The Emperor\'s new clothes(ZT)

This story of the little boy puncturing the pretensions of theemperor's court has parallels from other cultures, categorized asAarne-Thompson folktale type 1620, although the tale itself has noidentified oral sources.[1]

The expressions The Emperor's newclothes and said The Emperor has no clothes are often used withallusion to Andersen's tale. Most frequently, the metaphor involves asituation wherein the overwhelming (usually unempowered) majority ofobservers willingly share in a collective ignorance of an obvious fact,despite individually recognizing the absurdity. Such a case could beconsidered a classic example of groupthink, where individuals of agroup agree with the majority rather than put themselves outside thecomfort zone of what is accepted by the group. A similartwentieth-century metaphor is the Elephant in the room. A metaphor ofthe opposite, in which each individual insists on his or her ownperspective in spite of the evidence of others, is shown in the variousversions of the Blind Men and an Elephant story.

In oneinterpretation, the story is also used to express a concept of "truthseen by the eyes of a child", an idea that truth is often spoken by aperson too naïve to understand group pressures to see contrary to theobvious. This is a general theme of "purity within innocence"throughout Andersen's fables and many similar works of literature.

Inanother interpretation, the child is not simply a naive person, butprecisely a child, as the perspective of children is often unencumberedwith the filtering "knowledge" and social conditioning that fills theheads of adults, warping their perspective.

"The Emperor WearsNo Clothes" or "The Emperor Has No Clothes" is often used in politicaland social contexts for any obvious truth denied by the majoritydespite the evidence of their eyes, especially when proclaimed by thegovernment.