Before humans slot themselves to their adult professions or outcomes, they are born as taxonomists. We slot our perceptions into the simple categories of good and bad from our earliest age. Before we philosophize life and become artists, doctors, or bankers, we have to agree to the extant notions that the wolf is bad and the grandmother is good. The stepmother is bad; the orphaned girl is good. This syntax is so fundamental that we are rarely noticing our resort to it even when we’ve far outgrown the nursery.
This fairy tale does not end in childhood, but rather changes scale. I posit that entire societies arrange their distinct memories and, by extension of the societal scale we are working with, politics and laws, around the same soothing binary to which we put children to sleep. There ought not be inherent fault here, of course. The alternative — that our moral reality is ambiguous — is oftentimes irreconcilable with progress. In other words, overthinking impedes progress.
In the case of Iran, national memory is born out of an opposition to an incumbent repression. It is the mind of many Iranians that for over four decades, the nation has been a hostage to religious fundamentalism, perhaps a culmination of the centuries since the Islamic invasion of their land. This is comparatively understandable for it has been imposed by state violence. To merely accept this, the recourse, is to submit to the iron fist of the Islamist state. And so it steps beyond a fairy tale and into day-to-day living to try a just resistance. The tale was inspired by reality.
But in other cases, it is not so decisive or necessarily just. Historically, populism of every stripe sells a certain fairy tale: there was once upon a time a pure community, then some malefactor corrupted it. And some sort of return to simplicity as ordained by the populist will restore the moral order.
This type of appeal steps beyond reason. It’s psychological, for the audience need not be burdened with any business of analyzing the situation from every corner, but rather just accept that a single bad class or influence ruined everything. It is far easier for us to believe this than the fact that our society’s institutions too decay and rot, even our well-intentioned reforms — they can misfire! Even ordinary people may make decisions which over time accumulate into a disaster for others too. But fairy tales can spare us that vertigo, because they can readily provide us a villain to blame and a moral to affirm, and reaffirm.
Danger arises when we mistake the tale for a map. A fairy tale borne solely out of a need for sanity like in the case of much populism and not survival like in the case of Iranians should never become a blueprint for policy. The legislating for a simplified moral story makes a sanity-preserving story into a madness-inducing reality. The twentieth century is in no small part a catalog of such transitions: fairy tales of national purity and redemption, each initially a comfort, each eventually a cage, sometimes invisible and other times made of steel bars.
We as people seem to have a tendency to rely on fairy tales to preserve our collective sanity. The histories of our individual nations epitomize this. It can too be our undoing.