This is a fascinating and dangerous account of systematic errors in how we raise children. Lies are damaging because they make truth harder to find -- the opposite of a lie is almost never the truth. But, once revealed as lies (a key problem), they are highly informative about the state of mind of the liar.
What the essay suggests in various ways in describing how we lie to children is that we are afraid of conflict. The world is full of conflict and violence though we wish it were not. But we can wish it away for our children for a short while.
Which leads, I think, to the underlying reason for Paul's discomfort with these lies. The way to resolve conflict is to engage with it in a highly choreographed way. There aren't many, but there are some ways that society has devised for dealing with conflict in non-violent ways. The constitution of the U.S. of A. is an example. Litigation and contract law are others.
Unreflective lying is thus counter-productive to a long-term goal of raising children that have the right combination of courage and humility that is necessary to repeatedly engage in conflict without resorting to violence.
A few other thoughts on specific passages:
"Very smart adults often seem unusually innocent, and I don't think this is a coincidence. I think they've deliberately avoided learning about certain things."
The thing that "very smart adults" have in common may not be selective ignorance, but rather strong skepticism. They haven't "learned" because they remain skeptical long after the rest of the world is satisfied with the lies they've been told.
"You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational, and believing things that are true."
The way I understand what you're getting at here is through the distinction between a public good and a natural monopoly. Some people naively assume that all public goods have the natural monopoly characteristic of declining average total costs of production. This is not true. Natural monopolies occupy a middle point in the temporal-spatial spectrum. At the low end, we have black markets that operate in small geographical regions for short periods of time until legal firms can enter. A black market may have a natural monopoly, but it is not a public good. At the other end of the spectrum, we have religion and political ideology, which are neither non-rivalrous nor non-excludable, and yet may have natural monopoly characteristics in how their doctrine are established and disseminated. The bizarre payload can be explained by the leverage these natural monopolies have over their followers. Incidentally, I am a Christian, and believe that learning and practicing Christian doctrine would be of benefit to everybody. But I am acutely aware of the bizarre payload that the church as an institution has accrued over many years. That bizarre payload is a problem for people like me to try and fix, not a reason not to adopt and practice Christianity.
In the end, I connected with this essay because I find the author engaged in what I consider to be one of the more difficult and important human endeavors: becoming free. Freedom cannot be had by force. It grows up in the detritus of shattered false beliefs about self and others. Its growth is fostered by the sun of social acknowledgment, but can wither under the same sun when not also watered down and washed off by humble listening and a habit of self-criticism.
I enjoyed reading this. I specifically searched for anything pertaining to "when parents lie to kids", and this popped up. I do not have children (by choice), and I have completed a master in education, so I have researched learning theory. I see my sister and her husband lying to their children, and I abhor such practice; children are merely young adults who need to learn efficiently and effectively, so that they may comprehend what it takes to survive independently. I see your point about keeping reality from children until they are learned enough to make their own determinations about when enough is enough with respect to education, yet I still believe that, regardless of the measure of hardened reality to which they are exposed, they are ultimately responsible for their own learning motivation, save for the very early prompts that parents are responsible for instilling in them during the behaviorism years.
I have believed for many years that lying to children about Santa Claus, among other things, causes children to distrust parents and other adults, which is likely not intended by parents, but which is a very real effect of misguiding their concepts by deceit so early. To effectuate a lifelong positive result, parents and teachers should strive to ALWAYS tell the truth, so that the child (young adult) will NOT be shocked later in life by simple, inevitable realities such as death, disease, or inconsistencies in human behaviors. The truth is ALWAYS the best policy at any age. It is too bad that parents are so selfish as to hope or believe that they are doing their children favors by false lights, false hopes, and false expressions. If the truth sets us free, then what are parents doing when they lie, but creating a virtual prison for their offspring?
We lie to children because children aren't capable of long-term risk-benefit-adjusted decision making. But lying to the parents in this example should still be condemned.
