A new take on an old tale: the Emperor's New Clothes

A story everyone has heard: tricky merchants convince the Emperor they have a fabric so fine it’s basically invisible. The Emperor parades in it and everyone goes along with it thinking everyone else but them is seeing it. A child blurts out that the Emperor is naked, everyone realizes what has happened and spontaneous uproar follows.

A nice child’s tale. So what? Bear with me. There’s more to it.

If what I’ve been proposing thus far in this series is right—if adversarial players deliberately create misbeliefs in our maps—then we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss “children’s tales”. We shouldn’t be too quick to make decisions based on what something is called. Something’s name is a social convention that precedes us. To our best interest or to direct our attention away from something? 

If what I’m proposing is right we should be actively suspicious of social conventions of this kind. Suspicious that names can be used to deceive us, to misdirect us. And, instead, we should aim to see what the story is actually about, beyond its name. 

Overall it’s a hopeful story: a story of how “speaking truth to power”, through the innocence of a child, ends up killing a bad and unstable equilibrium of many-to-many self-deception where everyone had to deny what they saw to themselves and gaslight one another about it. Bringing everyone—except the king and the merchants—to a better equilibrium or place.

This story has been bowdlerized, or it might as well have been. 

IRL the child would immediately be shushed, talked over, and removed from view, and their parents sanctioned. Maybe cut up in a hotel room or have their family minivan be exploded. Power never speaks back to truth without a bang.

BOOM!
 
Clean the debris and back to the point: this kind of lie has too many fault lines and so the only way to keep them stable is to credibly threaten extreme force to the first person to break ranks. Which succeeds at keeping everyone in line. And the reason you need to keep everyone in line is because so much of the type of power being discussed here—like that of a King—is social power: a power which basis and maintenance is wholly dependent on social belief.

It doesn't matter what a treaty or convention or any document says: the king is king insofar as everyone believes everyone believes [sic.] the king is king. And he stops being so the moment that belief drops. Which is why the king must direct extremely violent repression to anyone who dare challenge or question it/him.

Now people can, and do, totally overcorrect, rationally so: you don’t want to pay any less vassalage to the king than the guy next to you and be killed. But if failing to pay sufficient loud vassalage means death, “individually rational” overcorrection ends up sending society into increasingly absurd or dangerous directions.

At the humorous end of those places you get mango cults in Communist China, but at the less humorous you get.