Do you believe in society’s lies?
Santa Claus, Jeffrey Epstein, witch doctors, and the propaganda model of the world
Infoterrorists have sabotaged the Santa Claus Parade in Brantford, Ontario. Thirty thousand people line Dalhousie Street to watch Santa go by in his mechanical reindeer sleigh, sponsored by GrandBridge Energy. Adorable little kids, cheeks red against the cold, eyes coal-black with wonder, standing on tiptoes for a glimpse of the great Christmas magus. Santa, the Santa, great potency, ancient king, who judges the world from his icy seat at the lifeless pole, and who will, for no clearly discernible reason, shortly be delivering them a Bluey Supermarket Play Set with fifteen pieces, including an exclusive Bingo figure—he’s here. He’s coming here, touching earth in this extremely medium-sized city in the flat cornlands of peninsular Ontario. A miracle. Magic beyond words. Instead, something terrible happened. Along the parade route, someone had left a series of terrible, obscene messages. SANTA IS FAKE, SANTA ISN’T REAL, YOUR PARENTS ARE SANTA, and YOUR FAMILY BUYS YOUR PRESENTS. The parade nearly tipped over into riot. Hundreds of parents trying to tear down the offending messages before they polluted the children. Fistfights, small fires. Hundreds of calls to the police. Two people mistakenly thought to be the perpetrators were very nearly lynched. Nobody is allowed to interfere with our right to nakedly lie to small children.
You can understand why they were so angry. This particular lie is vast, and it depends on a total omertà among all the conspirators. It’s been going for decades, centuries even, and the corruption goes all the way to the top. In 1961, a girl called Michelle wrote to President Kennedy, asking about Santa Claus. He wrote back: ‘You must not worry about Santa Claus. I talked with him yesterday and he is fine. He will be making his rounds again this Christmas.’ Michelle wrote to JFK because she assumed that surely the President of the United States could be trusted to tell the truth to an American citizen, and he lied through his teeth. The media is in on it too. In 1897, another brave young truthseeker wrote in to the New York Sun to try to understand the world. ‘Papa says if you see it in the Sun it’s so. Please tell me the truth: is there a Santa Claus?’ How did they reply? They lied. ‘Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.’ Newspapers reprint that response every year, drumming in the falsehood by sheer force of repetition. Corporations: every consumer-facing firm on earth will lie to their consumers that Santa is real. Obviously, the military-industrial complex is also involved. Every year, NORAD—the North American Aerospace Defence Command—pretends to track Santa’s movements on his reindeer sleigh across the world. Radar arrays swivelling, THAAD interceptors prepared to blow Santa out the sky at a moment’s notice. All that machinery, all those enormous defence budgets, all those kickbacks, to track an airborne object that doesn’t even exist…
But it doesn’t stop there. The tentacles of this thing reach into every corner of society. An architecture of deception so intricate it borders on absurdity. You can literally meet the man, sit on his lap at a shopping centre or your local library, tell him exactly what you want for Christmas—but it’s not him. There’s a global network of impostors. They even have special institutions, like the Charles W Howard Santa Claus School in Midland, Michigan, where they train these operatives in the arts of deceit. Your teachers, whose job it is to tell you the truth about the world: every single one of them is deliberately, knowingly lying to you. Even your parents are in on it. The world you think you inhabit is not the real world.
Some questions. Why do they do this? What does this conspiracy achieve? Why is it more wonderful and magical for children to believe that their gifts don’t come from their parents, who love them, but some stranger in the North Pole? We’ll get there. Most urgently, though: if they can lie about Santa, what else can they lie about? What is Santa Claus, if not a case zero for the propaganda model of society?
Like most people, when I was around twelve years old I suddenly discovered that society was made of lies. Everyone else inhabited the make-believe world sold to them by the capitalist media, but I could see through it; I knew the truths you’re not supposed to know. Advertisers really just want you to buy their products! Schools are really just there to give you skills for the workplace! Society is actually ruled by the government! This is probably a necessary step in the road towards political maturity; eventually you grow up and notice that practically everyone in society claims to be the only person brave enough to tell the truth in a world of lies. It’s weird: the more people there are insisting that the truth is being systematically covered up, the unlikelier it seems. It doesn’t help that most of the clandestine truth on offer is either obvious to the point of uselessness (‘Did you know racism is actually bad?’) or straightforwardly evil and incorrect (‘Did you know racism is actually good?’). So you end up concluding that while there might be different interpretations of how the world works, all the facts are, more or less, known. But then, sometimes, something happens.
Six years ago, something happened to Jeffrey Epstein in a prison cell in New York. I found it hard to reconcile with the basically sensible Marxist materialism I was using to understand the world. I thought social reality was essentially composed of surplus labour and the declining rate of profit, but Epstein seemed to suggest that there are things happening in the shadows that I had never imagined. In a way, it was like discovering, as a grown adult, that no, Santa Claus really is real. Santa’s implicit role is to be the guardian of the secret of the commodity-form. He hides the knowledge that all the wonderful presents are actually just a collection of exchange-values. The primordial forces of the world are fundamentally indifferent to little children, who tend not to actively participate in the labour or commodity markets. (Did you think it was a coincidence that Santa is a big guy with a big white beard, known for his impressive drinking abilities, and associated with the colour red?) Epstein’s secret is the opposite. Whoever it was pulling his strings, they were happy to let this failed maths teacher play around with their billions, pretending to be some kind of genius investor. Money is just a toy. Beyond a certain level it doesn’t really matter at all. The world really runs on stranger stuff. Magic wishes, sacrifices, the circuits of desire. Spooky flash photos of Bill Clinton and Donald Trump sharing verrucas in a hot tub. Somehow, this has to do with the fate of nations. War and revolution. Cities bombed into rubble in the lands of Armageddon. And children are not incidental; they’re at the ugly centre of the whole thing.
Is it possible for an entire social structure to be based on lies? Is it possible for a society to pretend to be something completely different to what it actually is? The ethnographic record says yes. In fact, it’s the norm.