When I was a little boy, I read, or was told, most of what was the then canon of classic children’s stories, and, decades later, retold the best of them to my own children in turn. Probably a key factor in making a kid’s story a classic is making it teach one or more useful life lessons, whether subtly or overtly. Perhaps, if the story has enough depth, it can be reinterpreted with a different lesson from a context of autres temps, autres moeurs. Thus, to me, with my 20th Century small “L” liberal upbringing, the hero of The Emperor’s New Clothes is the boy who called him out, but, to tell it to a generation that venerates the likes of Trump and Farage, you would maybe have to spin the story to be about what a masterful scam the tailors pulled off. Whatever; the primary lesson of the story is that vanity and credulity make unfit leaders, and Trump and Farage fans could do with being taught that!
The train of thought that gave me the urge to start typing involved another of the classic tales. I have known the story of Jack And The Beanstalk for longer than I can now remember. I think that if anyone had asked five or six year old me for my opinion on it (nobody did), I would have said “Jack was so brave!”. However, retelling it forty years on, I did wonder whether I ought to be doing so: Jack was a swindler who dishonestly disposed of his mother’s cow, a burglar who repeatedly raided and stole from the giant’s home, and a murderer who ultimately killed his victim. Not a great role model! However, all was well that ended well for the protagonists, so it is a feel-good story.
Many more years have passed since I was telling fairy stories at bedtime, and I have had time to read a lot of learned, or at least opinionated, articles on matters including politics, economics, society , and political psychology. Two important things that I have come to know about in recent years are “ othering”, where rhetoric denies some people’s humanity until the audience are no longer inclined to treat the subjects as human, and the existence of a hyper-elite, with substantial power and near-total impunity, waging a reverse-Marxist class war against both the proletariat and the rest of the bourgeoisie alike. The one in service of the other is doing much harm.
Let us take those two things back to the story of Jack. Or more specifically, the giant in that story. The giant has language, feelings, a home and chattels, but no telling of the story ever gives him a name or grants him humanity. The story wouldn’t work if it did. Making him a victim would ruin the feel good factor. Instead, he is just a resource to exploit and then an enemy to slay, when he seeks to stop the exploitation. If you have told that story to a child, and they didn’t feel sorry for the giant, you have conducted a successful demonstration of othering in action. However, on another level, the giant can be considered an allegory or symbol. This is a brand new thought for me, although an obvious enough one that there are likely to have been other essays saying so before me. The giant could have used his might to be the hero of the ordinary people, but instead isolates himself, sequesters vast wealth with him, that could have been circulating in the land, and uses his power to menace the little folk. In setting himself apart and above, he has forsworn his claim to humanity, so there is no injustice in Jack violating what would have been his rights, had the giant still any moral claim to them.
Now maybe the lesson that we subliminally learned form this story, but haven’t thought about all our adult lives, is due for application. The Epstein clique, and, at most, a few hundred others around the world, live like Jack’s giant, above and apart, hoarding the money the world should be living on, casually destroying little people who displease them. The time has come for those of liberal values, and a sincere belief in the preciousness of rights for all, to accept that these people, or ex-people, have abjured their own humanity by how they have chosen to live and behave, and we don’t owe them the care we would offer all others. They have othered themselves by choice. Seize their gold. Confiscate their magic hens. Chop the beanstalk away from under their feet. We don’t need to wipe out the whole billionaire class. Making examples of a few would incentivise the rest to change their ways, so let them live to pay appropriate taxes, but the old fairytale does provide the moral lesson that we should be doing something about those who would make bread flour of our bones.
The stories we learn in early life do much to shape who we grow up to be. If we grew up knowing greedy giants need cutting down to size, then we need not scruple to cut people who would live like greedy giants down to size in the same way.
