The Elon DOGE Emperor Has No Clothes

 

 

"Here’s a silly thing that happens sometimes: A powerful person says something obviously false, and everyone pretends not to notice. This is the plot of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” where an entire kingdom maintains a collective delusion until one child (who, importantly, hasn’t yet learned the sophisticated art of lying to yourself) points out that hey, the emperor is naked.

The story endures because it captures something fundamental about institutional lies, they don’t actually require sophisticated deception. They just require everyone to agree, collectively, to not say the obvious thing. (George Orwell had some thoughts about this too — in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the ultimate flex of authoritarian power isn’t making you believe lies, it’s making you actively deny what your own eyes tell you.)

Here’s the thing about institutional lies though: They can go on for quite a while, but they tend to have a breaking point. And that breaking point often comes when someone says something so obviously, comically false that it forces everyone to confront the absurdity.

This is probably why authoritarian regimes tend to get more ridiculous over time, not less — they keep having to make increasingly outlandish claims to maintain the fiction.

Which brings us to DOGE, Elon Musk, and what might be the most brazen example of institutional gaslighting we’ve seen in recent memory."

read article by Mike Masnik

The Elon DOGE Emperor Has No Clothes | Techdirt