Lies We Tell Kids
Wednesday, October 30
For today, an excerpt from Paul Graham’s Lies We Tell Kids:
Of all the reasons we lie to kids, the most powerful is probably the same mundane reason they lie to us.
Often when we lie to people it's not part of any conscious strategy, but because they'd react violently to the truth. Kids, almost by definition, lack self-control. They react violently to things—and so they get lied to a lot.
A few Thanksgivings ago, a friend of mine found himself in a situation that perfectly illustrates the complex motives we have when we lie to kids. As the roast turkey appeared on the table, his alarmingly perceptive 5 year old son suddenly asked if the turkey had wanted to die. Foreseeing disaster, my friend and his wife rapidly improvised: yes, the turkey had wanted to die, and in fact had lived its whole life with the aim of being their Thanksgiving dinner. And that (phew) was the end of that.
Whenever we lie to kids to protect them, we're usually also lying to keep the peace.
One consequence of this sort of calming lie is that we grow up thinking horrible things are normal. It's hard for us to feel a sense of urgency as adults over something we've literally been trained not to worry about. When I was about 10 I saw a documentary on pollution that put me into a panic. It seemed the planet was being irretrievably ruined. I went to my mother afterward to ask if this was so. I don't remember what she said, but she made me feel better, so I stopped worrying about it.
That was probably the best way to handle a frightened 10 year old. But we should understand the price. This sort of lie is one of the main reasons bad things persist: we're all trained to ignore them.
One of the things that sticks out to me from The Zone Of Interest, or Brueghel’s Icarus, is how easy and alluring it is to remain calm in the face of turmoil and difficulty by simply turning away from it, refusing to look at it directly. I think Paul Graham is right — that we learn this habit as kids — and in many cases it only reinforces itself throughout our life.
I don’t think the solution is always to be panicked, nor to spend all our time worried about the many grave problems in our world. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to have some peace in our lives. But maybe there’s a sort of meta-honesty we can have with ourselves: the self-knowledge that the world is full of wicked problems from which we are constantly turning away.