The Emperor Has No Clothes

Finding the Courage to Break the Spell

To all the silent good people watching our society tear itself in two, this essay is for you.

Those in charge have long since signalled that they have no intention of returning to a liberal democracy founded on the recognition of inalienable individual rights and freedoms. If data were the ingredient required to confront them, they would have folded long ago. They are impervious to data. This isn't about a virus. This is a psychological game and it's all about power and control.

In this Brave New World, the regime will grant temporary conditional privileges tied to virus seasonality, good behaviour, or whatever other conditions they choose to set to achieve the social engineering agenda of the day. Once they opened Pandora's Box to a society based on conditional rights, there is no limit to where their imaginations will take them.

How do we stop this neo-feudal re-imagining of society? How do we play chicken with a regime that appears to hold all the cards? At this point it is clear that regaining our freedom depends entirely on the government losing the support of the crowd. To use the words of Hans Christian Andersen's timeless folktale from 1837, we need to shake our frightened fellow citizens out of their stupor by getting them to see that "the emperor has no clothes" but, more importantly, we need everyone who sees it to be willing to say it out loud. 

So, in this essay, I am going to dissect the psychology of dissent.

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