‘I really believe I’d run in there’

It works like this:

1. I am a hero because I’m opposed to the imaginary Satanic baby-killers who are, by definition, the greatest evil of our time.

2. This makes me the equivalent (at least) of the heroes of other times who opposed the greatest evils of their day.

3. Therefore, when I read about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Corrie Ten Boom, Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Anne Hutchinson, Jesus, or Robin Hood, I’m really reading about myself and about what I would have done if I had been there.

4. And therefore whenever it comes to the actual evils and horrors of my time, it stands to reason that I would have heroically prevented them if only I had been there personally.

5. And therefore “I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon.”

The ability to tell yourself that, and to very nearly convince yourself to believe it, is a vital attraction of the Satanic baby-killer mythology and its ethos.

Yes, to outsiders — to those not playing along, this will make you appear to be a foolish blowhard.

But insiders will agree with you. The others participating in the game will congratulate you on this hypothetical courage and imagined heroism because your self-flattery flatters them too. They will heartily agree that this is what you would have done because that strengthens their own fantasy that this is what they would have done. They will help you to almost believe it about yourself because doing so helps them to almost believe it about themselves.

Your self-proclaimed moral superiority grants them a vicarious moral superiority of their own, and you all get to praise one another for how splendid you look in these emperor’s new clothes.