I think an obvious reason that is worth considering is that lying about death could possibly cause a child to have an unhealthy lack of risk aversion. While few parents are eager to tell their kids about death they are unwilling to have their kid's believe in the false idea that death can be cheated. Too much fear is unhealthy but a complete absence of it is deadly. All of the other things people are willing to lie about while contrary to reality are not as acutely dangerous. Believing in communism as an effective way to allocate resources while deadly on a meta level is not as immediately deadly as say having an Evil Kneivel or a Steve Irwin approach to the physical world.
And you might counter saying well awareness of death doesnt necessarily cause one to be risk averse. Or you might ask "Then why dont parents tell their kids about death proactively or sooner". Its not a rational process. Parents dance around the safety thing by pointing to the imminent pain factor associated with risky activities but once the death topic is on the table the idea of ones own kid thinking the worst case scenario is just short term pain feels too risky. And you might ask "but what about the heaven scenario?" my response to that is while not as bad as simply not existing in any form, the idea of waiting indefinitely in the sky with a bearded man for your family to arrive isnt a desirable circumstance worth experiencing for the chance to casually dangle from cliffs or eat insulation because it looks like cotton candy.
I’ve certainly never heard of someone outright lying about this.
I’d contend that it’s fairly simple, the parent cannot lie to themselves. “Will you die one day?” asks about a discrete, inarguable, and universal fact.
I all but practice radical honesty with my children but recognize that I could tell them “we’re out of ice cream” rather than argue about dessert. They’d never catch me. If they did, I could feign ignorance. The stakes are sufficiently low that I can lie to myself and alter my memory such that I *believe* I was mistaken and not truly lying.
When discussing immigration, I pull from a list of facts and impressions, many half-remembered. I perforce rely on the testimony of experts (like Bryan Caplan). If I find that I’m arguing a falsehood, I can always blame Bryan Caplan for giving me bad information. I can say I misread or misheard him. I have a multitude of ways of convincing myself and others that I was not wrong nor lying.
The stakes on this question are so high that you assume your child will remember your answer. You expect them to remember. If you lie about a foundational fact of life, the responsibility is entirely on you. You can’t be mistaken. You can’t say you misheard the question. You can’t blame that damned economist Bryan Caplan!
If your child asks you “Daddy, why did you tell me you would never die?” the only answer is “I chose to lie.” That feels bad and so we don’t do it.
I want to challenge Bryan's assertion that people tell pretty lies about the topics he brings up at the end. On topics like immigration and nuclear power, the lies are ugly. They lie and say that average immigrants are lazy criminals instead of hard-working and law-abiding. They lie and say that nuclear plants will melt down and kill everyone instead of telling the pretty truth about how it is a safe and clean form of energy. Sometimes people prefer ugly lies to pretty truths.
The average US immigrant is a lazy criminal because most people are lazy worldwide and most people, at least in the US, are criminals. You can complain it's a bad faith description as immigrants might have a similar profile as a non-immigrant but it's not a lie; at worst it's an ugly misrepresentative truth. It's also why I defend whataboutism because of cases like this, the appropriate response really is "well what about US native born citizens". But sans immigration, definitely agree with your point on many other topics.
What you're saying is true and interesting, but half of the lie.
On immigration the "pretty" lie is "immigrants are lazy criminals SO it's their fault that my life sucks, not mine" on nuclear it's "nuclear plants will melt down and kill everyone SO I'm pretty much a hero for fighting against it".
I have three children (now all in their twenties). This question came up and I answered honestly that all people are dying from the moment they are born. I never ever thought about my answer. My mother is something of a stoic (without knowing what that means). She was brutally honest about being less emotional than most other mothers. My mother also told me that she didn’t believe in God and I never gave the existence or nonexistent of God a second thought.
PS—My younger son was more upset about not knowing how to drive. This came up when I told him and his other brother (20 months older) that one day when they were adults that they would have to get jobs and live on their own. My son burst into tears when he heard this revelation. He cried, “But we don’t even know how to drive!”. I quickly assured him that I would teach them how to drive when they were older.
I had the same mom. She's the one taught me to drive. Best parallel parker I've ever seen (including my Lexus that takes twice as long) and always gave directions to places using compass points.
Adults know the truth about their mortality; most of them have no way of avoiding this knowledge. Many adults do not know the truth about regulation, the welfare state, nuclear power, etc., and would learn the truth only through efforts that they see no reason for making.
Ask people if they want to live forever and they’ll come up with a long list of shaky reasons why that would be the most horrible thing imaginable and why death is actually a blessing in disguise. Heck, ask them if they want to live to 150 with the health of a 25-year-old and the majority probably still say no.
