Lie to Me

Some people feel that lying to a kid about Santa Clause is a good decision. I disagree. Lies are lies. If your parents go through so much trouble and make up such a long-winded explanation of how presents end up in the house, how can I trust what my parents say about other subjects? Oh, so the parent lies just about Santa and nothing else? They say trust is like paper; once it is crumpled, it can never be made perfect again. Do the parents decide to stop lying when things are important? Right, because that's so easy to tell.

I feel that lying is immoral. I'm the type of person that would take the truth above any sort of lie. I would take the truth even when the truth and the lie both results in the same outcome, only the truth hurts more. I prefer truth over lies. This is the reason why claims about religion annoy me so much in principle. I want to believe in something because it's true, not because it's comforting. Half truths and lying by omission are deceptive and in my eyes almost equivalent to a flat out lie. Why is it so fucking difficult to get the truth? We're so used to lying to everybody to the point where we are expected to lie or deceive people when their emotions are in danger. If I asked a girl out and she's not into me, I don't want some bullshit like "I'm not looking for a boyfriend" or something. Just say it. It's like a band-aid. Rip it off, prevent scarring. Get it over with. I deserve the truth and if you don't give it, it is on you. I don't care if it's hard to tell the truth. Just refuse to tell the answer if you're so embarrassed or uncomfortable.Prevent anybody from getting the wrong idea and keeping false hope that will get shattered in the end all the same. I don't want false hope, I want the real deal. I want to prepare emotionally and physically for whatever comes my way before I hits me in the face. And it's funny to me that relationships go under due to 'lack of communication'. Or the ridiculous bullshit mind-games that people play in relationships. Be real. Tell the truth. Know what your standing is with everybody else and vice versa.

Now, back to Santa Clause. Some may argue that lying to children about Santa Clause gives them a sense of wonder. This is bafflement. This is confusion about how the laws of physics works and testing the incredulity of little kids by feeding them lies. Sure, with religion the idea has a higher chance of actually sticking with them into adulthood, but at least from a religious person's point of view, they are teaching their kid the truth. Teaching kids about Santa Clause is flat out intentional lying. There are many things in this world that are amazing and filled with wonder. Teach a kid what a cloud is. Or what a rainbow is. Or what the Sun is. Or how when we look out into the night sky, we are looking back in time. There is so much magic in reality that we don't need to start inventing myths and superstitions about this fat dude flying around in the air assigning toys to kids he deems nice instead of naughty after around the clock surveillance. And science has practical applications too. Beyond just wonder, IT'S REAL. The world revolves around science. This is education along with wonder.

Have you see Vsauce? It is a Youtube channel for mainstream science, where very interesting questions are posed. How much does a shadow weigh? Did you know the same effect that makes the sky blue is also what makes our eyes blue? Etc etc. And it is the strongest science Youtube channel to date. It fills people with curiosity, with wonder. And it is also educational. We don't need a fake fat guy in the way to get there. Or we can turn Santa into an educational activity. Kid asks if Santa is real? Ask him or her to investigate. How would we go about figuring this out?

I'm not a parent. I don't have  PHD in child raising. But when in doubt, stick with the truth. I don't think messing with the kid's sense of reality. You may argue that kids taught about Santa typically do just as well as the ones not taught about Santa Clause, but similar things can be said for teaching people about astrology. It's one more piece of falsehood and pseudoscience that just might stick. You cannot encourage healthy skepticism on one hand and then teach them about Santa being real on the other. And kids are still learning things about the world, and incorporating what they learn into their grasp of reality. Don't chuck lies in there.

Wonder is wonder. Wonder doesn't have to mean lies.

Opportunity Cost

Here's a thought: The food you eat, the shoes you buy? They are killing people.

Every $100 you spent on something is a $100 that could have been spent elsewhere. When you spend $100 on shoes, you are saying that the value of the shoes outweigh everything else I could get for $100 at this moment. Let's just say for the sake of argument that donating $100 to the right places saves the life of one random person. So the logical conclusion is, buying shoes for $100 means the person thinks the shows are more valuable than the life of a random person. And not only that, the $100 could've been used to save the person, therefore the person allowed somebody to die.

The obvious problem slams people in the face rather quickly: Then doesn't this mean we are indirectly allowing thousands of people to die? Well, yes. We are. There's really no argument that can be made at this point against my conclusions. Opportunity cost is understood in-depth in economics. But the coming points are subjected to debate, and debate people will. Since we are letting thousands die, does this make us immoral? The question lies on how we call somebody moral.

