The Santa Problem

This was originally written with the intention of being an episode of the podcast in December, but due to circumstances outside of my control, this did not come to pass. It is presented to you as a text post.

Hello everyone. 

Today is December 20, 2023. (It is now not.)

Christmas is in a mere 5 days. (This is no longer the case.)

Christmas, if you’re not familiar, is part of a cluster of ritual exercises we all agree to participate in around the winter solstice to sort of imbue our lives with a sense of purpose when we need it the most.

I think there’s a very good reason why when you look at the year as a whole the distribution of holidays is sort of lopsided in favor of the end of the year. 

Because there really wouldn’t be any reason to live otherwise.

That stretch around the winter solstice is horrible. You wake up, it’s dark, it’s cold, you go spend the day in a windowless room making money for somebody else, the sun sets at 1:00 in the afternoon so it’s dark by the time you get to go home.

You get two hours of time to yourself to drink and watch imperialist propaganda and then the cycle continues.

I truly do not think that the human mind would be resilient enough to cope with that lifestyle in those conditions completely uninterrupted throughout the winter months.

It’s a lot easier when you can put on a Santa hat and look forward to two days of paid time off if you’re lucky.

In some ways I almost wonder if we would’ve been better off without Christmas in the long run. Because I think without the holidays having that sedating effect, it might have pushed us to all wake up and say, why are we doing this? Life doesn’t have to be like this.

But we were happy settling for tacky decorations and terrible music.

And I know a lot of people are gonna probably call me a scrooge, or a grinch, and I’m fine with that.

Because those myths remind me a lot of the biblical story of creation: which was in many the first ever successful piece of propaganda.

You have the snake telling Adam and Eve, listen, you’re getting a raw deal here. You are in a prison. You don’t know what the world outside is like. I’m gonna give you the gift of knowledge. I’m gonna show you that you can take control of your life back.

Don’t just take this one guy’s word for it that you would be better off keeping the status quo. The message of that story as we know it is, look how you guys fucked everything up because you didn’t just listen to the patriarch in charge.

I’m saying, maybe we should take another look at the Grinch. Ebenezer Scrooge, maybe we dig deeper beyond the traditional narrative. And we ask ourselves, what’s really going on here in these stories?

Whenever you’re told to unquestioningly hate someone, you should always investigate a little deeper and develop your own point of view on the subject.

Now, I want to clarify, you should not do this if you’re stupid. If you know you are stupid, then yes, just do what everybody else says because, they’re probably smarter than you and you’re just going to end up getting more lost in the weeds because you have no clue where you’re going.

We got in big trouble these past couple years because people realized correctly that they were being scammed and lied to in this society. But, because they were stupid, they took that to mean, maybe Hitler was right, maybe we shouldn’t get vaccinated, etc.

Because they took the road less travelled, they blazed their own trail, but they ran into a bear and then tried to have sex with it.

Anyway, my point is, I want to emphasize I am not anti-Christmas. I’ve gotten accused of that a lot this holiday season in particular.

A couple of weeks ago there was a little misunderstanding with something that I posted, which seems to happen to me quite a bit, I’m not sure why people are so intent on willfully misrepresenting my words and actions.

I think that in general I am really misunderstood. And that’s why I think I have sympathy for these people in our mythology like, Scrooge, the Grinch, the devil, because when I look at these people I see myself a little bit.

I see a person who is going against the grain, speaking truth to power, and then being vilified for it because people don’t want to have their fantasy world disrupted.

So what happened a couple weeks ago was, I had been thinking about all of these things I’ve been discussing, this notion of Christmas as a sedative keeping us in check so we don’t fight back while we’re being taken advantage of, this is kind of swirling around in my head.

And I’m looking at the world around me, and seeing a society that is deeply in trouble. I see a society that’s too distracted trying to change the radio station that they don’t realize their car is hurtling off a cliff.

The mistake that most activists make is that they waste too much time and energy trying to change the minds of adults. People whose brains have sort of curdled with defense mechanisms and lead poisoning and so when you say to these people, hey look, what’s happening in Palestine is a genocide.

You’re gonna have a really hard time getting any new information to penetrate that wall they built around their brain to cope with getting beaten by their father.

So that’s why I say, you’re wasting your time with these people. Just let them die. Focus on the young people.

Their minds are like sponges. They want to be radicalized. Spend 10 minutes on TikTok and you will see the average 16 year old is a domestic terrorist.

They are so hungry for extremist viewpoints. When you’re a teenager you have the brain of a serial killer. And normally that gets kind of lobotomized by having sex all the time, but because of COVID, that stopped happening.

So all they do now all day is sit in their room and plan how they’re going to shoot up their school.

I’m a great example, I got popular on TikTok for making instructional videos about how to be a sociopath.

I take the approach of the parent who buys the kids alcohol and lets them drink in the basement so they don’t go off and try to do it somewhere else.

So, this is all swirling around in my head, I’m trying to grapple with forces at play in our society and reconcile that with the responsibly I have.

I’m thinking about Scrooge, I’m thinking about the Grinch, I’m thinking about capitalism, and I get this idea.

