The Kingdom of TomorrowIn the Kingdom of Tomorrow, the rulers built their empire on Promises — not bricks, not stone, but shimmering words that glowed brighter the less substance they had.
The people were told: “These walls will protect you, these towers will lift you, these bridges will carry you into the future.” Yet when they touched them, the walls dissolved into mist, the towers bent like reeds, and the bridges led only back to the same old square.
Every year, the rulers unveiled a new “Future Festival.” They paraded papier‑mâché machines that whirred without gears, maps that pointed to lands that didn’t exist, and clocks that promised time would soon run backwards to fix all mistakes. The crowd applauded, because applause was cheaper than doubt.
Meanwhile, Truth lived in exile at the edge of the kingdom, muttering: “A future built on lies is just a past in disguise.” But no one listened — it was easier to cheer for the parade than to admit the road was circular.
And so the Kingdom of Tomorrow marched endlessly forward, never arriving anywhere, but always announcing they had.
‘You kept standing next to lies and calling it a future.’ This line is more than a poetic lament; it is a piercing indictment of how deception is so often dressed up as progress. In politics, in business and even in private life, falsehoods are paraded as visions of tomorrow, while truth is quietly exiled from the room.
The observation is an old one. Hannah Arendt (1968) noted that truth and politics have never been on especially friendly terms, and that lying has long been regarded as a justifiable instrument of the political trade. George Orwell (1946) went further, arguing that political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and to lend an appearance of solidity to pure wind. What has changed is not the habit but its scale and polish. Harry Frankfurt (2005) draws a useful distinction: the liar at least acknowledges the truth in order to deny it, whereas the purveyor of what he bluntly calls ‘bullshit’ is simply indifferent to it. A future promised by someone indifferent to whether it is true is a future in name only.
Sissela Bok (1978) adds that the damage done by deception is rarely confined to its immediate victim. Every lie draws down a shared reserve of trust on which every promise about the future ultimately depends.
Further reading: Arendt, Between Past and Future (essay ‘Truth and Politics’); Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’; Frankfurt, On Bullshit; Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life.
Historical Parallels
History is littered with futures promised but never delivered. Utopian propaganda in the twentieth century, economic schemes built on sand, and grand national projects that collapsed under corruption all reveal the fragility of futures constructed on deceit. These episodes remind us that a false promise may glitter briefly, but it cannot endure.
Consider the utopian projects of the last century. Anne Applebaum (2003) shows how the Soviet camp system was cloaked in the language of re-education and socialist construction, while Frank Dikötter (2010) documents how, during China’s Great Leap Forward, officials competed to report ever-larger harvests to please their superiors. The inflated figures justified higher grain requisitions, and the countryside starved. The lie was not a footnote to the policy; it was the engine of the catastrophe. James C. Scott (1998) explains why such disasters recur: ambitious plans are imposed from above by authorities who see only what their simplified maps allow, and who suppress the local knowledge that might contradict them.
Timur Kuran (1995) supplies the psychological mechanism. He calls it ‘preference falsification’: people publicly profess what they privately doubt. Regimes built upon such performance appear formidable right up to the moment they collapse, because nobody has been telling them the truth, and the rulers have often ceased to tell it to themselves.
The economic record is no kinder. Charles Mackay (1841) chronicled the tulip mania, the South Sea Bubble and John Law’s Mississippi scheme. His account of the tulip episode has since been challenged by historians such as Anne Goldgar (2007), but the wider pattern he described has held. Charles Kindleberger (1978) later showed that financial manias follow a recognisable script in which euphoria and denial precede the crash, and Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff (2009) trace the same recurring conviction across eight centuries of financial folly: that ‘this time is different’. It never is.
Finally, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson (2012) argue that nations fail not through bad luck or geography but because elites build extractive institutions that channel wealth upwards while proclaiming national renewal. A grand project delivered through such institutions becomes a monument to its builders’ interests rather than to the public’s.
Further reading: Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps; Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine; Scott, Seeing Like a State; Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies; Kindleberger, Manias, Panics and Crashes; Reinhart and Rogoff, This Time Is Different; Acemoglu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail.
Contemporary Resonance
Today, the same pattern persists. Politicians speak of renewal while recycling old illusions. Corporations market ‘innovation’ that is little more than rebranding. Even in personal relationships, people cling to comforting lies, mistaking them for hope. The phrase captures this modern malaise: the ease with which illusion is mistaken for destiny.
In politics, Peter Pomerantsev (2019) argues that modern disinformation often aims less at persuading audiences of one particular falsehood than at exhausting them, so that nothing seems knowable and everything seems negotiable. Timothy Snyder (2017; 2018) warns that a public which no longer believes in facts cannot hold anyone to account, and Michiko Kakutani (2018) traces the wider erosion of truth across politics, culture and technology.
In business, Naomi Klein (2000) observed how brands came to sell an idea of a life rather than a product, so that the story mattered more than the thing sold. Evgeny Morozov (2013) criticised ‘solutionism’: the habit of presenting every social problem as a technical inconvenience awaiting an app, and every app as a step towards a better world. In such rhetoric, innovation becomes a destiny to be accepted rather than a claim to be tested.
