#AntiSanta Contra Mundum

Every year, I write a thing on the internet telling parents they shouldn’t lie about Santa. Here’s this year’s vintage.

The more pushback I get on this, the more I am confirmed in wanting to do it, because my position is so unarguably, self-evidently correct.

But while chatting on Twitter I realized there is another good reason for the #AntiSanta lie: it teaches your kids, as a friend incisively put it, “dissent with non-zero social cost.”

If you don’t become an accomplice of the Santa lie, your kids will learn that there are things that can be true, even though 99% of the world will tell them otherwise; they will learn that truth is not up to an opinion poll. What’s more, they will be socially pressured by peers and well-meaning adults into collaborating. A capacity for dissent with contempt for social costs is a moral virtue–it needs to be trained–and a hard, and precious one. It has to become a reflex, something deep in the gut, to treat things like “Don’t be such a killjoy,” “Don’t rock the boat” with contempt. Better start early.