Why do we lie to children about Santa Claus?

Dec 25, 2015 //
5

Lying is almost universally condemned as immoral behaviour. Deceiving children doubly-so. Yet for some reason, the lie of Santa Claus is celebrated every Christmas as children worship at the tabernacle of St. Nick, and parents knowingly smile and take joy in the deliberately perpetuated naivety of their offspring. Surely there must be a reason to pull the wool over the eyes of the young.

It would be nice to believe we lie for the sake of a lesson in post-modern deconstruction: the true nature of an old white man literally at the top of the world enforcing nonspecific yet absolute moral conventions is a social construction, and when children become disillusioned to the lie that is Santa Claus, they can become aware of the further social constructions of the dominant discourse in our society. Unfortunately, this inevitably leads to children thinking for themselves, and so this method is discarded as anarchical.

Many people believe that childhood is a time of innocence and joy, and that a belief in Santa Claus is a reflection of that innocence. The world is shitty and bleak, and children are not to be exposed to its true nature until they’re old enough to handle the responsibility that the misery of our inherited existence imposes upon them. Is this to protect them? Are we suggesting that joy cannot exist outside of a world built on lies? That innocence cannot survive when it is exposed to the truth? To believe this is to be a greater pessimist than those who choose not to lie to their children about Santa Claus, and those people are monsters.

When I was a child and suffered through my own carefree joy, I asked my mother if she believed in Santa Claus. She told me she believed in the spirit of Santa Claus. Though she didn’t elucidate at the time and I certainly didn’t know what elucidate meant in order to ask, what she meant was that there isn’t necessarily a being that delivers presents on a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer, but there is an essence of unlimited generosity that permeates the world once a year that is reflective of the nature of Santa Claus. People become more giving, human connection is enhanced, and the world becomes a better place, if only for one month out of the year. To her, this was Santa Claus. Perhaps we lie because children in their ignorance can more fully embrace this essence due to their unencumbered faith in jolly ol’ St. Nick.

Does the lie beget the symbol? Santa Claus in his current incarnation is notoriously based on an advertising campaign from Coca-Cola. His generosity is shown solely through his dispersal of material ‘things’ rather than intangible yet genuine human connection. Children cannot possibly understand this as a symbol of giving, because they are only ever on the receiving end. Does our lie not teach children that generosity, love, and human connection are about the transaction of objects? That our gratitude should be given to an unknowable deity rather than the very real human beings who loves us with all their heart? That happiness is about receiving unearned material wealth? If we desire a symbol for unlimited generosity and kindness, we can do better than one of commercialized consumption and misplaced gratitude. Which, if you ask anybody who has worked in retail around the holidays, is in fact the modern spirit of Christmas.

So life is shit, and Santa Claus is more of a reflection of that than we might ever actually care to admit. So why do we lie? I think it’s because we want to believe in magic. When we are children, anything is possible: reindeer can fly, a guy who’s built like a dump truck can fit through itty-bitty chimneys, red and white are somehow fashionable… When anything is possible, hope and wonder trump sarcastic cynicism every time. We feel as adults that magic dies with youth, and that merely implausible impossibilities become statically impossible and futile to resist. We desperately want life to be better, and magic would simplify that to easily attainable.

As many point out with derision, Christmas is an appropriation of the pagan winter solstice festival, and Jesus was more likely born in September. Why then the association with the winter solstice? The shortest day of the year inevitably leads to longer and brighter days; the birth of the saviour marks the end of darkness and entails an increasingly brighter outlook for humanity. Christmas, as it were, is the celebration of hope for a better future. The essence of magic as a symbol for hope is what Christmas is all about; not gifts or generosity at all, but magic. In the spirit of Christmas, rather than seek magic in our own lives, we pass the torch to our young out of nostalgia before we inevitably extinguish it for them as well. Hope becomes fantasy as we purge ourselves of our childhood delusions, and we choose to accept bitter reality over a world with brightness. Santa Claus isn’t a lie, Santa Claus is dead. Santa Claus remains dead. And we have killed him.

 

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Categories Fun, Social Criticism

By Any Means Necessary

Dec 15, 2015 //
3

There are two poles in political advancement, and while some grey area does admittedly exist, they have endured in almost binary opposition throughout all of history. Luckily, our buddy history provides two examples contemporary of one another that personify each pole. Martin Luther King was a civil rights activist who promoted racial equality by utilizing strictly non-violent methods. Malcolm X, on the other hand, was famously quoted by campaigning for civil rights “by any means necessary.” If that sounds like a subtle threat, it shouldn’t, because it was an incredibly overt threat. Malcolm X, and the other pole of political advancement, presents an unflinching view of violence as a potential necessity in social change. The “fight” for civil rights is exactly that, with all of the brutality that that implies.

