The insightful Paul Graham:
One of the most remarkable things about the way we lie to kids is how broad the conspiracy is. All adults know what their culture lies to kids about: they’re the questions you answer "Ask your parents." If a kid asked you who won the World Series in 1982 or what the atomic weight of carbon was, you could just tell him. But if a kid asks you "Is there a God?" or "What’s a prostitute?" you’ll probably say "Ask your parents."
Since we all agree, kids see few cracks in the view of the world presented to them. The biggest disagreements are between parents and schools, but even those are small. Schools are careful what they say about controversial topics, and if they do contradict what parents want their kids to believe, parents either pressure the school into keeping quiet or move their kids to a new school.
The conspiracy is so thorough that most kids who discover it do so only by discovering internal contradictions in what they’re told. It can be traumatic for the ones who wake up during the operation. Here’s what happened to Einstein:
Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies: it was a crushing impression.
I remember that feeling. By 15 I was convinced the world was corrupt from end to end. That’s why movies like The Matrix have such resonance.
What if one wrote a clear simple web page explaining to young kids the important lies they are told? How popular would it be with kids? Yes, even if kids like the page it might take a while for word to get around about it, but I suspect it would face a much bigger problem: very few kids really want to see through the lies. Hat tip to Kat.
Maybe this is just my own experience, but I grew up in a world where, some strangers and maybe the soviet union notwithstanding, I could trust adults. Teachers, priests and other authority figures tended to know what they were talking about. It wasn't until I started unraveling little lies like the SC one that the picture started to become in question. I would suggest many children are in similar situations, where the default is to trust their surrounding -- if they cannot trust their mother, or some kind of provider, they're going to have issues with basic survival and language acquisition, so some degree of trust is required even just to get that far.
Children might be seen as having big imaginations, but in fact their imaginations are truly and utterly limited by the narratives and experiences that they have available to them. They may be able to crystalize into new narratives and find new patterns with which to measure the world around them very easily but they are still only using what they have to work with, and I would argue that for the vast majority of normal children this does not include the kind of wide-ranging conspiracies that actually exist. You need practice in seeing lies, in seeing well-meaning mistakes, in seeing and interacting with social situations that usually only experience can give, especially experience where you have skin in the game. Sometimes you get lucky by seeing an internal inconsistency and recognizing it for what it is, but more often children rationalize it away as being a mistake that *they* made in interpreting the situation, something they are typically still doing a lot of as they experiment and grow.
So it's not necessarily that they don't *want* to see the truth, it's that they are not expecting a truth to be where they need to look in order to find it. Conspiracies are often "unknown unknowns" to children.
Sometimes though they'll choose to ignore the situation, if it's uncomfortable in the right way. In those cases then yes, they do 'want' to not know. I tried to ignore the sex subgame of life and everything involved with it for a long time. And to some extent this propensity to seek or ignore conflicting information might depend on a cultural value on truth -- if your culture does not support truth seeking your children may not care to look as much. But as others in this thread have pointed out -- children are practically by default curious, and will look at evidence presented to them in the right way, then quickly take it for granted that "everyone knows" that there is a conspiracy in this topic and move on to the next thing.
He originally was real person who got 'generalized'/'abstracted' into being a myth. But once he was a myth, Coca-Cola turned him into a way to market their product.
Wikipedia bears this much: claims Nikolaos of Myra, of the 3rd century was a real person, who did give gifts. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wi... ).
However the latter half of this is disputed by Snopes:http://www.snopes.com/holid... -- they claim that everything about Santa Claus was present before Coca-cola got their maws on it, and that they just used the meme successfully.
Regardless of how much was consciously cultivated, It's a microcosm of the broader picture of how gods are created -- someone does something worthy of being remembered, so worthy that it seems bigger than human in retrospect -- and in effort to remember him, the myth grows with every passing generation.
But one thing that definitely affects myths is when you can have one official version of the myth that everyone is exposed to:http://www.coca-colacompany...