One of the most insidious and underrated evils in our society is lying. Lying comes in many forms such as: refusing to be honest about our true motivations; contriving justifications for double standards towards different groups; knowingly misrepresenting the truth to avoid an opposing side racking up political points; saying what we know isn’t true because it’s socially/politically easier; even extreme euphemisms; etc.
The effects of all this is distrust, disunity, isolation, division. It’s poison to causes, countries, and relationships. Practiced liars eventually can’t even see reality at all, and can’t fix their problems because they can’t see them.
What this piece doesn't address is the harms of lying. It's like the boy who cried wolf. It erodes trust in those who are supposed to be experts, leading everyone to be unsure of what is true or not, which is a worse situation. Time passes and depending on how egregious the lie was, the collective memory forgets. But between then, the damage has been done and the experts lose some of those who would listen to them and yet others who unquestionably defended them.
When people can't distinguish truth from lies, or don't know how to conduct basic research on the truthfulness of something, it's the product of failed parenting and/or a failed education system.
For the first, formative parts of our lives we are told all kinds of lies and we then later find out that these aren't true and for many people this is traumatic. For instance, stories about father Christmas, the Toothfairy and other such characters. Then of course there is religion, which starts out by conditioning children to believe things that are entirely unsupported by facts from a very early age. And advertising and so on.
This conditioning spreads, children are literally meme machines. Bit by bit faulty pieces of information get lodged in gullible little brains. By the time you reach the age where critical thinking skills become important the whole world around you has become infested with lies and half truths, and the bits stored in your head are full of logic holes and trash.
So then, at the ripe old age of 25, a person with no scientific background receives from a number of directions at once something that is not supported by facts. By default, they are going to do what they've always done: accept it as though it is true. And they will spread it around, a click here, a retweet there, a like over here. Then, once they are invested in it, just like with Santa Clause there are always going to be some individuals that refuse to give up the lie. They persist in believing it because that's easier than to give it up.
It's how cults are formed and how people end up with false beliefs that cause them to do really bad things. Like kill others. The 5G Virus Conspiracy is falling into very fertile soil. Against a backdrop of low level continuous distrust of the authorities, the vast gap between poor and rich and the number of absolutely outrageous things that we have told people to accept as fact this is not all that surprising.
If we want to change this we will have to start by ensuring that what we tell people from a very early age is the truth, and that lying and spreading a falsehood as such would be - again - seen as something dishonorable.
This of course is entirely not acceptable to large fractions of society. So we will have to live with the fact that some people become so gullible that they will believe anything that they are being told by some guy in a frock, a labcoat or who they happen to resonate with. Critical thinking skills are like other skills: you have to learn, and then you have to practice them the rest of your life to make sure you retain them.
Until then you will see these conspiracy efforts have great success and this should not surprise us at all.
This article is brilliant. Lies play an enormous role in this culture. I could go on and on about the topic, but I think one quote from A Language Older than Words by Derrick Jensen says it best:
"In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must, in a broad sense, tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It is not necessary that the lies be particularly believable. The lies act as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities."
A baseball bat to the head makes your head hurt for a while. Lying makes hundreds of thousands of people refuse to vaccinate, which puts millions in more danger of diseases. Lying makes people die from refusing cures that owrk and going for glorified sugar pills.
And I mean lies from both sides - from those who will sell you the sugar pill and from those who represent the medical world and by lying and bullshitting made it hard to trust it.
Lies are toxic and accumulates in society. In an increasingly complex world that depends on mutual trust between people and organizations, this is an existential threat. I think that what's most likely to end our civilization is not war or disease, but this bullshit 'the world runs on' spilling over and drowning us all.
Of course they lie, they are completely open minds designed by nature to experiment with the world in order to survive, and therefore pursue any strategy they find will benefit them.
> This is an assertion. What harm is this lie causing?
Being lied to is arguably a harm itself, regardless of any concrete damages that may arise. It's disrespecting a person's autonomy and ability to know the truth. This isn't some crazy new theory, if you haven't heard of it before, I'd suggest you read Kant.