First of all, the most basic argument that leads all the way back to the very basic philosophical ideas on morality is that of moral relativism. But this is largely a useless argument. Unless you want to tell me that the people dying want to die, that you personally feel people should die, or that I think people should die, then we are all in agreement that death is bad and should be avoided. Moral relativism, while an interesting philosophical idea, is purely academic in that it does not translate to how we do policies.

But then the question comes in: How do we judge a person to be good or bad? When we call somebody a bad or a good person, we are not typically talking about one specific act they do, but rather every action and thought the person undertakes. Here is my opinion. Your good has to outweigh the bad for you to be a good person. Killing 50 kids and then opening the door for an elderly woman makes you a bad person in total. This case would be the case of a bad person doing one good thing.

I've had arguments which I did not expect. One person considered my stance to b e contradictory because a person doing good things can be good, but a person doing good things can be bad. Well, yes. That's not contradictory. Once again, whether we call a guy good or bad depends on the totality of their thoughts and actions.a

Another argument is about how my conclusions mean we cannot ever be moral. Seeing that every $100 we spend is letting people die, then we can never be moral. That's not actually an argument on the merits and logical consistency of my thought process. If it is true that it is impossible to be moral, then so be it. That's sucks, that's inconvenient, but that doesn't make my conclusions logically fallacious.

One idea is that we judge a person to be good or bad based upon the standards of our time period. Owning slaves is OK 200 years ago, but do that in 2013 and you are considered a monster. Therefore the thought process goes, because most people in 2013 constantly spend money for their own good instead of saving other human beings, doing so is the norm, therefore by this criteria, this does not make us immoral.

Which is something I do agree with, but may be problematic for the future. When slavery was practiced 200 years ago, some people questioned whether this practice is actually good. Maybe we should think about the suffering of others. It takes people who are forward thinkers, who come up with answers about morality which most people don't care for, to drive society forward. If every single person 200 years ago had the mindset that, because slavery is normal, practicing slavery is normal by the standards of their time, therefore there is no need to change, then we will NEVER STOP SLAVERY.

So sometimes I think about the future. Have you ever thought about the past? Asked yourself, how the hell so many people practiced slavery without second thoughts. How their conscience didn't eat them inside-out. Why did it take so freakin' long for somebody in the government to realize slavery is wrong? Didn't ANYBODY stop and think about the suffering of their fellow man? What was wrong with them? It seems to patently obvious that slavery is immoral. What about the future? Maybe people will come and look at 2013, shaking their heads. Didn't people in 2013 KNOW that the $80000 they earn a year and proceed to spend on themselves is letting countless people die in a variety of horrible ways? What were they THINKING? Surely SOMEBODY stopped and think, maybe what we're doing is not morally correct?

The Starving Child

If you were walking on a street one day and saw a starving, dying child, you would probably feel the need to do something about it. Buy the person something to eat, call the cops, or something. But if the person is dying somewhere else, and we know this happens, we feel utterly no moral imperative at all. So the suffering has to be in our face for us to care. Would you save somebody in your school or work for a few dollars? You probably would. But for some stranger? You still might. But you would keep saving people until you realize you don't have money left to buy yourself a new Xbox, then you'd stop. No such point exists where you give out so much money, it is morally correct to stop giving out money to save some people from death. It just becomes more inconvenient to you, but is your convenience worth their death? Every single thing you buy, you are accepting the opportunity cost of that purchase. Every $100 you spent could've been spent to prevent that starving kid from dying. It's not your problem? Of course not. I can do all sorts of very illegal things to you this instant, and if it were not for the law, it wouldn't really be my problem now, would it? Would you say, "not my problem" if you see a guy having a heart attack and you were the only witness? Out of sight, out of mind. No name, no face, no sleep lost.

There's this diffusion of responsibility. If many people can fix the issue, you feel less liable. When I was in psychology class, the teacher showed a video clip about a few psychological studies regarding the diffusion of responsibility. The people in the study saw (or in some cases heard) what seems to be somebody having a heart attack. You have one person in the room seeing this, and they run out for help. You have three people, and the three just sit there going 'oh my god'. This is why when people have a heart attack, medical training says to assign one specific person to call 911 instead of just yelling 'SOMEBODY CALL A MEDIC'.

How many people are in poverty today? In true poverty, not unemployment in the United States. Your bad day is their great day. You are too lazy to go to the store to get food to eat. Or, you're trying to eat less because you're getting fat. The guys over there don't have food to eat. Not my problem, I got dance classes, cya.

Not just you, of course. Everybody. Me as well. We're not programmed by evolution to be selfless. But I'm saying we are indirectly killing people all the time and we feel no remorse. I believe nobody can meet the standards of morality this sets. But if you're not going to donate money, the least you can do is the acknowledge the reality and not blatantly say 'it's not my problem'.