Children Believe Every Lie
The Santa Lie
I was raised Jehovah’s Witness. As part of this, I was taught as soon as I could understand the concepts that Santa wasn’t real. Neither was the tooth fairy, or the Easter bunny. Jehovah’s Witnesses have a near-autistic dedication to being truthful. While many religions informally refer to themselves as “the Faith,” (“she is strong in the Faith” etc) Jehovah’s Witnesses refer to themselves as “the Truth.” As part of this, they believe it’s wrong to lie to children about made-up characters.
This made me special. I knew things my classmates didn’t know. I knew they were being lied to. I knew my parents cared enough about me to not lie to me. The message was very clear: we won’t even lie to you about Santa, despite how popular that lie is. You can also trust us when we tell you the Trinity is just as fake as Santa is.1 And the secondary message: These people will lie to their own children for no other reason than because it’s fun. You can’t trust them one bit.
When I came to realize all supernaturalism is a lie, and the only way one with intellect and curiosity can believe it is to intentionally blind themselves, I became very angry with everyone who should have known better (or DID know better) and lied to me. Being a Jehovah’s Witness is a life-altering decision. Honestly, any sort of theism should have massive repercussions on how one lives. By lying to me they had ruined my map of the territory so badly that massive amounts of effort had be burned for nothing. And all that trust I had? Burned in the fires of epistemic hell. The sheer betrayal of having been lied to so much but people I trusted so deeply left me angry and seething for nearly two decades.
When I excised that belief from myself I thought that at least I was free now. I would obviously still be wrong or misled about some things in life, but I would never have to again deal with discovering that a bedrock fact about all of reality was literal lies and everything I had been building upon was sand and vapor.
I was of course very wrong.
“Believing In” is Aspirational, Unless You’re A Child
Anna Salamon recently posted “Believing In” on Less Wrong, already a hugely up-voted post. It interrogates the concept of “believing in” things, and concludes that this concept is usually not a literal belief, but more of an aspirational bet. A statement that “I believe X will yield good returns if resources are invested in it,” combined with a willingness to signal that you are investing such resources and urging others to do the same. The post concludes that this is often a very good thing to do!
we can use often reasoning to locate a pattern worth trying, and then “believe in” this pattern to give low-level heuristics a vision to try to live up to
Having a target and acting as if that target is true has positive outcomes in many ways, in many places! I believe this is correct. It’s a good post, I recommend it.
A similar sentiment was echoed in Rachael Kuintzle’s reply to my post yesterday about The Most Important Thing In The World
I'm not sure I've encountered the idea that looks don't matter except in an aspirational sense--i.e., looks and weight *shouldn't* matter, and hopefully we'll get there someday
This points to a phenomenon I’ve seen called “Not Getting The Joke.” It is probably true that many such beliefs are aspirational and everyone knows that what they really mean is “it would be good if this was true, and acting like it is will help us get there, so we’re all going to pretend that it is as much as possible in order to make that happen.” In fact, I now believe that’s what most intelligent religious people are doing. But children, or people who are autistic, and especially children that are autistic, simply do not get this. They don’t get that everyone knows it’s not real, they just believe what they hear everyone saying. They don’t “get the joke.” It becomes reality to them. Or rather, to us.
Reality Keeps Shattering
I was raised in the 80s/90s. I knew that women and men are basically the same. We’re all humans. Men have more upper-body strength, and are prone to violence, but aside from that, and the reproductive bits, the sexes are undifferentiated. My heroes harped on this and backed it up with biological science.2
In ~2020 we witnessed the Men’s/Women’s World Cup Scandal. The US Men’s Soccer team had failed to qualify for the previous World Cup, whereas the US Women’s Soccer team had won theirs! And yet the women were paid less that season after winning than the men were paid after failing to qualify. There was Discourse.
I was in the car listening to NPR, pulling out of the parking lot of a glass supplier when my world shattered again.3 One of the NPR leftist commenters said roughly ~‘One can propose that the mens team and womens team play against each other to sort this out—’
At which point I mentally pumped my fist in the air and cheered. I had been thinking exactly this for WEEKS. I couldn’t quite understand why no one had said it! As we all know, men and women are largely undifferentiated. Soccer is a perfect example of this, because the sport doesn’t allow men to use their upper-body strength advantage at all. The one thing that makes men stand out is neutralized here, and a direct competition would put this thing to rest and humiliate all the sexists. I smiled and waited to see how the right-wing asshat would squirm out of having to endorse a match that we all knew would shut him up.
