If
I were to answer, Yes or No, to the question “Should kids be told Santa exists?” I would probably say no. It’s not so much because it inculcates illogic
in a child’s worldview, what with the claim that some jolly old man sends presents
to children around the world in one night. What is most disagreeable to me is
the morals of it all.
Obedience, and other
immaturities
The
‘Santa mentality,’ of submitting to some outside authority over what is
considered “bad or good,” pervades religion primarily. It is indicative of the
primitive, if not savage, institutions at the time of the founding of such
religions some centuries ago. One’s value system is thus based on maintaining quotas
so as to please this outside authority. Obedience equals goodness.
Spirituality
Healthy
living, in fact, involves action apart or beyond what is tolerated by religious
or political law. For example, while one can perform a job solely for the sake
of money, this does not mean one’s life is maximized. There ought to be the
so-called ‘spiritual,’ from which one’s actions are rooted.
Not
to say that the task of spiritualizing should be handed over to some entity
such as government, whose very means of getting things done — violence or the
threat thereof — is at odds with most moral standards. The lack of
voluntariness as found in the state can only make for alteration of specific
actions, as opposed to the alteration of mentalities required to sustain any
social upheaval.
Holistic change
Doing
“good for goodness’ sake” in fact involves more than categorizing between “naughty
and nice.” It requires reconnecting the very idea of morals with health, and
aesthetic taste. In this regard, Santa, religion and the state are obsolete to
a philosophy of the future.
A natural progression
Perhaps
the case for Santa may be that, as a person approaches adolescence, he casts
off his old frameworks, such as of belief for belief’s sake, or of doing good
for obedience’s sake. The discarding of the Santa myth in a young adult would
thus be just one manifestation of an overall coming of age, of becoming
independent in terms of systems of thinking and acting. “Mommy says…” becomes “It
seems to me that…”
In
such a natural process, all superstitions could be sufficiently reevaluated,
with no long-term harm being done from preceding ‘truths’ fed to the back-then immature being at a time when they were incapable of acting wisely.
Or
maybe adolescence signifies a transformation in understanding of the world, where
historical-biographical particulars turn to general concepts, and the literal becomes
the figurative. For example, Santa the rewarder-punisher gives way to an
understanding of the baser (reptilian) regions of the psyche, where one’s urges
have no corresponding inhibitions other than the degree to which one’s organism is in need of a certain behavior or attitude, e.g. anger in order to channel sufficient energy as required in a life-or-death situation.
Final thoughts
Of
course, the intellectual state of today’s humanity is too lamentably bad for
the above considerations to have any relevance. Dismissing Santa at a later age
is a mere matter of no longer being a gullible sucker, and not about raised individual
awareness. If the latter were so, we would see the same corresponding
discarding of religious and political superstition.
And
as I end this entry by bidding you a Merry Christmas, dear reader, you would know that I
mean the true spirit of Christmas, which is not about gifts, nor about Jesus
even, but about family and friends. Although, Kierkegaard would argue that such
a notion has nothing to do with Christ, who is pure individuality as to exclude
the social... but that’s a different story.
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