiliation of being lied to or trodden on. Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm makes the persuasive argument that liberation comes at a price greater than blood, sweat and tears. It may be that party loyalty and a white picket-fence mentality, ‘blocks development as a free self-determining, productive individual; but the identity with clan gives security in which [a person] has an unquestioned place.’ You might well calculate that’s worth any amount of mud on your face. Individuation on the other hand, becoming your own person with the autonomous capacity to think for yourself, ‘means growing isolation, doubts concerning one’s role, the meaning of one’s life, a growing feeling of powerlessness and insignificance.’ ( ‘The Fear of Freedom’ p29)
Fromm paints a compelling picture of the advantages of servitude; unquestioned belonging, certainty of beliefs, internal harmony and self-idealisation. We could add to that the power which servitude provides to project both the inmost self and the unwanted shadow onto third parties. Slavish devotion means the Self can be attributed to the glorious leader, no better example being Trump’s depiction of himself on social media as Jesus healing the sick. There were muted protests about messianic delusions at the time and not a few psychiatrists had something to say, but he got away with it within days because it’s no more than the manifestation of a collective projection already firmly in place. Trump himself commented at a recent rally, ‘I could say the stupidest things and you’d still clap.’ It seems ridiculous and yet, as Jung observed, ‘People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.’ (CW12 p99)
Such collective abdication absolves the voter from the gnarly responsibility of ever having to address the reality of the Self in an interior way. Having the dear leader, albeit Jabba the Hut, embody the Self, the ego is permitted continued pre-eminence in the psyche. You need never grow up or renounce your narcissistic omnipotence. Moreover, as one of ‘The Good’, you are then further enabled to project the less salubrious facets of your character onto some anonymous brown person halfway around the world, or across the street, who can then be used as a repository for all the undifferentiated collective bile you care to spew upon him.
All your insecurities, inferiority, fears and questionable morality can be exported in one grand package. Moreover the bombing and murder of defenceless school girls can be reduced to collateral damage. The warped logic of replacing one mildly irritating regime with another which now actively wants revenge paid in blood, is just one more minor inconvenience for a regime now get entirely comfortable with live streaming public executions whilst condemning other nations that do so as barbaric.
You are then miraculously liberated from both the torment of having to pursue your own destiny and from the noisome trial of keeping down all the indigestible facets of human nature which contest the idea of you being without stain or limitation. The problem of the shadow, with which you are now free to go to war and combat on the outside, rather than come to terms with it on the inside, is laid to rest.
Why is this important? Because it helps us understand why we are so ambivalent about our own freedom, why we’re careless about who is allowed into office, and why the muttering of ‘boots on the ground’ should chime so perfectly with the timing of midterm elections.
At first glance the problematic issue of the shadow doesn’t seem pertinent to our story. There’s no blood on the carpet, no beaten protestors, no ICE agents. Yet the fear is palpable, present in its most insidious, invisible form as the power to coerce and indoctrinate. It’s present in the capacity to tear the other away from the validity of their own perceptions, to make others doubt themselves. It’s present in the self-estrangement of being made to feel your judgment is incompetent. It’s in the mugging of autonomy and self-reflection, the forced consumption of Kkkool-aid, the yoke of herd mentality and all without a bruise or broken bone.
There is however, something even more compelling than the prospect of ridding oneself of both the Self, now attributed to the Glorious Leader, and the shadow, now attributed to the Heinous Enemy. This subtlety is the invisible interruption of conscience which is part and parcel of internalising the rhetoric of autocracy. You get to gaslight yourself. In the story, the most chilling moment is when the ambassadors of the Emperor arrive to view the ‘invisible’ clothes. The first minister begins to doubt his own reality, “Is it possible that I am a simpleton? I have never thought so myself; and no one must know it if I am. Can it be, that I am unfit for my office?’ The second, having been influenced by the first sets the seal on his own self-estrangement, “It must be, that I am not fit for my good, profitable office! That is very odd; however, no one shall know anything about it.” Not even himself. He has internalised the lessons drummed into him by the state. He can no longer stand by his own perceptions. It’s not that he has convinced himself that he can see what is not there but that he believes himself to be insufficiently zealous for failing to do so.
For the autocrat to continue to rule, the populace must be persuaded that congenital stupidity is their natural station, amply demonstrated by Trump once asking a rally in Iowa, ‘why are the people of Iowa so stupid?’ to rapturous and resounding applause. The people collude with such humiliating insults because it permits them to attribute the troublesome burden of self-determination onto their fomenting frontman. The dear leader will tell us what to do, how to live, when to eat, shit and sleep. What a relief!
Energies rerouted from unrealised ambition, having renounced self determination, can now be used to mobilise the belligerence necessary to attack people with whom you have no personal quarrel so that the architect of it all can be left in peace with his wardrobe and beauty pageants. Fromm says it most clearly, ‘the amount of destructiveness [in a society] is proportional [to the extent] that the expansiveness of life is curtailed.’ Destructiveness is the outcome, (not of any innate predisposition), but of the unlived life. (p158) ‘Unlived life’, says analyst Marie Louise von Franz, ‘does not sit idly on the shelf, it will turn round and bite you.’
The dangers of the idea that if you don’t see what others see you must be an idiot, is that it appeals both by way of a simple explanation, that’s just how things are, and by virtue of its associated benefits. It permits us to wallow in mediocrity having projected both the best and worst of ourselves onto undeserving others for as long as we identify with the ministers’ conviction, ‘I must be stupid’. It normalises what should not be normalised. Our story sounds a warning about the dangerous appeal of such normalisation, the deception of the weavers, the collusion of the ministers, the narcissistically defiant and undaunted procession proceeding regardless. So what if I’m naked? There need be no accountability. Everyone can get away with it. Give me what I want and you too can take what you want. The appeal to the lowest common denominator really can win. The only casualty need be the creative process, which you can’t help but think is then the author of all this unreality.
