Today we are attempting to choose leaders in an era when we have never needed leadership more.

One right step and the whole world can become new again. One more wrong step and the globe itself is in irreversible danger.

The question is, then, How shall these new leaders lead so that the errors of the last generation do not simply become even more death-dealing?

A child’s insight can help. In this classic story, a village is awaiting a visit from the emperor: every year he came regally dressed, resplendent in velvet and gold, to demonstrate how great an emperor he was.

People lined the streets for miles and shouted as the emperor strode by, “You are the greatest emperor of all.”

But one year a small child in the crowd, shocked by what he saw, shouted even louder: “No, No,” he said. “Look! The emperor has no clothes at all.”

Then the farce was over. Then the crowd went silent. Then everyone snuck away ashamed of what they had allowed to go unchallenged. And then the emperor resigned the throne.

Lesson one: If we want to lead the world through bad times to good, we must be truth-tellers.

“If you want to save the age,” the poet Brenda Kennelly writes, “betray it. Expose its conceits, its foibles and its phony moral certitudes.”

There will be those among the powerful who try to make us say what we know is clearly not true because, if everyone agrees to believe the lie, the lie can go on forever.

The lie that there is:
—nothing we can do about refugees except close our borders
—nothing we can do about world poverty
—nothing we can do about “free” trade
—nothing we can do about inequality and justice
—nothing we can do to provide education and health care, housing and food, roads and water and just wages for everyone in the world.

If we want to lead this world, we, too, must refuse to tell the old lies. We must learn to say with certainty and clarity: Those emperors have no clothes! We must, like the child in the story, see what we’re looking at and say what we see!

—from The Legacy of Leadership by Joan Chittister.