But when you look at their behavior, the vast majority of people move heaven and earth to postpone death, at any age. There’s obviously a huge gap between stated and revealed preferences.
Why the disconnect? In my opinion, because there not being any upside to death is an ugly truth. Recognizing it comes across as either arrogant or nihilistic.
So I would argue that there’s a social desirability bias in favor of, to an extent, romanticizing death. Saying “I won’t die!” (even to a child) thus looks a bit too cocky/hubristic to most people.
You could say this falls under your "pretty lies about death" category, but from a different angle, so I thought I'd still say it.
Not trying to argue the overall point about lying itself but I did want to say you had one harsh mother Bryan lol. Maybe my family was the outlier, though I'm guessing I'm closer to the norm here than you on this one, but to this day the non-existence of Santa Claus has never been discussed more than once, as small child, and I'm well into my sixth decade of life, not even among adults. Santa Claus doesn't bring presents to those that profess not to believe in him in households with minor children; he does bring them to everyone else though including the dog in that household and all their friends too. For that matter, the tooth fairy was never discussed either and yet my adult daughter recently had a tooth removed and much to her eye rolling amazement, she found a silver dollar under her pillow in the morning. Wonder is part of the simply joys in life, not sure the need for so many parents to destroy that.
I do want to push back on your "afterlife as an excuse" thing though. To a true believer of a religion with an afterlife, it's not an excuse as temporal death is simply that, a transitional state and I've known atheists that console themselves with similar secular equivalent in Sagan's "We are all stardust". Little children aren't generally going to understand those sort of complex nuances nor is that what they are really asking, hell adults often struggle the same, hence what you really need to figure out is "What does my kid mean in that question" because you first need to understand what they even think death is in the right now before you can even begin to formulate an answer hence it not diversion to tease out that answer. Also IIRC going to be sleep used to be called the little death hence it's not unreasonable nor lying, in religious afterlives where you retain your individual identity, to simply tell your children "Grandma went to sleep in the ground for a long time, just like you do in your bed every night. She won't wake up in your lifetime but she will one day and you can see her then. Just like you see me every morning after you go to sleep. It's no different, just longer. It's OK to feel sad though just like when you were sad that that time I had to go on that work trip once and you missed me.", i.e. the Great Sleep. An atheist might be lying in that answer but a believer would not.
Also as a parent myself, I don't recall my kids every asking the question, nor me of my parents and I tend to question how often that question is actually asked or if it's just a trope. And it's not that none of us were ever exposed to death, I went to a lot of funerals as a child (big family) and I wasn't one of those parents (I've met people like this) who refuse to take their own children to funerals for fear of "traumatizing them"; my kids went to every wake and funeral along with some strong after the fact ride home vehement lectures on how bad "celebrations of life" are. Death was just part of life and not anything anyone (overtly) pondered on in my family, even in our angst teenage years nor even now; it's not avoided, it's just nothing worth wasting any time on outside practicality of the logistics. You died, went in the ground, cried, and would hopefully see them again one day in an afterlife; that was just assumed like the sun rising and gravity and you don't get angst on "will the sun rise tomorrow". At worst, when death was even discussed as a family matter, it was more in conversation around having children as in "You are only dead when there is no one left to remember you AND not a drop of your blood [DNA] remains living". Given my family has always been big on genealogy, my family has documented and extensive records going back to the 600s, that meant "if you don't have kids, not only you are missing a joy of life, but you are killing your parents, grandparents, and your entire family so pop out a couple for FAMILY TFR purposes so we, and you, will never die" (How is that for a guilt trip lol. I lay the same on my kids now). Hell my gay cousin even had that lecture "We don't care what you love or marry, pop a kid out anyways or die., Do your duty".
Kids won't find out if their parents are lying about the afterlife. Nobody comes back to tell you how great heaven is (that's just how great it is). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIHZKvz7Po8
I grew up with close parents, and I raised my children that way (close), too. But honestly, I don't know how this conversation goes between the modal child and parent. I don't REALLY remember the conversations that took place between me and my parents and me and my kids, but I DO know the conversations took place. On both ends, they were essentially truthful, though my father occasionally employed a light-hearted euphemism when explaining that someone or other had died of "old age." "Too many birthdays," he'd say, perhaps with a gentle smile. We kids knew perfectly well what he meant. And I, for one, was charmed (I'm a sucker for a turn of phrase).
Q: First, am I correct that when asked, “Will you ever die?,” people rarely lie?
