December 18, 2023
Santa Is an Emotional Abuser: On Modern Authority Structures
Yeah, OK, I know; Santa isn’t real (oops; spoiler alert?) but as Picasso ostensibly said, everything you can imagine is real. That is, Santa Claus might not be a real being, but the persona and the associated actions are. And Santa, as an emotional abuser, has some very real repercussions.
To be clear, emotional abuse doesn’t rely on Santa Claus alone. Parents have six ways to Sunday to emotionally abuse their children, threatening with repercussions, bribing them, gaslighting them, manipulating them. But Santa, besides a very efficient weapon of emotional abuse, is also a remarkably apt personification of the phenomenon itself.
Santa Is an Emotional Abuser: Efficiency and Personification
I mentioned above two things about Santa Claus, in the context of emotional abuse: that he is a very efficient tool in parents’ emotional manipulation of their children, and that he is an apt personification of the phenomenon itself. Let’s take a quick look at both.
You Better Watch out, You Better Not Cry (or else what?)
First of all, before we talk about such dark stuff, let’s lighten up the mood a bit using His Excellency, the Supreme Overlard of puns, Punning Walrus, and his view on Christmas:
So, what makes Santa such an efficient tool of emotional blackmail? Mostly two things:
- An ostensibly clear cause-effect pattern. “If you behave, you will get the gift you wanted”.
- The idea of scarcity. