By Paul Clark
(aka motomynd)
Even though I’m 67 years old, fairly world-wise and extremely well-traveled, it wasn’t until five years ago – when my son was almost two years old – that I fully realized that a shocking number of people are innately and almost maniacally dishonest. I had always noted that many people – including “good” people, and definitely not just “bad” people – routinely used exaggeration, partials truths and “white” lies in their normal conversation with me, but it wasn’t until I saw them blatantly lying to my toddler-age son that the point hit home.
| A shocking number of people are innately and almost maniacally dishonest |
When you are raising a child, you basically have two choices: Option A – raise them in a fact-based manner where they learn to sort out what they value and decide for themselves how they want to live; Option B –allow them to become conditioned to accepting a life that is filled with a confusing mix of mythology, dishonesty, and plain old bullshit that masquerade as factual information. In other words, you can raise a child in an honest manner, or you can raise them in the same marginally dishonest fashion in which way too many of us were raised.
Choose Option A and you hopefully raise a child who can think their way through life and chart their own course. Choose Option B and you most likely raise a child who goes with the flow and winds up wherever luck and the winds of social change take them.
It may be different for you readers, but in my world, I always saw a whole lot of Option B parenting. I knew I would be bucking some headwinds when I chose Option A, but I had no clue how strong those opposing forces would be until Christmas with my family and the in-laws, when my son was just three weeks from his second birthday.
Which brings me to what is often the first situation in which society tries to condition us to accept the Big Lie. Yes, doom descended in the form of Santa Claus, the bearer of gifts and the slayer of best intentions. Most of us were raised on the Santa Claus lie, right? So what’s the big deal? Why not just go along?
Turns out there are many reasons not to go along. Psychologists question if perpetuating the Santa lie sets up children for disappointment when they learn the truth, and are concerned that the Santa lie also plants the first seeds of parental distrust. If you are interested, the Huffpost article “Psychologists Think Your Lies About Santa Will Damage Your Kids” concisely presents thoughts on the topic.
Colin Cowherd is one of the few sports talk guys I occasionally listen to. He does a skit about the “say it out loud” test. The point being that if you say it out loud and the idea sounds ridiculous, don’t go there. If you say it out loud and it sounds good, give it a try.
Try saying out loud, “Santa Claus is a jolly old man with a sled pulled by reindeer who flies all over the world in one night taking gifts to all the good little girls and boys.” Doesn’t sound all that bad, now, does it? Not if you don’t get into some basic math about how many stops that would be in one night, and don’t have a gearhead toddler who already has a pretty good idea that even the most wicked hemi-powered Dodge Charger couldn’t even get Santa all around the state in one night, much less the world.
So, to the chagrin of all families involved, I applied Cowherd logic and started talking to my son about the origins of the myth of Santa Claus, and about how he shouldn’t confuse fake Santas at the mall with people, or traditions that we honor from the past with today’s giving of gifts.
Amazingly, as a not quite two-year-old toddler, my son comfortably grasped the explanation. I didn’t have the same luck with the adults, a few of whom became irate at how I was “ruining Christmas” for my son – including one who pulled up the NORAD “Santa Tracker” and said “your dad doesn’t want you to believe in Santa, huh? Ask him to explain this.” Yes, adults were angry with me because I wouldn’t lie to my son.
And so, I explained it. Eye to eye with my son, I said, “Are those talking cars real in that Cars movie you love to watch?” He laughed. “Of course not, they’re cartoon cars.” Thus encouraged, I said, “Right. And that’s what Santa Tracker is, a cartoon.” He looked around the room and said to no one in particular: “You don’t understand this? I do.”
Victory!
Which of course meant that the gathered forces, having failed to win Round One, had to rush to Round Two, the other place where most people begin conditioning others into accepting the Big Lie: religion.
“Why haven’t you had him baptized yet? When are you going to do it?”
My son looked puzzled. “What is that?” An authoritative voice jumped in with, “Your daddy needs to have you baptized so you get to go to heaven.” I looked at my son and countered with, “It’s sort of like the myth of Santa Claus,” and the battle was on.
Have you ever encountered a situation where you felt all the forces of the world were arrayed against you, and yet you found yourself incapable of taking even the tiniest tactful step back? There is a saying that sometimes you have to make the leap and build your wings on the way down; I had made the leap, but the wings weren’t taking shape.
| Do religious people understand that when they state dogma as fact they are telling a lie? |
This country was founded in part on the principle of religious freedom, and it is – so far – still a fairly free country, where people can pretty much say and believe what they want, but many people don’t seem to realize that just because they believe something doesn’t give them the right to force others to accept their belief as fact.
Religion is considered faith-based rather than fact-based for good reason, and most people know that, even as they spout dogma as fact. Church people can be stubborn – it was 350 years after Galileo’s death that Pope John Paul II finally apologized for the way the Catholic Church treated Galileo because his scientific beliefs conflicted with church dogma – but in this day and time what is the upside of provoking conflict over something that can’t be proven, or at least so far hasn’t been proven? We have so few real-world matters to argue about, we have to fight over theory?
So, how did my conflict with in-laws and immediate family – all devout Lutherans, Baptists, and Evangelicals – turn out? About like Galileo and the Catholic Church, only with possibly more enduring implications.
Was it worth standing ground instead of giving in? I thought about that seriously, and about the price society pays when we enable others to get away with their various levels of dishonesty, and I decided damn right it was worth standing ground.
First off, since I’m not fueled by stereotypical church-goer arrogance, I didn’t try to tell any of them how to raise their children, so who were they to tell me how to raise mine? Secondly, if the only way we can stay on good terms with acquaintances, neighbors, friends, and family members is to let them browbeat us into silence, why bother to be on good terms?