A: In my experience, people rarely lie.
Q: Second, assuming that’s true, what exactly is stopping people from lying?
A: People do not want to seem to be an idiot.
With very young children, people mostly avoid answering the question. With people older than very young children (I have no idea what age that might be) most people do not lie.
Why not take the logic to its conclusion — the fact that people do not lie about death shows that knowledge of death is comforting. I have seen children take a fascination with death. It is clearly less traumatic to them than, for instance, the breakdown of their parents relationship. D.I.V.O.R.C.E. by Dolly Parton is an example of parents lying about that. I understand that you are anti-Freud but the death drive is the obvious solution to your puzzle.
I have not seen parents lie about mortality (except pets that "go to live on a farm").
Kids are likely to know someone that died. Until recently in human history, that included other kids. The question of if they will die is most likely to come up after a death. So, its hard to lie.
If parents lied, it would be even worse for the kid when someone they know died. If it is something inevitable, it isn't as tragic.
What you talking about Alex? Grandma, Aunt Betty, and Cousin Ray-Ray are all upstate working on that same farm for elderly and sick pets. And no we can't visit because it's far away and they don't let visitors because some of the pets are very sick and you might bring germs. Grandma can't visit either because she's old and no car but she loves you anyways.
Perhaps a simpler answer than previous comments: the prospect of dying in 40+ years isn’t that undesirable? It’s too abstract as to be painful at the moment, and too undeniable to justify lying about something so far off as to not be painful.
I’d be curious to compare the responses of healthy parents to parents with near-term terminal illness: if your five year old learns you’re sick, do you tell them you’re going to die in three months? Probably not. But in fifty years? Sure, ye, fine, I’ll die. Right now, it’s not a particularly undesirable idea, and certainly the discounted undesirability doesn’t outweigh the obvious lie (and easily falsifiable lie).
I know a few people who would answer, in all seriousness and with complete sincerity, that they do not believe they will die. They believe that either medical science or computing (or, more likely, some combination of the two) will defeat death, and that it will happen in the next two or three decades.
When I saw the title of the post, I assumed the post would be a discussion of this possibility.
I think an obvious reason that is worth considering is that lying about death could possibly cause a child to have an unhealthy lack of risk aversion. While few parents are eager to tell their kids about death they are unwilling to have their kid's believe in the false idea that death can be cheated. Too much fear is unhealthy but a complete absence of it is deadly. All of the other things people are willing to lie about while contrary to reality are not as acutely dangerous. Believing in communism as an effective way to allocate resources while deadly on a meta level is not as immediately deadly as say having an Evil Kneivel or a Steve Irwin approach to the physical world.
And you might counter saying well awareness of death doesnt necessarily cause one to be risk averse. Or you might ask "Then why dont parents tell their kids about death proactively or sooner". Its not a rational process. Parents dance around the safety thing by pointing to the imminent pain factor associated with risky activities but once the death topic is on the table the idea of ones own kid thinking the worst case scenario is just short term pain feels too risky. And you might ask "but what about the heaven scenario?" my response to that is while not as bad as simply not existing in any form, the idea of waiting indefinitely in the sky with a bearded man for your family to arrive isnt a desirable circumstance worth experiencing for the chance to casually dangle from cliffs or eat insulation because it looks like cotton candy.
I’ve certainly never heard of someone outright lying about this.
I’d contend that it’s fairly simple, the parent cannot lie to themselves. “Will you die one day?” asks about a discrete, inarguable, and universal fact.
I all but practice radical honesty with my children but recognize that I could tell them “we’re out of ice cream” rather than argue about dessert. They’d never catch me. If they did, I could feign ignorance. The stakes are sufficiently low that I can lie to myself and alter my memory such that I *believe* I was mistaken and not truly lying.
When discussing immigration, I pull from a list of facts and impressions, many half-remembered. I perforce rely on the testimony of experts (like Bryan Caplan). If I find that I’m arguing a falsehood, I can always blame Bryan Caplan for giving me bad information. I can say I misread or misheard him. I have a multitude of ways of convincing myself and others that I was not wrong nor lying.
The stakes on this question are so high that you assume your child will remember your answer. You expect them to remember. If you lie about a foundational fact of life, the responsibility is entirely on you. You can’t be mistaken. You can’t say you misheard the question. You can’t blame that damned economist Bryan Caplan!
If your child asks you “Daddy, why did you tell me you would never die?” the only answer is “I chose to lie.” That feels bad and so we don’t do it.
