Mapmakers once filled unknown regions with lions and monsters. The phrase hic sunt leones did not appear everywhere, but the instinct did. Where knowledge ended, imagination supplied danger. We still do this. We draw lions around people we do not know, histories we avoid, and futures we cannot control.
Political leaders exploit that instinct. They populate the unknown with enemies and then offer themselves as protection. Fear is an act of imagination.
Artists understand that. Every creative act begins in uncertainty. An empty page, a blank stage, an unbuilt space, a room of strangers. We do not always find lions there. Sometimes we find beginnings.
The Map Has Changed
I once believed American democracy could correct its failures. I am no longer certain. Recent assessments show steep democratic decline. V-Dem reports a 24 percent drop in the U.S. Liberal Democracy Index in 2025. Freedom House lowered the nation’s score again in 2026. Standards differ, but the direction is clear.
The United States is not yet a totalitarian state. Elections continue. Courts restrain power. Journalists investigate. Citizens organize. But democracy can be hollowed out long before it collapses. People adjust to violations until the unthinkable becomes ordinary.
First, Draw the Lions
Authoritarianism needs more than power. It needs a story that makes power appear necessary. The story begins with danger. Immigrants invading. Cities collapsing. Artists corrupting children. Teachers indoctrinating. Journalists betraying. Minorities receiving privileges that supposedly belong to someone else.
Some fears reflect real problems. Manipulation begins when anxieties are given convenient human targets.
Once the threat is vivid enough, the strongman steps forward. He alone can restore safety. The bargain is ancient. Give me power, and I will protect you from the creatures beyond the map.
Facts alone rarely defeat this. The appeal is built from narrative, identity, grievance, spectacle, and belonging. It is a work of imagination.
The Unknown Becomes the Enemy
Authoritarian stories shrink the future. They insist that safety requires uniformity, disagreement produces chaos, and freedom is a dangerous indulgence. Eventually people stop asking what might be possible and ask only who can keep danger away.
Fear keeps the public watching the perimeter while power changes hands behind them. Oversight weakens. Language corrodes. History is rewritten. Cultural institutions are disciplined. The lions outside the map distract from what is happening inside it.
Artists are not immune. We can become cautious, exhausted, or professionally busy enough to mistake activity for safety. The machinery keeps running until it does not.
Artists Know the Territory
Creative practice teaches that uncertainty is not danger, disorder is not collapse, and difference is not threat. Artists begin where certainty ends and show that the unknown can produce something other than fear.
Authoritarianism claims that without control there will be chaos. Artists prove that people can enter uncertainty and create form without surrendering freedom. We improvise, collaborate, revise, and remain responsive. We create structure without obedience.
There May Be Lions
Some dangers are real. People are being detained, displaced, intimidated, and excluded. Institutions are weakening. History is being distorted. Communities with long memories recognize patterns that others still dismiss.
Artists have the opportunity to help distinguish real lions from imagined ones.
We are able to reveal who benefits from fear, whose humanity has been concealed, and what possibilities disappear when society accepts the map it has been given.
This does not require every artist to make political work. It requires recognizing that the struggle over democracy is also a struggle over perception, memory, language, symbols, public space, and the futures people believe they are allowed to imagine. Those are already our materials.
The map is being redrawn. Some warnings are justified. Others are placed there to keep people frightened and obedient. Artists cannot remove every danger. We can cross the boundary, look carefully, and return with something more truthful than the monsters others have drawn.
The artist does not deny that there may be lions.
The artist refuses to believe that lions are all there is.
This essay was cross-posted to Substack, Aug 27, 2026
Banner image: Detail from Olaus Magnus’s Carta Marina, 1539. Mapmakers filled unfamiliar waters with creatures drawn from observation, folklore, and fear. Library of Congress, public domain.