The left-wing commentator continued ‘—is what one would say if one is a right-wing deplorable that just wants to laugh while humiliating those that are already oppressed. Naturally none of us would ever propose such a thing, we aren’t horrible people. Here’s what they get wrong…”
I didn’t hear any more after that, because my world had shattered again. A proponent of my side was not only admitting that the women’s team would lose badly, but that everyone knew and had always known that the women’s team would lose badly, so the only reason one would even suggest such a thing was to humiliate them.
Here I was, in my late 30s, still believing that men and women are basically the same, like a fucking chump. Do these people realize how much of my life, my personal and public decisions, my views of my fellow man and my plans for the future, were predicated on this being actually true? Not a single person had ever once bothered to take me aside and whisper “Hey, we know this isn’t actually true, we’re just acting this way because it leads to better outcomes for society, on net, if we do. Obviously we make exceptions for the places where the literal truth is important. Welcome to the secret club, don’t tell the kids.”
These were the people who always had told me men and women are equal in all things, explicitly saying that anyone who actually really believed this was a deplorable right-wing troll. I could taste the betrayal in my mouth. It tasted of bile. How had this happened to me again?
A couple years prior I had lost a woman I dearly loved, as well as the associated friend group, when I had Not Gotten The Joke about a different belief and accidentally acted as if I believed something that everyone agreed to say was true was Actually True4. I didn’t understand what had happened back then. Now it was starting to make sense. I was too damn trusting and autistic to make a reliable ally in a world bereft of truth.
Believing In Anti-Santa
I’ve woken up to how much this happens since that day. It’s everywhere, and I kinda hate it. I almost want to say that parents SHOULD tell their children that Santa is real. That way they learn very quickly in life that everyone will lie to them without hesitation for the most trivial of reasons. They can never trust anyone to accurately represent what they actually think is true, not even the people who claim to love them more than anything else in the world. It would maybe prevent them from reaching their late-30s still believing that leprechauns grant wishes.
But I don’t really think that. I believe that fighting to be as honest as possible will yield good returns if resources are invested into it. I have a vision of a world where acknowledging openly and explicitly that we are acting as if something is true without it actually being true is far more acceptable than just pretending it’s true. Acknowledging that the reality of a situation doesn’t match what we aspire to *shouldn’t* matter, and hopefully we’ll get there someday.
Together we can take the first step, and not say things we know to be false to our children as if they were true. Down with Santa, now and forever.
Jehovah’s Witnesses believe the doctrine of the Trinity is a heresy
In 2006 the science journal Nature listed [Pharyngula] as the top-ranked blog written by a scientist based on popularity.
Yes, I remember where I was and the whole she-bang, that’s how big a deal it was to me, shut up I know it’s embarrassing.
In that case it was that there’s no material differences between the races.
I was raised evangelical fundamentalist Baptist, and I am sure that nearly everyone in those circles believes that the things they say they believe are literally true. Some beliefs have plausible wriggle room; they may say that the 6 days of creation are not Earthly days, and that Earth is very old. Some have inexplicable wriggle room: the Bible has a complete genealogy from Adam to Jesus which isn't long enough for the Neolithic. Many say they believe the Bible literally, yet don't deny that humanity is more than 6000 years old. But many do stick on that point, and come up with AND BELIEVE explanations such as that humans before Adam didn't have souls. I have far too much experience with these people to think that all of them are faking it.
The way these Christians plan their lives does not make sense if you take their beliefs as aspirational. They believe literally that Heaven is a place, and that they will be there after they die. MANY of them are willing to risk death to spread these beliefs, and many have died rather than perform some symbolic act of disrespect towards their God. If the people who "believe" the sexes are the same were like Christian fundamentalists, you wouldn't find people covering up the fact that they are different; you'd find HUNDREDS or THOUSANDS of professionally-published books with long, detailed, scientific-looking arguments against all of the evidence that men and women are different, as you do books attempting to scientifically rebut evolution. These people really believe they have the truth, and sufficient scientific study will prove it.