I want to challenge Bryan's assertion that people tell pretty lies about the topics he brings up at the end. On topics like immigration and nuclear power, the lies are ugly. They lie and say that average immigrants are lazy criminals instead of hard-working and law-abiding. They lie and say that nuclear plants will melt down and kill everyone instead of telling the pretty truth about how it is a safe and clean form of energy. Sometimes people prefer ugly lies to pretty truths.
The average US immigrant is a lazy criminal because most people are lazy worldwide and most people, at least in the US, are criminals. You can complain it's a bad faith description as immigrants might have a similar profile as a non-immigrant but it's not a lie; at worst it's an ugly misrepresentative truth. It's also why I defend whataboutism because of cases like this, the appropriate response really is "well what about US native born citizens". But sans immigration, definitely agree with your point on many other topics.
What you're saying is true and interesting, but half of the lie.
On immigration the "pretty" lie is "immigrants are lazy criminals SO it's their fault that my life sucks, not mine" on nuclear it's "nuclear plants will melt down and kill everyone SO I'm pretty much a hero for fighting against it".
The ugly lie serves as fuel for the pretty lie.
The lies in the nuclear case are mostly spread by the nuclear establishment itself.
When you are talking Safety all the time and preening yourself on how safe you are, others naturally think you aren't very safe.
I have three children (now all in their twenties). This question came up and I answered honestly that all people are dying from the moment they are born. I never ever thought about my answer. My mother is something of a stoic (without knowing what that means). She was brutally honest about being less emotional than most other mothers. My mother also told me that she didn’t believe in God and I never gave the existence or nonexistent of God a second thought.
PS—My younger son was more upset about not knowing how to drive. This came up when I told him and his other brother (20 months older) that one day when they were adults that they would have to get jobs and live on their own. My son burst into tears when he heard this revelation. He cried, “But we don’t even know how to drive!”. I quickly assured him that I would teach them how to drive when they were older.
I had the same mom. She's the one taught me to drive. Best parallel parker I've ever seen (including my Lexus that takes twice as long) and always gave directions to places using compass points.
Adults know the truth about their mortality; most of them have no way of avoiding this knowledge. Many adults do not know the truth about regulation, the welfare state, nuclear power, etc., and would learn the truth only through efforts that they see no reason for making.
Ask people if they want to live forever and they’ll come up with a long list of shaky reasons why that would be the most horrible thing imaginable and why death is actually a blessing in disguise. Heck, ask them if they want to live to 150 with the health of a 25-year-old and the majority probably still say no.
But when you look at their behavior, the vast majority of people move heaven and earth to postpone death, at any age. There’s obviously a huge gap between stated and revealed preferences.
Why the disconnect? In my opinion, because there not being any upside to death is an ugly truth. Recognizing it comes across as either arrogant or nihilistic.
So I would argue that there’s a social desirability bias in favor of, to an extent, romanticizing death. Saying “I won’t die!” (even to a child) thus looks a bit too cocky/hubristic to most people.
You could say this falls under your "pretty lies about death" category, but from a different angle, so I thought I'd still say it.
Not trying to argue the overall point about lying itself but I did want to say you had one harsh mother Bryan lol. Maybe my family was the outlier, though I'm guessing I'm closer to the norm here than you on this one, but to this day the non-existence of Santa Claus has never been discussed more than once, as small child, and I'm well into my sixth decade of life, not even among adults. Santa Claus doesn't bring presents to those that profess not to believe in him in households with minor children; he does bring them to everyone else though including the dog in that household and all their friends too. For that matter, the tooth fairy was never discussed either and yet my adult daughter recently had a tooth removed and much to her eye rolling amazement, she found a silver dollar under her pillow in the morning. Wonder is part of the simply joys in life, not sure the need for so many parents to destroy that.
I do want to push back on your "afterlife as an excuse" thing though. To a true believer of a religion with an afterlife, it's not an excuse as temporal death is simply that, a transitional state and I've known atheists that console themselves with similar secular equivalent in Sagan's "We are all stardust". Little children aren't generally going to understand those sort of complex nuances nor is that what they are really asking, hell adults often struggle the same, hence what you really need to figure out is "What does my kid mean in that question" because you first need to understand what they even think death is in the right now before you can even begin to formulate an answer hence it not diversion to tease out that answer. Also IIRC going to be sleep used to be called the little death hence it's not unreasonable nor lying, in religious afterlives where you retain your individual identity, to simply tell your children "Grandma went to sleep in the ground for a long time, just like you do in your bed every night. She won't wake up in your lifetime but she will one day and you can see her then. Just like you see me every morning after you go to sleep. It's no different, just longer. It's OK to feel sad though just like when you were sad that that time I had to go on that work trip once and you missed me.", i.e. the Great Sleep. An atheist might be lying in that answer but a believer would not.
