The Emperor's New Bigotry

Most of us get our first insights about the world from fairy tales. 

The Boy Who Cried Wolf highlights the importance of honesty and sincerity. King Midas warns us about the perils of greed. Snow White and Sleeping Beauty teach us that it’s okay to kiss comatose women if you're a prince. 

But my favourite, the Emperor’s New Clothes, offers a more fundamental lesson than any of these. 

Because while people will admit to being dishonest or greedy or sexually predatory, while they’ll volunteer details of their most embarrassing moments, while they'll describe, in excruciating detail, the "geography" that their farts have to travel through, most people won’t say anything if they think it'll cost them social capital. 

So when a couple of con artists claim to have made a fabric so refined and sophisticated that only the most refined and sophisticated people can see it, you know that everyone, from the lowliest peasant to the emperor himself, will play along. 

Well, almost everyone. 

As the emperor struts through the town in his new "clothes," one little boy stands up and points out the obvious: the Emperor is naked. And when he does, everybody else finds the courage to stop pretending. 

But the boy didn't say anything wise or noble. He didn't tell the townsfolk anything they didn't already know. None of them really believed the king was wearing anything,

They just didn’t want to be the first to tell the truth. 

Thankfully, we don’t rely on these childish stories forever. As adults, we learn to take our cues from the the most dishonest, chronically offended people on the internet.

Con artists who have expanded the usage of words like racism, antisemitism and transphobia beyond contempt for people to disagreement with any ideas or actions even tangentially related to those people. And this, unsurprisingly, leads to a few problems.

For example, do you dream of a world where we judge each other by the content of our character instead of the colour of our skin? Check your privilege. According to TED, that kind of talk is not only racist, it’s “dangerous.” 

Do you think prisons should be single-sex (as the Geneva Convention does) or that “homosexual” means same-sex attracted (as the Greek language does) or that a woman is an adult human female (as pretty much everyone on Earth does)? Bad luck TERF, all of those ideas are transphobic dog whistles now. 

And of particular relevance at the moment, have you been wondering how dropping two Hiroshima’s worth of bombs on Palestinian civilians keeps Israel safe? Do you quietly suspect that there should be some boundaries to a country's right to defend itself? Well, keep it to yourself. Questioning the Israeli government (not the Jewish people, mind you) is officially antisemitic now.

It doesn't matter how careful you are to criticise ideas and not people. It doesn't matter how diligently you avoid collectivising groups. It doesn't matter if you're a member of those groups (that just means you're “self-hating”). Minor disagreements are so readily conflated with bigotry that it's almost always safer to keep your mouth shut. 

And this is a feature, not a bug.