Sometimes the Safest Way to Tell the Truth Is to Invent a World

Some of the most important lessons I ever learned about leadership came from places that do not exist.

​Arrakis does not exist.

Neither does Battle School.​

​Isaac Asimov’s future histories are not history.

​Roger Zelazny, Steven Brust, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, and Jerry Pournelle all built worlds I could never actually visit.

But I spent a lot of time in those worlds.

At the time, I thought I was reading science fiction and fantasy because I liked science fiction and fantasy.

That was true.

I still do.

What I did not completely understand when I was younger was that those writers were also giving me places to think.

They let me watch people deal with power, status, class, loyalty, fear, courage, responsibility, institutions, manipulation, leadership, freedom, and the unintended consequences of our best intentions.

They could take a problem that would immediately become an argument if you named the current political party, country, religion, or social group involved, move it to another planet or another century, change everyone’s names, and suddenly I could look at the pattern instead of defending a side.

I first read Dune in the summer of 1976 (damn! as I read that sentence, that was 50 years ago!).

I remember being fascinated enough by the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear that I memorized it and would say it to myself.

At the time, I was reading a great adventure.

Years later I could see more of what Frank Herbert had put in there: questions about power, charismatic leadership, religion, ecology, empire, institutions, prophecy, and what happens when human beings desperately want a hero.

The book had not changed. I had.

That may be one of the greatest gifts of fiction.

A good story can meet you at one level when you’re young and then be waiting for you at another level when you’ve lived enough life to see the questions underneath it.

What I did not realize at the time was that I was also building a kind of judgment.

Those books were entertaining — I would have read them for that alone.

But they were also training.

Every story invited me to ask something I had no formal language for yet:

• What would I have done in that situation?
• Would I have made the same choice?
• What kind of person would that choice have made me?

I did not have the vocabulary for it then.

I was just a kid reading science fiction.

But looking back, those imaginary worlds became an early leadership laboratory — a place where I could examine power, hierarchy, loyalty, and moral tradeoffs before I had the language to recognize those same forces clearly in real life.

A Mirror Tilted Just Enough

​Jonathan Swift understood this long before science fiction had spaceships.

​Gulliver’s Travels looks like a bizarre travel adventure.

Gulliver keeps arriving in places populated by people and societies strange enough to make us laugh at them.

But Swift was not merely inventing weird little people for entertainment.

He used those imaginary societies to satirize political corruption, factionalism, institutional stupidity, and human pride in the world he actually inhabited.

Think about the method for a moment.

If somebody walks up to you and says:

• “Your people are corrupt.”
• “Your leaders are ridiculous.”
• “Your beliefs are hypocritical.”
• “Your class is exploiting everybody else.”

What happens?

Most of us do not calmly pull out a notebook and say:

“Interesting. Please continue.”

We defend ourselves.

We defend our group.

We challenge the messenger.

We search for the flaw in their argument before we seriously examine whether they might be pointing at something real.

But send Gulliver to Lilliput and something different can happen.

We laugh first.

Then, if the writer is good enough, there comes an uncomfortable moment when we realize we may not have been laughing at them.

We may have been laughing at ourselves.

Fiction gives us enough distance from ourselves to examine truths we might defend ourselves against if they were stated as accusations.

Why Distance Matters

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why intelligent people can talk past one another.

Sometimes one person thinks the conversation is about facts and logic.

Another person is responding from trust, emotion, identity, belonging, or some combination of all of them.

The first person keeps bringing more evidence.

The second person feels more attacked.

Then everybody concludes the other person is irrational.

A story can sometimes create another route into the conversation.

Instead of saying:

“Here’s what’s wrong with people like you.”

A novelist asks:

“Imagine a society where this happened. What do you think would follow?”

For a little while, we are allowed to consider the situation before deciding whether our identity is under attack.

There is research suggesting that narrative communication can produce somewhat less resistance than a direct non-narrative message, particularly when we become engaged in the story or identify with its characters.

I would not overstate that.

Stories are not magical mind-control devices.

The effect depends on the story, the person, and the situation.

But the basic experience makes sense to me.

Nobody has accused me of anything yet.

I’m just watching what happens to these people in this imaginary world.

That gives me room to notice.

Mars, Arrakis, and Battle School

That is part of why Pierce Brown’s Red Rising is such an obvious modern example.

Its society makes class visible by literally color-coding people into a hierarchy.

Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste, while the Golds rule the society above him.

Brown does not have to begin by telling me which twenty-first-century political argument I’m supposed to join.

He builds a world where hierarchy, inherited position, exploitation, status, and rebellion can be made huge enough to see.

Then I get to wrestle with the questions:

• What does a rigid hierarchy do to the people on the bottom?
• What does it do to the people on the top?
• What happens when a system teaches everyone that their place in it is natural?
• What happens after people decide the system is unjust?

That last question matters.

Destroying something is not the same thing as knowing what should replace it.

Dune creates a different laboratory.

​Frank Herbert gives us politics, ecology, religion, economics, family, warfare, and charismatic leadership all tangled together.

You can admire competence and courage while also asking whether our hunger for heroes creates dangers of its own.

​Orson Scott Card gives us another kind of moral problem in Ender’s Game.​

What happens when empathy makes someone a better strategist?

What happens when adults decide a gifted child is valuable enough to manipulate?

At what point does training a person to save everyone else turn that person into a tool?