Also as a parent myself, I don't recall my kids every asking the question, nor me of my parents and I tend to question how often that question is actually asked or if it's just a trope. And it's not that none of us were ever exposed to death, I went to a lot of funerals as a child (big family) and I wasn't one of those parents (I've met people like this) who refuse to take their own children to funerals for fear of "traumatizing them"; my kids went to every wake and funeral along with some strong after the fact ride home vehement lectures on how bad "celebrations of life" are. Death was just part of life and not anything anyone (overtly) pondered on in my family, even in our angst teenage years nor even now; it's not avoided, it's just nothing worth wasting any time on outside practicality of the logistics. You died, went in the ground, cried, and would hopefully see them again one day in an afterlife; that was just assumed like the sun rising and gravity and you don't get angst on "will the sun rise tomorrow". At worst, when death was even discussed as a family matter, it was more in conversation around having children as in "You are only dead when there is no one left to remember you AND not a drop of your blood [DNA] remains living". Given my family has always been big on genealogy, my family has documented and extensive records going back to the 600s, that meant "if you don't have kids, not only you are missing a joy of life, but you are killing your parents, grandparents, and your entire family so pop out a couple for FAMILY TFR purposes so we, and you, will never die" (How is that for a guilt trip lol. I lay the same on my kids now). Hell my gay cousin even had that lecture "We don't care what you love or marry, pop a kid out anyways or die., Do your duty".
Kids won't find out if their parents are lying about the afterlife. Nobody comes back to tell you how great heaven is (that's just how great it is). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIHZKvz7Po8
I grew up with close parents, and I raised my children that way (close), too. But honestly, I don't know how this conversation goes between the modal child and parent. I don't REALLY remember the conversations that took place between me and my parents and me and my kids, but I DO know the conversations took place. On both ends, they were essentially truthful, though my father occasionally employed a light-hearted euphemism when explaining that someone or other had died of "old age." "Too many birthdays," he'd say, perhaps with a gentle smile. We kids knew perfectly well what he meant. And I, for one, was charmed (I'm a sucker for a turn of phrase).
Q: First, am I correct that when asked, “Will you ever die?,” people rarely lie?
A: In my experience, people rarely lie.
Q: Second, assuming that’s true, what exactly is stopping people from lying?
A: People do not want to seem to be an idiot.
With very young children, people mostly avoid answering the question. With people older than very young children (I have no idea what age that might be) most people do not lie.
Why not take the logic to its conclusion — the fact that people do not lie about death shows that knowledge of death is comforting. I have seen children take a fascination with death. It is clearly less traumatic to them than, for instance, the breakdown of their parents relationship. D.I.V.O.R.C.E. by Dolly Parton is an example of parents lying about that. I understand that you are anti-Freud but the death drive is the obvious solution to your puzzle.
I have not seen parents lie about mortality (except pets that "go to live on a farm").
Kids are likely to know someone that died. Until recently in human history, that included other kids. The question of if they will die is most likely to come up after a death. So, its hard to lie.
If parents lied, it would be even worse for the kid when someone they know died. If it is something inevitable, it isn't as tragic.
What you talking about Alex? Grandma, Aunt Betty, and Cousin Ray-Ray are all upstate working on that same farm for elderly and sick pets. And no we can't visit because it's far away and they don't let visitors because some of the pets are very sick and you might bring germs. Grandma can't visit either because she's old and no car but she loves you anyways.
Honest answer is maybe; 93% of us have died so far. Actuarial escape velocity is a promising idea, though.
Perhaps a simpler answer than previous comments: the prospect of dying in 40+ years isn’t that undesirable? It’s too abstract as to be painful at the moment, and too undeniable to justify lying about something so far off as to not be painful.
I’d be curious to compare the responses of healthy parents to parents with near-term terminal illness: if your five year old learns you’re sick, do you tell them you’re going to die in three months? Probably not. But in fifty years? Sure, ye, fine, I’ll die. Right now, it’s not a particularly undesirable idea, and certainly the discounted undesirability doesn’t outweigh the obvious lie (and easily falsifiable lie).
The soundtrack to this post: https://youtu.be/PKVOeQICi1A
I know a few people who would answer, in all seriousness and with complete sincerity, that they do not believe they will die. They believe that either medical science or computing (or, more likely, some combination of the two) will defeat death, and that it will happen in the next two or three decades.
When I saw the title of the post, I assumed the post would be a discussion of this possibility.