(2022-12-26) VisakanV Santa Is Real

Visakan Veerasamy: Santa Is Real. I’m almost kinda mad at how good the above meme is at distilling everything I was initially hoping to say in this essay. But maybe it’s still worth talking about it.

The question is, “should you tell your kids ‘the truth’ about Santa?”

it’s also maybe kind of cruel to disillusion children too early, depriving them of the joy of magical thinking, imagination and so on.

We can initiate them into a higher level of understanding, that is compassionate, enriching, even profound.

In my first essay, We were voyagers, I talked about how Pericles and Abraham Lincoln were “giving out purpose and meaning like free candy”. They initiated their people – the people of Athens, the citizens of the USA – into a more meaningful way of being, with something compelling to live up to. This is what the Santa initiation is about, too. Yes, it’s made up, but all of human social reality is made up. (social fiction)

It’s about sustaining nourishing contexts where people can behave in meaningful ways.

This is shaman’s work, which I will be talking about a lot more in the coming year. But it’s too important to be left entirely to professionals. We all do it, for ourselves and each other, all the time. Standup comedians exist, but that doesn’t mean you don’t tell jokes.