What about Santa Claus?

August 16, 2020 by Fred Allebach

When my mom was a kid, she asked my grandparents, “How can the Easter Bunny carry all those chocolate eggs to so many people?” She broke my grandmother down. After a few minutes, Mom said, “What about Santa Claus?” At that point, my grandmother said, “Don’t tell the kids at school.”

 This is a fun story about waking up to see the flaws of magical thinking. When we get to be adults, why stop at Santa? What about religion, Jesus, and God?

Religion, whether chosen or enculturated, offers security, shared meaning, community, and belonging. It’s also a hedge against mortality. This security blanket function holds for all “tradition.” You don’t need to think; all content and meaning are handed to you on a silver platter. The content doesn’t even matter so much; It’s as much community, in-group glue as anything. 

 “When a code is familiar enough it ceases appearing like a code, one forgets there is a decoding mechanism,” wrote Douglas R. Hofstadter. The message is identified with its meaning.

Unquestioning tribal buy-in has great survival value. It keeps group solidarity, and tends to make other out-groups bad and sub-human, all the easier to delegitimize, fight, and kill. Religion demarks groups and justifies them and their antagonisms and parochialisms. But what if religion is at once your liberator, exploiter, and deceiver? Why have world religions not acted more forcefully with a unity message, especially when we are clearly all together on this pale blue dot?

 “The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude.” – Eric Hoffer

On a grand scale, modern humans have been slowly awakening to see that it is they themselves who create the meanings they later get on their knees and pray to. It is people after all, who write and interpret all the holy books.

The Classic Greeks, the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Age of Reason, the scientific method, all these trajectories put humans, not gods, at the center of meaning. The ascendancy of the individual is modernization and represents the evolution of human thought, and potential liberation from the smothering strictures of tradition.

 “It is the theory that decides what we can observe.” – Albert Einstein.

 The challenge for the modern, secular humanist is to create the whole meaning of the world out of themself. Why? Because we can – self-enlightenment represents the path of liberation from arbitrary definition, power, and control by others. Yet as we wake up and challenge the rationales used to exploit us and to destroy the planet, as individuals, we are also less effective, unable to join together in the numbers needed to force clearly needed changes.

 “So many things fail to interest us, simply because they don’t find in us enough surfaces on which to live and what we have to do then is to increase the number of planes in our mind so that a much larger number of themes can find a place in it at the same time.” — Jose Ortega y Gassett

 Seeing the world clearly and waking up from magical thinking is a joyful and empowering opening, yet it also leaves us without the old security blanket of tradition, and without the strength of our greatest adaptation, membership in community and cooperative society. If the bonds of immoral oppression are to be broken, the old justifications need to be taken out by the root. Unfortunately, in the US, these justifications reside with deep threads of American mythology, a potent idolization of the individual as blessed by God and Providence. This has led to enshrining rationales of the liberty of the few, to rip off all the rest.

“Religion is the opiate of the masses.” – Karl Marx

The cold hard facts, people have exploited each other for labor, reproduction, and material advantage from day one. Religion has been a primary justification, divine rule, Manifest Destiny. Conquest plus religion is the ultimate in the exercise of raw power for material advantage, and mind control. Then people can be exploited and accept it, as they hope for a promised reward in an unproven afterlife that will never come. But this is not an immutable truth, it is Santa Claus 202.

Christianity has been a top tool in conquest leading to white, European privilege. If the conquered don’t pull back the curtain on this magical thinking, they’re condemned to take the religion of the conqueror and justify their own exploitation. Couple Christianity with the fetishization of finance and the individual, and you get United States mythology.

 “Experience is something man projects upon the outside world as he gains it in its culturally determined form.” –  Edward T. Hall

 And so, tradition is used to keep people down, even as modernization entices with aspirations for more. Impulses of the exploited for liberty, equity, and autonomy are held down by loyalty to tradition and respect for religious authority. It’s a trap. It’s the same Christian religion that exploits and promises salvation. Maybe it’s time to reconsider?

 “All we like sheep, have gone astray, and the Lord has visited his iniquity upon us all.” – Isaiah 53:6

 With the ascendancy of the individual as the locus of all culture, secular humanists, “liberals”, and cultural creatives have been successful at unmasking troubles with tradition and modernization but, this awakened cohort has lost the ability to cooperate and have strength in numbers. Divided we fall.

 Time for a new prophet, a new myth, that of the whole earth; we’re all one tribe, the same in-group. We could come full circle back to the original whole earth, unity mythology. We could share better, just like we did in kindergarten when our impulses were pure. 

 The pendulum needs to swing away from both tradition and modern individualism. A real e pluribus unum, unity from diversity, is called for. We need a new human community that surmounts the tragedy of the commons, and endless war, and where individuals sacrifice for the greater good, not kill the greater good for their own greedy liberty. If we can’t act together for a greater common purpose, one that honors all and does not divide, kill, destroy and exploit, we’re sunk.

Do tell everyone at school: we make the gods, and we need a new one we can join together in believing now, in a program that chooses our best, leaves the worst, and that honors the full range of our natural capacities.