"Belief as aspiration" is a thing, but I think it's a distinctly elite thing. In ancient Athens or Rome you could have found many elites who didn't believe the gods existed, but thought it was good for other people to believe in gods. There's also "belief as pragmatics", and this is common outside the literalist churches. You find pragmatics in "religious" people who don't deep down believe in anything, but believe everyone would turn to raping and murdering each other if society stopped saying it believed in a god. (This is not quite "belief as aspiration"; the aspiration people are revolutionaries; the pragmatics people are conservatives.) And there's "belief as aesthetics": "I don't really believe this absurd thing, but how beautiful it is! If it's untrue, I don't want to know it." That was C.S. Lewis' ultimate argument for "believing in" Christianity in /The Silver Chair/.
"Belief as literal belief" is probably the oldest, and still co-exists alongside these others. What is new about the modern beliefs is actual altruism. Altruism is not a part of any conventional religion. Every time you find a religion that preaches self-renunciation, love of your neighbor, and so on, you'll find that it teaches that the person who does that will be rewarded. They are all carrot-and-stick. Ones that aren't, don't last.
Humans do naturally have actual altruism, but it is not useful for religions in an evolutionary sense. (You should apply evolutionary psychology to religion. Religions and philosophies are just self-replicating meme sets.)
My mother literally believes that I will burn in Hell for eternity unless she prays hard enough for me. The pain this causes her is not faked. She knows that she is risking her relationship with me every time she recites the same reasons why she is a Christian. She isn't doing this because she believes religion will have some good effect on me or on the world. She knows I would be the same person and do the same things in the same way if I "accepted Jesus as my savior", except for going to church, praying for missions, praying before meals, and doing other things that would have no impact on anything if her beliefs are not literally true.
She, and all my religious relatives, literally cannot understand any of the simple and obvious reasons why their beliefs are false. She never, ever comprehends what I say in reply, nor remembers it the next time around. I know her well enough to say this is a sincere lack of comprehension, or even a lack of ability to translate my statements into her internal representation. Plato's ontology, which is basically what Christians have, was constructed so that the claims which disprove Plato's theology can't be expressed in it, and thus can't be comprehended or remembered.
Take the fact that you can't explain the complexity of life by saying "God created it." This just leads to infinite regression: Who created God? And who created the one who created God? I've argued this point many times with many people, and they really, really, cannot understand it. Some roadblock in their brains shatters it before it reaches their consciousness.
Religious systems--the kind that last--are self-consistent. So is post-modernism, Nazism, and the Social Justice movement. They come with their own epistemologies, which provide ways of dismissing all evidence that the system is false. They are logical and self-consistent, so that once a person literally believes all the major points of this system, rationality keeps them IN the system rather than breaking them out of it. Rationality is the problem, not the solution. Empiricism is the solution.
Really enjoyed this, thanks for writing it. I'd like to note one additional phenomenon that also plays a role here. Once an aspirational truth is widespread enough, the actual truth can become what Scott Alexander calls a hyperstitious slur:
>True facts can be hyperstitious slurs. “Black people commit more crime” is a hyperstitious slur, in the sense that racists talk about it more than non-racists, this helps it become a signal for racism, the fact that it’s a known signal for racism causes non-racists to talk about it even less than they would otherwise, and the vicious cycle ends with it being a very strong signal for racism and non-racists avoiding mentioning it. This leads to another sort of vicious cycle: half of people understand it’s a true fact that they’re not supposed to say for signaling reasons, the other half have never heard it before and assume it must be a vicious lie, and you end up with situations where someone notices that some police department arrests more blacks than whites, accuses that specific police department of racism, and everyone is afraid to explain what’s going on. I think the accepted way around the problem in these very few situations where it’s absolutely necessary to talk about it is by adding “. . . but obviously this goes away when you adjust for poverty” at the end. Even though this statement is false, it successfully avoids the hyperstitious slur and lets you mention the fact in that one special-purpose case.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-the-way
I think that there are many people who would prefer to say the actual truth but choose not to because most people saying the actual truth are either bigoted or low status, and no one wants to be associated with them by saying it.