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A harmless lie? That might be an oxymoron.
One of the reasons our society is on its last shaky legs might be that when our children are very young, we start lying to them. All of us do.
First we fill their little brains with nonsense about Santa Claus, the fat little dude in a red suit who, using flying reindeers pulling a sled, delivers Christmas presents to 124 million households (that’s just in the US) in a few hours on Christmas Eve. He lands his sled on the roof, we tell the little cherubs, and brings the presents down the chimney.
“Really?” they ask, a tiny sliver of skepticism appearing. “Really,” we assure them, “See? He ate the cookies we left him.”
It takes years for the sliver to become a chasm, for education and experience to begin to gnaw away at our credibility. We plop them in Santa’s lap at the mall, and they are horrified — not only is he loud and strange and repellent, but the odor of cigarettes and booze stays with them for months. They learn math; if Mr. Claus spent just one minute in each house, it would take him 600 days to do the job. Only Amazon could pull that off. They realize that their house does not have a fireplace, and if the bearded one came down the chimney he would shoot straight into the furnace. They look at the chimney and see that its opening measures 12 inches across. If the Fat One put more than a single foot in there it would take the Jaws of Life to get him out.
Then there’s the secondary reason for observing Christmas — the first, of course, being to get stuff — to commemorate the birth in a manger, surrounded by animals, on December 25 in the year 00, of a baby named Jesus Christ. According to serious historians, none of those things is objectively true. That is not where it happened, when it happened, or what his name was. But that is our story and we stick with it as, year after year, our credibility shrinks to the vanishing point.
And then one day it all comes together and they look at us, and whether they say it aloud or not, they think: “All these years, you’ve been lying to me.”
Not just about Christmas, either. We told them the Easter Bunny hid candy and colored eggs in the yard for them to find on Easter morning; that a fairy snuck into their room at night to leave money under their pillow in return for a discarded tooth; and at the same time instructed them, in the sternest tones of which we were capable, that they must never, ever tell a lie. It is a wonder that by the age of 12 or so they listen to anything we have to say about anything.
So how is it that we are surprised to see that a large number of our fellow citizens, raised, as we were, on a diet of lies, are susceptible to the crackpot conspiracy theories of QAnon and the MAGA heads? We accuse them of being stupid and deluded, but believing that John F. Kennedy is going to come back to life, appear in Dallas and restore Donald Trump to the presidency is not measurably more whacked out than what we told our kids about Santa Claus.
What would be wrong with raising our kids on the truth? What would be wrong with telling them that Christmas is a time we have set aside to honor our family and friends by exchanging gifts, and to honor a great teacher who lived two thousand years ago and whose teachings are still important to us? Why do we need the stupid magic in the story at all?
A lot of what you write makes sense – maybe too much sense. I wouldn’t necessarily slam magic. Magic is where creativity finds a home. It’s nature’s way of breaking down the delusion that we – the clever apes – can somehow figure everything out; that the universe gives the slightest damn about the rambling theories, formulae and equations emanating from our recently minted frontal lobes. Magic is art, music, dance, poetry, and, yes, myth.
Kids sense that Santa is just for fun. Their imaginations soar. They have that precious human quality of being able to hold fact and fantasy in perfect balance. The Enlightenment ethos that ‘reason is good, myth is bad’ must be force fed to them as they mature. Their instincts inform them otherwise, but to little avail. Repression becomes necessary to keep the civilized machine running. The beast within rebels, and mental illness – sometimes en masse – is too often the result. This may be the real source of the MAGA- Qanon mentality.
Of course, I’m just registering my opinion here; I have zero credentials in any of this stuff…but I’ve been to town.
Finally went to your website – was worried, have not had an email in months. (No notices in spam folder.) Phew. Guess I’ll just re-subscribe.
Tried to re-subscribe. Welcome to censorship…
“400. That’s an error.
The server cannot process the request because it is malformed. It should not be retried. That’s all we know.”
My last email (from The Daily Impact) was July 23 2022.
Carl Sagan said in his book The demon-haunted world that there is plenty of magic to fuel our imaginations in the cosmos, the micro world, and the macro world to keep us enthralled and filled with wonder forever or at least as long as our human lives are if mankind could but leave all the really unintelligent religious nonsense and just live together knowing that this is our only home and there is a lot to learn we might still pull through all of the damage we have inflicted on this planet. (I doubt it, but who knows)
I just finished reading Science and the akashic field (a theory of everything) if something like a universal intelligence is to be found so much more (obviously) complex than the world’s petty religions then that would be it, truly a mind-expanding book right or somewhat wrong.
As for Santa he operates using the Quantum field and gets it done easily.
There are different kinds of lies, you know. Certain kinds of lies are probably harmless to believe in e.g. the fat one in a red suit. (He’s not without his charms, the way he’s been portrayed.) Certain other kinds of lies are fatal to believe in. The single most outstanding example today would be the Ideology of Unlimited Growth, of course. What is so terrifying here is how so many supposedly intelligent and educated people, above all the global ‘elite’, believe this lie without question.
I’ve precious little against what others want to believe as long as they don’t drag me and my loved ones into Hell for what they believe. Unfortunately this is looking more and more like what’s going to happen.