Beware of fairy tales and false gods this election season

C.S. Lewis’ seven-book “Chronicles of Narnia” culminates in “The Last Battle,” a thinly disguised adaptation of the book of Revelation and the end of the world as detailed therein. Heavy with Christian symbolism, the story centers around a false deity — purportedly the great lion Aslan but in actuality a witless donkey named Puzzle wearing a lion’s skin as part of a clever ruse by a talking ape named Shift — in whose name great evils are undertaken that precipitate Narnia’s ultimate destruction.

A lesson of “The Last Battle” is that well-meaning people can be manipulated by having their otherwise sound belief systems weaponized against them in service of immoral ends. Puzzle (as directed by Shift) is an archetypal false prophet, and even when in the story King Tirian readily recognizes Shift’s fabrications, Narnia’s population is unable to acknowledge the truth given its unwillingness to defy even a fake Aslan.

Resistance to tyranny and the dead hand of conformist narrative flows from the bottom up.

One can think of “The Last Battle” as a darker, more spiritual variation on “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale in which a ruler is fooled by con men into believing he is wearing beautiful clothing invisible only to the dim-witted, and the townspeople play along for fear of being thought dull. In each tale, there are strong social and cultural currents that reinforce people’s willful suspension of disbelief for fear of disfavor or sanction, and knaves and fools alike play upon respect for authority or obeisance to a duty-based value system for their own nefarious purposes.

Sadly, contemporary life is replete with real-world manifestations of this same phenomenon.

Perhaps the starkest example in recent years is the secular sainthood bestowed upon Greta Thunberg, a Swedish “climate activist” with high-functioning autism and OCD but no academic expertise in climatology or any related scientific field. The moral authority invested in a troubled child of no accomplishment, long on conviction, fitful hysterics, and little else, embodies the triumph of emotion over reason.

The message, having been predetermined, validates the messenger.

In an era of waning religious beliefs, it’s unsurprising that performative outrage has not only drawn a significant audience but also insulated its purveyors from critique, as with organized religion of yore. The cult of Greta has been fazed neither by her reluctance to target major non-Western polluting nations like China and India nor a recent foray into geopolitics with her strident anti-Israel stance following the October 7 Hamas terror attacks against Israel. Once anointed, saints are not to be questioned.

Alongside this denial of objective truth and reification of false idols is the triumph of narrative. Consistent with feelings’ newfound primacy over critical thinking, narrative — a veritable hop-skip away from rank gaslighting — has today largely replaced fact-based investigation, the scientific method, and deductive reasoning.

When paired with emotion, narrative is particularly noxious, as it cloaks a conclusion drawn from intuition or fervor with an inductive, reverse-engineered form of reasoning that hijacks the authority of traditional linear argument to augment its legitimacy. This is related to recent trends in which language is co-opted in service of a given concept’s antonym. Witness the use of “equity” for “equality” or what constitute today’s “anti-fascists.”

It is easy to lose hope in an era in which objective truth remains discernible and in plain sight to some (or even many) but unacknowledged by “thought leaders,” elites, and institutions of all types. The herd instinct and desire to conform without imperiling one’s privileges or social capital can constrain even the bravest souls from challenging accepted narratives.

While elites may be too hopelessly bubbled to apprehend the world as it is — or far too invested in the manner of storytelling endemic to their respective tribes and fearful of the consequences of acknowledging objective truths — a reality-based world endures, if we will only use the senses and cognition available to us.

Consider the samizdat prominent in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War, which sustained dissident activity in the face of brutal repression of free expression and other forbidden activity by communist authorities, to hearten us. The human spirit’s desire for freedom and love of truth are irrepressible. Even if people are forced to live under totalitarian oppression for a significant period — as was the case in the Soviet Union, for seven decades — the “truth will out.”

The signal takeaway of the Soviet era is an instructive one for our time: No institution or corporatist collection of interests can be expected to self-reform voluntarily. Resistance to tyranny and the dead hand of conformist narrative flows from the bottom up. We each have an individual responsibility for seeing things as they are, speaking the truth, and refusing to be complicit with “approved” viewpoints and interpretations of events.

In an election season, one can expect the dial of orthodoxy to turn still farther. The dotard in chief will sport his lion’s skin, and we will be expected to believe that he is in command of his administration, if not always his faculties.

We will be told that “the border is secure,” the “adults are back in charge,” the Middle East region is “quieter today than it has been in two decades,” “trans women are women” and thus should be allowed to compete in women’s sports, and that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” are really about diversity, equity, and inclusion, among other fairy tales.

Having begun with one of my favorite childhood authors, I’ll close with another. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” George Orwell wrote in “1984.” “It was their final, most essential command.” Against the Party, let objective truth, and its expression, be our sword and shield against the false prophets and idolaters of our time.