On Growing Up …

Arthur Silber …

A Nation of Stupid Children, Who Refuse to Give Up the Lies

By the age of eight or nine, most children realize that Santa Claus isn’t a real person, just as they know the Easter Bunny and similar pleasantries are only make-believe, tales of imagination offered to add a bit of fun to the holidays. The great majority of children give up these fantasies without experiencing emotional upheaval that remotely approaches serious trauma. Those very rare children fortunate enough to be raised by adults who accord them the seriousness and respect they deserve know such stories to be ones of invention from the beginning.

Unfortunately, the great majority of Americans — led by a relentlessly trivial and mendacious political class and a comparably anti-intellectual media — never approach again the psychological achievement of children who undergo this transition.

Still more unfortunately, most of these same children, while able to recognize fabrications of the Santa Claus variety, become prisoners of the American mythology that I recently discussed. Their pathetic plight is understandable in one sense, since almost no one will disabuse them of the lies with which they comfort themselves.

Nonetheless, one can legitimately hope and expect that upon attaining adulthood, more individuals would be prepared to exercise even limited independent powers of assessment. But if you have such expectations, you will almost always be disappointed.

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