I believe we are quite privileged to exist in a society that gets to claim quite rigidly that the non-violent approach is the ideal solution in political advancement. There is a middle-class modality to non-violent activism that belabours our relative affluence compared to the rest of the political and historical climate of the world. Revolutions have almost entirely been violent. The Haymarket Massacre which galvanized unionists and delivered us the eight hour work day got its name from obvious implications. America won its independence from England and eventually freed its slaves with violence in both instances. As easy as it is to denounce violence, it does have precedent in successfully altering the course of history in progressive ways. The swiftness with which violence can enact change in its ferocity is also a testament to the power that it wields, as entire paradigms can shift in the span of a few years when ideas are conquered and quashed by force.

However, within violence lurks a system of oppression that is utilized in every instance. Audre Lorde is quoted as saying that the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house. Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, and Mohammed Morsi are illustrative of causes dedicated to ameliorating power imbalances within society which used violent means to achieve those goals, and ultimately climaxed in yet another oppressive regime. To conquer with violence is using tools of oppression to fight oppression, and will only lead to perpetuating the very thing it is trying to overcome.

Violence, with its implicit link to oppression, is also incredibly alienating. Those who are moderate or ambivalent toward a cause will shun it if its proponents utilize violence as tactics. Since quoting people makes me sound a lot smarter, Gandhi’s rubric for success comes from first having them ignore you, then having them laugh at you, then when they fight you, you win. Gandhi used the violence of the occupying British authority to delegitimize them, and through this measure effectively achieved Indian independence. While perhaps this is illustrative of our modern day sensibilities, I believe most people recognize that those utilizing violence, especially against those who do not, have lost the higher moral standing.

What is it about change that leads to violence? Progressive movements today try to shun its use, but that is a relatively recent phenomenon. Bob Mullaly indicates that anger is the natural response to injustice, and that it can be used constructively to reconcile that injustice. However, anger often leads to hate, and as Eric Hoffer states, “Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious of his weal and future, frees him of his jealousy and self seeking. He becomes an anonymous particle quivering with a craving to fuse and coalesce with his like into one flaming mass … Mass movements can rise and spread without a belief in a God, but never without belief in the devil.” Even contemporary progressive movements like Occupy Wall Street demonized the 1%, and utilized that hatred to form an albeit ineffectual mass protest against income inequality. If anger is the reaction to injustice, and hatred is required to spur a movement, it is of little wonder that violence has been the root of previous social change.

Both Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi were widely successful with their non-violent methods of social activism. However, neither of them acted within a vacuum. As I began by showing, MLK worked in tandem with Malcolm X (though not cooperatively), and they played the good cop/bad cop routine in their pursuit and eventual acquisition of civil rights. Gandhi had the multitudes of India, and his distinctively harmless methods belied an unspoken threat of violence from the sheer amount of popular support which stood behind him. Is this Yin Yang approach demonstrating the veracity of Al Capone’s quote saying that you can get further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone?

The appropriate approach to social justice is not even a simple matter of the already impossible task of mediating the proper balance between peace and war. MLK, Gandhi, Occupy Wall Street, all the dove approaches to social justice, and even Malcolm X, the Arab Spring, the Ukrainian uprising, or the Irish during The Troubles representing the Hawk approaches, all recognized the importance of message control. Everyone knows the difference between a terrorist and an unhinged individual because of how he is portrayed in the media. The success of both hawks and doves is often the result of finding a sympathetic journalist to exonerate their cause and declare it just.

What’s the solution? Do we stick strictly to a non-violent approach to maintain the easiest access to sympathy? Strike terror with violent methods in the hopes of a quick fix? Rely solely on the whims of the news media to dictate what gets positive attention? Or some combination of all three? Oddly enough, I don’t think people necessarily plan these things. I doubt Martin Luther King and Malcolm X sat down together to hash out their respective paths, nor do I think groups like ISIS or Al-Qaeda wonder whether or not non-violence might be a successful alternative to their current modus operandi. I think the conditions that lead to activism are the greatest indicator of the practices used. Extreme oppression will result in mirrored backlash, as indicated by extremist groups being bred in poverty and cultures of violence, whereas groups like Occupy Wall Street with its foundation in milquetoast America are more prone to drum circles and sit-ins. Pacifist activism may be slower and more methodical than the alternative, but it is the result of privileges already gained from previous revolution. Perhaps we are beyond the need for violence in activism, but that does not mean we should be ignorant of its causes when we witness it in practice.

