Post #168
People fight to protect the Emperor with no clothes
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The Naked Emperor is an expression of power… People trick themselves into believing it, and even staking their wealth and reputations on it… It is a relationship of power and the purchase into power. The lie gains power the more people repeat it. It snowballs. It becomes impossible to break it… Or at least impossible to break it without violence. That people will fight to maintain the lie, that they’d be ruined if they ever acknowledged it was false.
They are not tricked. They know that they are lying.
Even if the linguistic part of their brain tries to trick themselves into thinking that they are tricked.
If a child could dispel it, it would mean that the spell was already broken by the Emperor and his attendants' poor maintenance of the power relations… One might as well say that the “clothes” blew off the emperor in the wind, or a wizard stole them, as attribute it to anything said by the child.
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