Celtic fans are not stupid, nor easily scared.

Celtic fans have to put up with a lot from this club. Thankfully, we’ve got interests outside of the game and movies are one of mine.

The other day, I discovered that the latest screen adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm was being savaged by critics. Curious, I went to find out why, and the reason became obvious almost immediately.

They had changed the ending.

They had taken one of the bleakest and most uncompromising conclusions in modern literature and tried to make it more upbeat.

Why anybody would do such a dreadful, sacrilegious and frankly idiotic thing escapes me, because Animal Farm is not supposed to have an optimistic ending. It is not supposed to leave you believing that everything will work out in the end.

The entire point of the story is that, by the final pages, the degradation of the revolution is complete. Its new rulers have betrayed every principle they claimed to believe in. The revolution has not liberated the animals. It has merely replaced one ruling class with another, and the new one is every bit as corrupt, exploitative and contemptuous as the old.

The pigs control Animal Farm because they are the most intelligent creatures there and because they have no scruples about how they use power. They rewrite the rules. They revise history. They hoard the best food. They make decisions in secret and explain them afterwards as though every disaster was actually part of some brilliant plan.

More importantly, they constantly tell the animals that their lives are improving.

The evidence of their own eyes says otherwise.

The animals work harder. They eat less. Their conditions deteriorate. The promises made at the beginning of the revolution are quietly abandoned one by one. Yet Squealer, the pigs spokesman, continues to produce figures proving that food production has increased, working hours have fallen and life has never been better.

Only a few of the animals, most notably Benjamin the donkey, understand that this is nonsense.

As the story progresses, their quality of life declines markedly. Their exploitation becomes worse than it ever was under the humans, but they are expected to celebrate every supposed improvement and remain grateful for the privilege of being ruled by the pigs.

And whenever dissatisfaction threatens to spread, the pigs deploy their most reliable argument; “Surely, comrades, you do not want Jones to come back?”

Jones was the farmer they overthrew. He represents the nightmare of the old regime. His possible return is held over the animals as the ultimate threat. However badly things may be going now, they are told, questioning the pigs risks bringing back something worse.

It is one of the oldest forms of coercive control in recorded history.

Do not ask difficult questions. Do not challenge those in charge. Do not look too closely at what is happening around you. Because if you do, the monsters might come.

At Celtic, we have our own version of Jones.

It is the death of the club across the city.

For years, Celtic fans have been warned, sometimes explicitly and sometimes through carefully cultivated talking points, that demanding greater ambition puts Celtic at risk of going the same way as Rangers. We are constantly reminded that the lights are still on. We are told that the club is financially secure. We are warned that reckless spending could create a catastrophe from which Celtic might never recover.

Do not complain about the way we run the club, because we have kept it alive. Do not demand more, because more might lead to ruin.

Do not question the cash piling up in the bank, the failed transfer windows, the threadbare squads or the wasted opportunities, because somewhere down the other road lies liquidation, humiliation and a new company emerging from the wreckage.

It is one of the greatest lies ever foisted upon the Celtic support.

We are expected to believe that Celtic is perpetually one bad signing, one bad window or one disappointing season away from a Rangers-style calamity. Spend £6 million on the wrong midfielder and the gates of Celtic Park will apparently be chained shut by Thursday. Pay a serious fee for the manager’s first-choice target and administrators will be emptying the trophy cabinet by Friday.

It is nonsense. Of course it is.

Yes, Celtic could spend itself into serious trouble. Any football club could. Nobody disputes that. Financial recklessness exists, and the collapse across the city demonstrated what can happen when arrogance, dishonesty and unsustainable spending combine.

But nobody in the Celtic support is calling for that.

Nobody is demanding that the club borrow hundreds of millions, conceal liabilities, gamble its future on imaginary Champions League income or construct an entire business model around winning every competition forever.

Nobody has ever seriously suggested such a thing.

Celtic fans are asking Celtic to use a reasonable proportion of the money it already earns and already holds to build the strongest possible team.

They are asking the club to operate with ambition appropriate to its resources. They are asking those in charge to support the manager, invest in the football department and stop treating prudence as though it requires permanent paralysis.

There is a chasm between responsible investment and financial self-destruction.

The board knows this.

That is why I sometimes wonder whether the endless references to what happened at Ibrox are rooted in genuine trauma or whether they serve the same purpose as Jones in Animal Farm. Perhaps the people running Celtic really are terrified by what they witnessed across the city. Perhaps they have convinced themselves that any significant outlay is the first step towards catastrophe.

But it is difficult to believe that this fear is entirely sincere when it has become such a useful weapon. It allows every failure to be reframed as responsibility. It allows every act of cowardice to be presented as prudence. It allows a lack of imagination to masquerade as sensible stewardship.

The team can be weakened and Celtic fans are told to be grateful because the club still exists. Transfer targets can be missed and the board is praised for refusing to be held to ransom. Money can accumulate in the bank while the football operation deteriorates, and this is somehow offered as proof that the institution is healthy.

The numbers may improve while everything the numbers are supposed to support gets worse. That is pure Squealer.

Supporters are not demanding financial insanity. They are demanding that the football club behave like a football club. They are demanding that money generated by success should be used to sustain success rather than simply stored as evidence of administrative virtue.

The balance sheet is not the purpose of Celtic. The balance sheet is supposed to serve Celtic.

There is another reason the comparison with Animal Farm works. The pigs rely on the belief that the other animals are too stupid, too exhausted or too frightened to challenge what they are being told.

That is where Celtic’s board has miscalculated.

We are not stupid. We know the difference between responsible spending and reckless gambling. We know that using the Rangers collapse as a response to every demand for ambition is dishonest. We know that the club is not on the verge of insolvency. We know that Celtic could invest far more aggressively without putting its future at risk.

Most of all, we know when fear is being used to lower expectations.

The support will no longer accept the argument that, because Celtic has not suffered the most catastrophic fate imaginable, the people in charge must therefore be doing a good job. Survival is not success. Solvency is not ambition. Avoiding liquidation is not the highest standard by which this institution should be judged.

The board does not get to point across the city forever and use somebody else’s collapse as an excuse for its own failures.

Jones is not coming back. The gates are not about to be locked. The club is not one serious signing away from extinction.

And Celtic supporters are not dumb animals who will swallow that story simply because it is repeated often enough.

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