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Categories Politics

Accelerationism

Dec 10, 2015 //
2

Charles Eisenstein (2013) predicts that a convergence of crises where the devastation of the environment, the increasing social hostilities across the world, the domination of monolithic international corporations over the global economy, and the impotence or facilitation with which governments typically respond to these factors will inescapably lead to the end of civilization. Ronald Wright (2004) looks at the rise and fall of previous civilizations and sees that there is a large sampling of civilizations that grew too large, consumed all their resources, and then spread out once those resources were finished. In an effort to see how humanity behaves without any room to expand, Wright looks at Easter Island as an example of a confined society where every last resource, in this instance trees, was eliminated, thereby destroying the civilization and the ecology of the island.

This analysis of the past and prediction for the future paints a bleak picture for our now global civilization. Humanity has run out of room to spread, and it is quite quickly running through its finite resources. Eisenstein (2013) suggests that those who wish to do some good for the world should continue their progressive practices in order to provide a solid foundation upon which humanity is to rebuild after the coming calamity. Another somewhat facetious approach is accelerationism; if we accept that the end of our global civilization is inevitable and imminent, the morally righteous course of action would be to speed that process along so as to hasten the opportunity to rebuild. This posits a critically important question, however: are we truly bound by a predetermined Armageddon where all hope of salvation for our current world is already lost?

Possibly the greatest threat to the stability of the world is the proliferation of international corporations. The Corporation (Achbar, Simpson & Abbot, 2003) illustrates the way that businesses that might otherwise be benign have infected the status quo by externalizing the problems they produce and internalizing anonymous blamelessness. Corporations lack any kind of accountability (outside of the profit motive) due to their personhood lacking any kind of body to incarcerate or otherwise punish. This leads to environmental and ecological destruction which damns future generations, and inhuman working conditions that damn the current one. Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices (Greenwald, Gilliam, Levit & Smith, 2005) localizes these issues by demonstrating how large corporations can turn communities into ghost towns by using predatory market practices to eviscerate smaller businesses and unfair labour practices to impoverish their workforce. These corporations run not just an oligopoly in the world’s economy, but in the media as well. In 1983, there were 50 different companies running the news media in America, and as of 2004 there are six (Perkins, 2011). By achieving a stranglehold on what the general population consumes as ‘news’, and by providing only the dominant cultural narrative through it (Mullaly, 2010), the corporate agenda can act with an even greater impunity than what the anonymity of corporate personhood normally would allow.

While these corporations continue to increasingly subjugate every aspect of the planet, the general populace faces contrasting destitution. The debt of the average Canadian is approximately $1.64 of debt to every dollar of income and continues to grow (Wong, 2015). This spiraling debt is the result of the credit industry; a tragedy caused by a gluttonous system creating superfluous demand to consume its petty trinkets (Perkins, 2011). This demand is built on a foundation of nothingness, however, and by witnessing its rapid growth we can predict a debt bubble destined to burst.

In addition to these worrying dilemmas, speaking out against them has its own problems. The film What Would Jesus Buy? (Morgan & VanAlkemade, 2007) depicts the criminalization of dissent as the protagonist of the film, Reverend Billy, is routinely harassed by police and security, or even arrested as he attempts to decry the commercialization of one of North America’s most sacred holidays. While many armchair activists might like to believe that posting a politically-themed status update on their Facebook page might be the equivalent of enacting social justice, the reality is that change will only occur through tangible efforts made by real people, such as the Reverend Billy. However, by forbidding that kind of activism through the use of police and the laws to which they adhere, the status quo clamps down on any real activism that might take place. While purporting to celebrate free speech and social justice, by relegating activism to predetermined locations where it might safely go unheard, society creates a wall where change breaks like a wave on the rocks.

Those working to create that change often find themselves at odds with one another as well. By being entrenched in a society that fosters competitiveness and creates a zero-sum funding method for social programs, activists are forced to fight not only against the structural inequalities of our broken system, but also against other activists that are labouring toward common goals. The system by its very function disrupts progress simply by exerting its default ideology of competition and capitalism (Bishop, 2006).

In addition to the systemic factors undercutting progress, there is a further burden on those advocating for change. Quite often when things go wrong, the blame will fall on those working toward ameliorating them. One example is the death of an Aboriginal teen which was primarily blamed on the “persistent indifference of front-line government workers” (Changes being made, 2015, para. 4). The problems inherent in the structure of racist policies that function to the detriment of Aboriginal youth go unnoticed as culpability is thrust upon the persons closest to the issue. This culpability further stigmatizes those seeking social improvement, and acts as discouragement toward even bothering in the first place.