Robert Heinlein repeatedly made me think about freedom, responsibility, competence, and the assumptions hidden inside the society around us.

He even gave me the word grok — a way of describing understanding so deep that you do more than merely know facts about it.

That word stayed with me because it described something I wanted to be able to do:

Not just know about a thing, but understand it from the inside.

Fiction, at its best, lets you do that.

It lets you inhabit a perspective that is not your own.

Asimov, Zelazny, Brust, Niven, and Pournelle did this in their own ways too.

These books were never answer keys.

They were places to ask better questions.

Fiction Is Moral Sparring

The closest analogy for me may be martial arts.

Sparring is not a street fight.

Nobody should confuse the two.

There are rules.

There is a controlled environment.

We deliberately remove some of reality so we can safely explore another part of it.

But sparring is valuable precisely because enough reality remains to expose us to timing, pressure, consequence, and resistance.

You learn what happens when somebody does not cooperate with your plan.

I think good fiction can work the same way for judgment.

In sparring, you can test a technique against a resisting partner and learn something about timing, distance, and pressure without getting hurt the way you would in a real fight.

In fiction, you can test a set of beliefs against imagined consequences and learn something about incentives, leadership, loyalty, or moral tradeoffs without having to live through the actual collapse.

The environment is artificial by design.

That is what makes it useful.

The artificiality is not a weakness.

It is the reason the exercise works at all.

Fiction is moral sparring.

It gives us a bounded imaginary environment in which we can ask:

• What happens if this incentive keeps rewarding the same behavior?
• What kind of leader does this system produce?
• When does loyalty become complicity?
• When does strength become domination?
• What happens when a revolution becomes the new establishment?
• Who pays the price for the hero’s victory?
• What would I become inside this system?

Those are personal-leadership questions even when the story happens a thousand years from now on a planet that does not exist.

A Good Story Can Also Lie Beautifully

There is a danger here.

The fact that a story lowers our defenses does not mean the story is true.

In fact, that may be one reason we need to be more careful with stories, not less.

A novelist controls the universe.

The writer can decide:

• who is wise;
• who is stupid;
• which choices succeed;
• which institutions fail;
• which characters are punished;
• which consequences never occur.

Build the fictional world cleverly enough and almost any philosophy can be made to look inevitable.

A story can lower the drawbridge. That does not mean whoever rides across it is telling the truth.

That is why I do not think fiction should be treated as evidence.

Fiction is a simulation chamber for judgment, not evidence by itself.

A story can help me notice a pattern.

Then I need questions.

Then I need history, evidence, competing explanations, and reality.

Then I need to decide what I think.

And eventually I need to test my judgment against my actual life.

Stories help us notice.

Questions help us investigate.

Evidence helps us decide.

Practice helps us learn.

That sequence matters because storytelling itself is morally neutral.

• Propaganda uses stories.
• Advertising uses stories.
• Political movements use stories.
• Religions use stories.
• Families tell stories about who “we” are.
• Businesses tell stories.
• Nations tell stories.
• We even tell stories about ourselves.

The ability of a story to move us is not proof that its conclusion deserves our allegiance.

It is an invitation to look more carefully.

⚔ The Dojo Drill

Think of a novel, movie, or fictional character that has stayed with you for years.

Not necessarily your favorite one.

Pick one that changed how you saw something.

Then ask:

1. What question did the story force me to confront? Leadership? Power? Courage? Freedom? Loyalty? Class? Responsibility? Human nature?
2. What did the story seem to be claiming?
3. What part of that claim do I believe — and what evidence outside the story supports it?
4. What would a strong counterargument or a different story say?
5. Where do I see a smaller version of the same pattern in my own life?

That last question is where fiction stops being entertainment and begins becoming practice.

Come Back to the Real World

Sometimes the safest way to tell the truth is to invent a world.

Not because we should hide from reality.

Because sometimes we need enough distance from reality to see it clearly.

Swift sends Gulliver away from England so readers can look back at England.

Science-fiction writers send us to Mars, Arrakis, distant futures, and impossible societies so eventually we can look back at our own.

And then we have to come home.

That is the part that matters.

In martial arts, we bow onto the mat, practice inside an artificial environment, then bow off the mat and return to ordinary life.

The point is not to live forever inside the drill.

The point is to become more capable because of what the drill allowed us to discover.

Maybe the best fiction does something similar.

We enter an imaginary world.

We practice judgment there.

Then we come back to this one seeing a little more clearly.

Good fiction does not have to tell you what to think.

At its best, it gives you a place to notice what you had not known to question.

📚 Leader’s Library

​A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens​

Why?

Dickens begins by describing a world filled with contradictions:

• Wisdom and foolishness
• Belief and disbelief
• Light and darkness
• Hope and despair

He was writing about the turmoil surrounding the French Revolution, but that opening survives because human beings keep discovering the same truth:

An age can contain extraordinary progress and extraordinary danger simultaneously.

That is worth remembering whenever somebody tells you that everything is getting worse.

Or everything is getting better.

Usually, reality is more complicated.

It is often both.

And leadership begins with learning to see both clearly.

P.S. Know a martial arts gym owner who’s stressed about money or student numbers?

Do them a favor: send them to The Leader's Dōjō, my website where I help owners get more students and keep them longer with simple systems.

One forward from you could change their gym: The Leader's Dōjō​

Chuck