The bold voice that many people believed to be until the moment of truth arrived

In the 14th century, a Spanish prince, Don Juan Manuel, grandson of King Ferdinand III of Castile, wrote a history that became famous.

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This story appeared in his book "Count Lucanor," written between 1331 and 1335, specifically in his Examplo XXXII, entitled "What happened to a king with the rogues who made the cloth". The story tells of three scoundrels who convinced a king that they were great masters at making cloth. The swindlers told the king that they were capable of making a cloth that could only be seen by those who were legitimate children of their parents, and that no one else would be able to see it.

The king thought he had a chance to find out which of his subjects were the children of the people whose parents were supposed to be theirs. In reality, there was no suit. It was all a hoax. Finally, one day the king held a grand feast and decided to wear this new suit. No subject dared to tell him they couldn't see the fabric, and the king also avoided saying anything, so as not to question his honor. So to go to the feast, the king mounted his horse and rode through the streets of the town naked. He didn't care because it was summer, and in the town, where word had spread that the suit was only visible to the children of their parents, no one said anything for fear of losing their honor.

Finally, the first one who dared to tell the king the truth was a black man who served as his groom. Not caring that his lord doubted his honor, the humble and simple man said: "I tell you that I am not blind and you go naked." The king reproached his servant for his lack of honor, but others who heard his words finally dared to recognize the truth. Finally, the king realized the deception, but by then the scoundrels had already escaped with the money that the monarch had paid them for a nonexistent suit.

Five centuries after this story was written, in 1837, the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen wrote the most famous version of this tale, titled "The Emperor's New Clothes", based on a German translation of the medieval Spanish tale. In Andersen's tale, the black groom is replaced by a child, who becomes the bold voice who dares to shout the truth, in all his innocence, as a naked emperor passes by.

This story is famous throughout the world and is often explained to children and adults as a fable about the pernicious effects of vanity and flattery and the courage that is sometimes required to affirm the obvious, when the truth is denied by many for the sake of very diverse interests or motivations.

Today, this story encourages many to wonder how such fear or stupidity could have been reached, such that a king would accept the existence of a suit he couldn't see, and such that his subjects wouldn't dare speak the truth. In this story, we all see ourselves represented in the innocence and courage of the boy (or in the original version, the black groom) who finally dares to say that the monarch is naked, which should be obvious to everyone. Sadly, this still happens in other ways.

Today, in the field of politics, there still exists an old vice that is the cult of personality, a vice that becomes especially strong in those societies where democratic principles are being degraded to put in their place strong leaders, but not in the best sense of the word leadership, but in the worst: surrounding oneself with flatterers incapable of telling the truth to the leader for fear of losing his favor, leading social groups into a spiral of irrationality that involves justifying anything the leader says or does, even if it contradicts the principles and ideas that that group claimed to defend.

If anyone expects me to direct this criticism at a specific ideology or party, I'm sorry to disappoint you. This vice has spread to almost the entire political map and almost the entire ideological spectrum, driven by that gregariousness that has so many good things (the advantage of not having to learn from scratch all the experience that humanity has accumulated) but that also often leads to a certain fear of contradicting the group in which you feel integrated, since where there is no healthy debate of ideas - something increasingly rare - what appears is the imposition of a single way of thinking and the marginalization of any critical voice, no matter how reasonable its approaches may be.

In our society, we all believed we were that child or that black groom, but when it comes down to it, few dare to take that step, because in politics, having the support of a large group of people is much more comfortable and offers you many more advantages than being a solitary, annoying, and marginalized voice, no matter how loaded with good reasons it is. This is how authoritarian and totalitarian movements triumphed in the 20th century, and this is how democracy is degrading today, once again with large masses willing to applaud a leader no matter how absurd and immoral the things he does are.

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Image: Illustration by Vilhelm Pedersen (1820 - 1859) for "The Emperor's New Clothes" by Hans Christian Andersen.