In private life, Lauren Berlant (2011) describes ‘cruel optimism’: an attachment to a fantasy of the good life that itself obstructs the flourishing it promises. Daniel Goleman (1985) examines the ‘vital lies’ that individuals and groups tell to spare themselves discomfort, and Dan Ariely (2012) shows that most people cheat only a little, precisely so that they can go on regarding themselves as honest. The comforting lie in private works exactly as the grand lie does in public: it protects the story we would like to be true at the expense of the life we actually have.
Further reading: Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda; Snyder, On Tyranny and The Road to Unfreedom; Kakutani, The Death of Truth; Klein, No Logo; Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here; Berlant, Cruel Optimism; Goleman, Vital Lies, Simple Truths; Ariely, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty.
Philosophical ReflectionTruth is a seed: it grows slowly, often painfully, but it endures. Lies are scaffolding: they rise quickly and impressively, but they collapse when weight is applied. To call deception ‘the future’ is to confuse scaffolding for foundation. A society cannot truly advance if its progress rests upon falsehoods; it merely circles back to the same failures.
Bernard Williams (2002) argued that the virtues of truthfulness, which he names Accuracy and Sincerity, are not optional refinements of civilised life but conditions of cooperation itself. Without them we cannot rely on what others tell us, nor build institutions that outlast a single generation. Karl Popper (1945) gives the argument its political form: open societies endure because they permit criticism, and criticism is how error is corrected, whereas closed systems immunise their claims against refutation and so guarantee that their mistakes will compound. Jared Diamond (2005) reaches a similar conclusion empirically, showing how failures to anticipate, perceive and address problems have helped bring societies down.
Plato is instructive on both sides of the question. In the Republic he floats the ‘noble lie’, a founding myth told to citizens for the good of the city, and in the same work offers the allegory of the cave, in which prisoners mistake shadows on a wall for reality (Plato, 1993). The irony is hard to miss: the same book that entertains a useful fiction also supplies the most enduring image of its cost. Jean Baudrillard (1994) and Guy Debord (1994) carried the cave into the media age, describing societies in which the image of reality progressively displaces reality itself.
Further reading: Williams, Truth and Truthfulness; Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies; Diamond, Collapse; Plato, Republic (Books III and VII); Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation; Debord, The Society of the Spectacle.
Satirical Allegory
Consider the Kingdom of Tomorrow, where rulers built walls of promises, towers of rhetoric and bridges of illusion. Each year they unveiled new marvels: machines without gears, maps to lands that did not exist, clocks that promised to reverse time. The people applauded, for applause was cheaper than doubt.
At each festival the Minister of Progress cut the ribbon on a bridge that stopped halfway across the river, and the crowd admired the view from its end. Those who pointed out that the bridge did not reach the far bank were thanked for their contribution and assured that the far bank was a matter for next year’s budget. Meanwhile, Truth lived in exile, whispering: ‘A future built on lies is just a past in disguise.’
The Kingdom of Tomorrow has distinguished ancestors. Jonathan Swift (1726) sent Gulliver to Laputa, whose Academy of Projectors pursued schemes of spectacular impracticality. In Hans Christian Andersen’s tale (1837), an emperor’s courtiers praise garments that do not exist because to doubt them would be to confess their own unfitness. Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) shows a revolution’s commandments being quietly repainted to suit those in charge; Voltaire’s Candide (1759) mocks an optimism that survives every catastrophe; and Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) carries, in its very name, the admission that it is ‘no place’. Satire endures because laughter is often the only tool capable of slipping past the defences of a comfortable lie.
Further reading: Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Part III); Andersen, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’; Orwell, Animal Farm; Voltaire, Candide; More, Utopia.
Conclusion
The phrase is both a warning and a mirror. It reminds us that futures built on deception are not futures at all, but recycled pasts dressed in new costumes. To stand beside lies and call them destiny is to walk in circles, mistaking motion for progress.
The alternative need not be heroic. Václav Havel (1985) called it ‘living within the truth’: the stubborn, ordinary refusal to take part in the ritual of pretence. He saw this as a political act precisely because systems of lies depend on universal participation, and they weaken as each person quietly withdraws. Snyder (2017) makes a similar plea in more practical terms, urging readers to defend the very idea of facts.
The challenge, then, is to recognise illusion, resist its seduction, and insist upon truth as the only soil in which a genuine future can grow.
Further reading: Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless’; Snyder, On Tyranny; Arendt, Between Past and Future.
References
Acemoglu, D. and Robinson, J.A. (2012) Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty. London: Profile Books.
Andersen, H.C. (1837) ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, in Fairy Tales Told for Children. Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel.
Applebaum, A. (2003) Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps. London: Allen Lane.
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Ariely, D. (2012) The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone – Especially Ourselves. New York: HarperCollins.
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Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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Goldgar, A. (2007) Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Scott, J.C. (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Snyder, T. (2017) On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. London: Bodley Head.
Snyder, T. (2018) The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. London: Bodley Head.
Swift, J. (1726) Gulliver’s Travels. London: Benjamin Motte.
Voltaire (1759) Candide, ou l’Optimisme.
Williams, B. (2002) Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
