What I’m talking about here—authenticity—is apparently an alien experience for too many people. As individuals, we’ve been blinded, conned, manipulated, trashed, beaten up, beaten down, and hammered into insensibility by the publicity mills, the hype, the grind, the weight of peer group pressure, and ultimately even our own belief systems. We end up believing what we want to believe instead of seeing what is really so. Goebbels had it right—if you tell a big enough lie and you tell it loud enough and long enough, people will accept it as truth. It all depends on how well you package it. This is the essence of American discourse in the ’90s: Say anything. He who can lie the most sincerely will win the affection of the public.

And when someone does stand up to object, “Hey, wait a minute—the clothes have no emperor,” he too becomes a target. The steamroller of lies will aim itself at him, too.

Everyone who has a vested interest in having you believe that there really is an emperor inside all that taffeta will do everything they can to discredit and destroy any person who still believes in accuracy enough to stand up and say, “Uh, excuse me—? That’s not the way I saw it and I was there.” Even goodhearted people will unknowingly add their voices to the chorus of falsehoods because it’s more fun to believe the glamorous lie than the dirty truth; but the cost of that easy acceptance is such a complete and total destruction of our respect for authenticity that, as a society, we now act as if we have the right to vote on reality.

The one place where we really do have a vote—where it really matters—is in our interactions with other human beings. Samuel R. Delany said it. Drama occurs in the space between two people. It goes beyond that. All of life occurs in the space between us. All we really have is each other—and it’s in our commitment to each other that we make the kind of difference that really can change the world. But when we lose our commitment to accuracy, honesty, and justice, we lose our ability to make a difference, because we also lose our vision of what is possible.

Harlan Ellison’s strength, the essential reason why he has dominated the conversation of this community for so many years, is that he is a man who refuses to let his vision be muddied by the convenient little lies of politeness and tact, because those little lies lead directly to the bigger lies of greed and venality. Harlan stands up against the steamroller of lies again and again and again. I think it is this singular commitment to honesty that makes him one of the most important voices in the literature of amazement.