All of these things–prefering a lover’s lie to the truth, putting your shoes on the conveyer belt, banning a book–are really the same. Ultimately, each of these things serves to protect an illusion.
As human beings, we continually re-invent the world around us. To some extent, this is necessary; our perception of the world is limited by our senses and by our past experience. Filtering is a necessary way to make sense of the world.
But the person who bans The Prince, the person who prefers a lover’s lie, and the person who puts his shoes on the converer belt are all engaged in something more. They are actively seeking to protect and preserve an illusion–a deliberately constructed, carefully maintained falsehood.
The Prince is threatening because it exposes an illuson about human nature. It shatters the fiction that people are basically good and just, that we are far too enlightened to be manipulated in these ways. Machiavelli rubs our noses in our own human weaknesses, in the fact that not only can we be manipulated and led, but that, ultimately, we like to be manipulated and led. It’s easier than doing the work ourselves.
People like to preserve illusions about their lovers, and about themselves–they like to fabricate a fantasy in which true love conquers all, their lovers are faithful and act with integrity, that their lover’s lives and their lover’s past did not exist before that wonderous day when they fell in love.
People don’t always seek romantic relationships because they want to know the truth about themselves and their partner, and want the intimacy that knowledge brings; often, they seek romantic relationships because they are trapped between fear of loneliness on one side and their own insecurities on the other. Such a relationship benefits from fiction; the fiction is easier than the truth, because the fiction protects insecurity and the truth does not.
And the shoes on the X-ray belt? They create the illusion of security, without actually creating real security. Real security is expensive. Real security is inconvenient.
A commercial passenger flight would be far safer if the baggage on the flight were matched to a passenger on that flight in every instance,a nd if the airlines took steps to make sure a person could not put a package onto an airplane without actually boarding that airplane himself.
But this checking (which is standard on some non-US airlines) creates logistical complication and expense; and at the end of the day, the airlines know that the risk of terrorist attack is incredibly slim anyway. It is not, in the final analysis, worth the effort and expense to create real security; the illusion of secuirty is good enough to keep people flying.