One of the first times in your life that you’re forced to reckon with the harsh reality of what the world is really like is, finding out Santa isn’t real.

And these moments of disillusionment are when, I think, we are most susceptible to being radicalized.

Moments where it feels like the rug of our world view has been pulled out from under us and we find ourselves in free-fall desperately swinging our arms around to find something to hold onto.

I had been seeing these mass demonstrations of protestors around LA, in the past few weeks they’ve done things like stopped traffic downtown, stopped traffic at the airport.

And that form of protesting is really great, but to me, protesting has kind of gotten a little cliche.

You see protestors, and no matter what they’re saying, in your head you kind of go, “oh, shut up.”

Just because we’ve seen people protest all the time for all sorts of things. And nobody really cares anymore.

It doesn’t work. It doesn’t reach people. Everybody’s just playing on their phones anyway, they don’t care what’s happening on the 110 freeway. They don’t even care about what’s happening right in front of their own face.

We’ve got to go about this differently. We’ve got to think about new ways to get ideas inside people’s heads.

If you tell somebody what you think their opinion should be, they’re going to get defensive. No matter what it is, no matter how right you are, nobody wants to admit when they’re wrong, because it makes them feel stupid. So if you put them in that position, they’re going to shut down, and you’ll never get through to them.

If you want someone to truly change their opinion on something, you have to make them feel like it’s their idea. You have to incept them and make them come up with the idea themselves.

There’s an old saying in the writing world: “show, don’t tell.”

I used to love Olive Garden the restaurant. My ex and I used to go every Friday when I lived in Georgia.

Then I moved out to LA, and everybody told me, Olive Garden sucks. It’s not good.

And of course, that made me upset. Because they’re attacking my taste. They’re attacking something I love.

If what they’re saying is true, it means, I’m wrong, I have a stunted palette, and I have terrible taste.

I don’t want to accept that.

So I would say, fuck you, I love Olive Garden. It’s good. You’re a snob.

Over time, I started going to more italian restaurants, having really good food, and having more diverse experiences that showed me Olive Garden wasn’t good. I only thought it was good because I had a limited worldview. And I didn’t want to admit that, so I got defensive.

I realized that on my own, and now I believe it.

Once you realize this is how people work, you can do anything.

So, knowing this, I asked myself: How can I show people the emotional truth of what I want them to believe?

What can I do to lead people down the path of discovering for themselves how the world around us really works?

Let’s go back to Santa for a minute. We have this whole mythology built for Santa Clause.

He’s a fat guy, he lives in the North Pole, he has a workshop with elves that make presents and every christmas he goes around the world on his sleigh with his reindeer and delivers them to every house in world over a certain income level.

To me, the Santa myth perfectly encapsulates the American psyche. We sedate ourselves with fantasies so we don’t have to accept the truth about the world we live in.

The truth about the north pole is, it’s an inhospitable purgatory. Half the year, it’s completely dark. The sun doesn’t come up the entire winter. It’s cold. The average high in December is 1 degree Fahrenheit.

Time itself doesn’t exist. Not only is there literally no time zone, because all the time zones intersect at the poles, but since the sun never comes up, there’s no way of keeping track of the passage of time at all.

So you have the closest thing you can possibly get on earth to hell.

A timeless empty dark frozen void.

That’s the reality of the north pole. But we can’t accept that, so we pretend there’s a Disney world up there.

Santa technically is real. Santa’s workshop is a real place. The elves are real. The raindeer are real. Presents get delivered all over the world. It’s called amazon.com

And you might know Santa better by his actual name, Jeff Bezos.

The American dream of santa clause has been achieved through human rights violations and exploitation of labor.

The mythological version of santa is made possible by our belief in him. Our belief in the capitalist fantasy is what makes it possible.

The actual version of Santa clause is made possible by callous disregard for human life.

If we fully grasped the consequences of Amazon.com, we would never buy anything again. But we don’t want to believe that.

We want to believe in the fantasy. The elves are happy to work all day every day for their entire lives. That’s their only purpose in life. Making our stuff.

So, by believing in Santa Clause, we are complicit in the perpetuation of our fascist death cult known as America.

Fuck that.

I refuse.

I printed out a huge banner that said, “SANTA IS NOT REAL.”

Taped it to the back of my car, and I drove around town. Even if just 1 child saw that and started down the path of truth, that would be a victory for me.

Of course, since the propaganda has been so successful, any dissent against the capitalist machine is immediately vilified.

I was called a grinch, I was called a scrooge.

By the Hitler youth of America.

Just like me getting told that Olive Garden isn’t good, I was so defensive because I know deep down that was true. But I couldn’t accept it.

I know that in the future, I will be vindicated for this. And I may not even be alive to see it. But so what.

Blessed is he who plants trees under whose shade he will never sit.

When you smother someone with a pillow, they’re going to fight back. they’re gonna thrash around. They’re gonna claw your face.

But hold the line. Stand your ground. And the thrashing will stop. Their limbs will go limp. And you will have won.