However, on a purely utilitarian and practical level, lying also causes concrete harm. Let's go back to the original example of grave robbers. If you knew that whatever valuables you buried with the departed would just be dug up again and stolen, you probably wouldn't bury them. Thus grave robbers are stealing from you pretty directly.
I believe, that the "lies to children"-approach is one of the driving forces behind the general science-skepticism, and maybe even behind some consipiracy theories and some climate-science-denial.
It basically goes like this:
1. Teachers are authorities and present facts to children
2. people later learn that some of these facts are in-fact not factual
3. people learn that:
a) authorities can not be trusted
b) it is ok to make up facts, as long as they sound good
4. people apply a) and b) to other situations
No matter how worthy the purpose, falsehood is falsehood. Is it really such good education for your children to demonstrate that lying should be used to obtain the important things in life?
> A lie-to-children (plural lies-to-children) is a simplified explanation of technical or complex subjects as a teaching method for children and laypeople. The technique has been incorporated by academics within the fields of biology, evolution, bioinformatics and the social sciences. It is closely related to the philosophical concept known as Wittgenstein's ladder.
The lie can cause harm. Your logic is flawed. It's as saying as telling a captain telling a soldier to kill a child is harmless. Because it's only information,and information is harmless. The cause of the cause is a cause.
The trouble with telling noble lies is that once people realize that you've been lying to them, they start to suspect everything you say. That's part of why the replication crisis in the social sciences is so corrosive: it shreds people's willingness to believe unintuitive things that institutions insist are true, even in those instances where institutions are correct.
Humans have been lying for as long as they've been human, but they've also shunned this behavior for just as long. It's destructive to both individuals and communities.
What the essay suggests in various ways in describing how we lie to children is that we are afraid of conflict. The world is full of conflict and violence though we wish it were not. But we can wish it away for our children for a short while.
Which leads, I think, to the underlying reason for Paul's discomfort with these lies. The way to resolve conflict is to engage with it in a highly choreographed way. There aren't many, but there are some ways that society has devised for dealing with conflict in non-violent ways. The constitution of the U.S. of A. is an example. Litigation and contract law are others.
Unreflective lying is thus counter-productive to a long-term goal of raising children that have the right combination of courage and humility that is necessary to repeatedly engage in conflict without resorting to violence.
A few other thoughts on specific passages:
"Very smart adults often seem unusually innocent, and I don't think this is a coincidence. I think they've deliberately avoided learning about certain things."
The thing that "very smart adults" have in common may not be selective ignorance, but rather strong skepticism. They haven't "learned" because they remain skeptical long after the rest of the world is satisfied with the lies they've been told.
"You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational, and believing things that are true."
The way I understand what you're getting at here is through the distinction between a public good and a natural monopoly. Some people naively assume that all public goods have the natural monopoly characteristic of declining average total costs of production. This is not true. Natural monopolies occupy a middle point in the temporal-spatial spectrum. At the low end, we have black markets that operate in small geographical regions for short periods of time until legal firms can enter. A black market may have a natural monopoly, but it is not a public good. At the other end of the spectrum, we have religion and political ideology, which are neither non-rivalrous nor non-excludable, and yet may have natural monopoly characteristics in how their doctrine are established and disseminated. The bizarre payload can be explained by the leverage these natural monopolies have over their followers. Incidentally, I am a Christian, and believe that learning and practicing Christian doctrine would be of benefit to everybody. But I am acutely aware of the bizarre payload that the church as an institution has accrued over many years. That bizarre payload is a problem for people like me to try and fix, not a reason not to adopt and practice Christianity.
In the end, I connected with this essay because I find the author engaged in what I consider to be one of the more difficult and important human endeavors: becoming free. Freedom cannot be had by force. It grows up in the detritus of shattered false beliefs about self and others. Its growth is fostered by the sun of social acknowledgment, but can wither under the same sun when not also watered down and washed off by humble listening and a habit of self-criticism.
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