Having no communication with a liar or a bully is better than having dishonest communication that appeases and enables them; if you're not communicating at all, you are at least preventing them from wasting your time. And you are preventing them from trying to instill in your child the dishonesty they’ve come to accept.
Being a younger boomer, I’ve always looked askance at the older boomers predilection for “slacktivism” instead of activism, and at their penchant for political correctness. My jaundiced view is very likely based in an event from the first “Earth Day” in 1970.
An older classmate had founded an environmental group called P.R.I.D.E. – People Rationally Involved in Defending the Environment – and even though we were just a bunch of 14 to 17-year-old kids, we became a force. We helped block planned construction of an unneeded dam that would have ruined a favorite stream, and we marked the first Earth Day by turning out en masse to walk around our hometown picking up trash and litter.
Luck had put me working side by side with “hottish” but aloof classmate Pat McManaway, and I was looking for any opportunity to impress her – if one can impress by picking up often unidentifiable debris and throwing it in a trash bag you are dragging beside you.
We were only two blocks from our school when two attractive 20-something couples pulled up beside us in a very stylish Pontiac Catalina convertible. The driver said something like, “So, you punks want to clean up stuff, huh?” and with that he and the others bombarded us with a volley of fast-food trash, including some leftover milk shakes. They laughed and spun the tires as they took off.
Furious and humiliated, we nevertheless dutifully cleaned up the mess. That set the tone: we were 15-year-old boomers begrudgingly cleaning up after older boomers, and many of us feel like we have basically done that our entire lives.
While politically correct older boomers have been enabling liars and bullies and arrogant loudmouths for decades, we somewhat younger folks have had to endure the results of such. We have come to think that when people lie, they should pay a price, and when people try to coerce others into buying into their dishonesty, they should pay a price. We have learned that when these people see others keep silent, it only emboldens them. Forget political correctness, we are at a point where if they want a fight – figuratively or literally – we are happy to oblige.
| The January 6, 2020 attack on the Capitol is the natural outcome of decades of excuses and political correctness |
Given that 40-year history, why is everyone so surprised at the January 6 attack on the Capitol? That group has never been punished for anything else they did, so why shouldn’t they think they could attack our democracy and get away with that too?
At some point, people who live by facts have to stand up to people who live in defiance of facts; if not, we end up as Germany did under Hitler, Spain under Franco, Cambodia under Pol Pot, and on and on and on. And yes, to state the obvious, we end up with 50 million people believing a Big Lie, despite there being zero evidence to support it.
Risking “ruining” a child’s Christmas by refusing to support the Santa Claus lie seems a small price to pay if it teaches a child to think through and seek out facts, rather than just blindly accept what people are saying as fact. It is just as important to teach that belief and opinion are not fact, no matter if that belief is religious or political, or if that opinion is so misguided as to think a 1968 Dodge Charger is the greatest car ever built. Despite my best efforts, my garage guy has almost convinced my son of that, can you even imagine?
| Copyright © 2022 by Paul Clark |
Paul, I was listening to a BBC broadcast on PBS radio this morning about homophobic beatings in Spain. Might homophobia be another trait of the people you depict in today's post?
ReplyDeleteThis is superbly said and absolutely true. Every time I walk through a bookstore and see the Religion section, I remark to myself that it should all be bundled under Fiction. Or maybe that's too kind. Perhaps there should be a section called Lies. Alas, truth is not a valued commodity these days. Our country seems to be slipping into an ever more deeply entrenched period of minority rule, a minority that has seemingly little use for truth. I don't know if it will be as bad as CNN says. Hopefully not. But I do know how hard it is to value truth in such a world. Knowing there are other truth-tellers in the room certainly helps. Thank you, Paul, for being one of them.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Eric. Putting the religion section under Fantasy would seem appropriate. I don't go so far as to say all religious dogma is impossible, but I do note that none of it has so far been proven. Which makes it even more amazing when I think of how many millions of people have been killed because of arguments about it. People being killed over debate about an unproven god seems reasonable proof there may be no god – except for the one that humans created in their own image.
DeleteI encourage my son to develop his imagination and embrace what might be, but I do not allow him to confuse it with the fact of what is. I remember reading an article where the writer said, "When religious people start ranting about god and Jesus, remind them we have just as much physical proof of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox." That seemed a bit harsh at the time, but then I became a father. Defending facts in the face of rhetoric always mattered deeply to me, it just matters more now.
Moristotle,
ReplyDeleteHomophobia would certainly fit. I remember when the NYC police used to surround gay night clubs and beat those in attendance when they tried to leave, and I remember how that -- mostly -- came to an end by the 1980s, and I imagine it's all behind us. Not so elsewhere, unfortunately, and too much of it still going on here.
Paul, you wonder about something deeper going on when people who make unwise decisions in one area usually make them in numerous other areas as well. Here is a link to an article in the New York Times that is about why certain Republicans push conspiracy theories and other counterfactual information: they think that it will help them achieve their goals: “Why Republicans Keep Falling for Trump’s Lies.”
ReplyDeleteDon, the NYT article is certainly informative, and a bit frightening. What exactly are their real goals? Destroy our system of democracy and rule in defiance of our constitution? That seems a strange twist for the party of "law & order" and a group of people who claim to be patriots. Or is it simply "we want to win, and we don't care how" and they don't realize the deeper damage of what they are doing?
DeleteDo we give them the benefit of the doubt and launch a re-education campaign, or do we fight fire with fire and meet them in the streets? The radical rightists are outnumbered 3:1 by the rest of us: if the majority did to them what they are aspiring to do to us, would a beatdown put an end to it? Or would it just provoke a whole new and even more delusional version of QAnon and its followers?
A solution, anyone?