So in the face of the impossibility of overcoming insurmountable global obstacles, or, on the off-chance that they are overcome, doing so in a timely enough manner that the already crippling environmental damages do not become irreversible, why do we bother? What leads us to bang our heads against this wall, suffering the slings and arrows, while facing off quite literally against the world? Would it not be simpler to merely give in, let the wave of inevitability wash over us, and accept somewhat less facetiously the merits of accelerationism?

The existentialist philosopher Albert Camus utilizes the myth of Sisyphus to illustrate how one might be able to confront meaninglessness. While Camus speaks ontologically, the method applies to social justice as well. Sisyphus is condemned to an eternity of pushing a giant boulder up a mountain, seeing it roll down the other side, then walking down to push it back up again. Camus, rather than seeing this as dreadful punishment, celebrates it and declares that Sisyphus must own his task and complete it passionately. He claims that Sisyphus overcomes the will of the gods in this manner in spite of them, and announces that “there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn” (Camus, 1956, p. 314).

Bob Mullaly mirrors this view by declaring that anger is the necessary tool to combat futile odds: “anger at governments that cater to the wishes of the wealthy at the expense of women, children, visible minorities, and other marginalized groups; anger at a social welfare system that homogenizes, controls, and monitors people who are forced to go to it for assistance and that has proletarianized its workers; and anger at the discrimination, exploitation, and blocked opportunities that so many people experience today” (Mullaly, 2010, p. 283). Mullaly suggests anger as a tool to rally a community around an issue in an attempt to overcome it. From this perspective, it is only through owning the cause and becoming passionate about it that pointlessness can be conquered.

There are also those who believe that when knowledge is gained and compassion is utilized, fighting against these crises is humanity’s natural response. Si Transken defines these fruitless warriors as fuchsia elephants, who “may be on the verge of extinction,” but still “cannot blend into the chicken crowd” (Bryant et al., 1999, p. 33). No matter the outcome, fighting for social change compels them, and no amount of pressure from outside forces will quell the fires that have been lit inside. Once one adopts the mantle of the fuchsia elephant, it cannot be discarded. One may submit to the “exhaustive demands of the circus crowd” (Bryant et al., 1999, p. 33) and have their fire reduced to embers, but the fuchsia will never fully wash out.

Whatever the cause, be it natural or passionate, we must continue to fight. Even in the face of impossibility, in the face of meaninglessness, the battle for social justice must continue. Accelerationism works solely on the faith that there will be enough of a world left to rebuild once the convergence of crises has devastated it, and that is a deadly gamble. Giving up is not an option.

References:

Achbar, M., Simpson, B. (Producers), & Achbar, M., Abbot, J. (Directors). The Corporation [Motion Picture]. USA: Big Picture Media Corporation

Bishop, A. (2006). Becoming an Ally: Breaking the cycle of oppression in people. Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing.

Bryant, V., Dahl, P., Lane, L., Marttila, M., Transken, S., Trepanier, C. (1999). Battle Chant. Sudbury, On: Battle Chant Ink.

Camus, A. (1956). The myth of Sisyphus, p. 312-314 In Kaufmaan, W. (ed.) Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. Cleveland: Meridian Books.

Changes being made after report on death of Aboriginal teen: Children’s Ministry. (2015, Oct. 20). Prince George Citizen, p. 6.

Eisenstein, C. (2013). The ascent of humanity: Civilization and the human sense of self. Berkeley, CA: Evolver Editions.

Greenwald, R., Gilliam, J., Levit, L., Smith, D. (Producers), & Greenwald, R. (Director). Wal-Mart: The high cost of low price [Motion picture]. USA: Brave New Films.

Morgan, S. (Producer), & VanAlkemade, R. (Director). (2007). What would Jesus buy? [Motion picture]. USA: Arts Alliance America.

Mullaly, B. (2010). Challenging oppression and confronting privilege. Oxford, NY:Oxford University Press.

Perkins, J. (2011). Hoodwinked: An economic hit man reveals why the global economy imploded – and how to fix it. New York, NY: Crown Publishing Group.

Wong, C. (2015, Sep. 12). Household debt ratio grew in Q2 as debt increased faster than income. Prince George Citizen, p. 32

Wright, R. (2004). A short history of progress. Toronto, ON: House of Anansi Press.

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Categories Politics, Social Criticism, Uncategorized
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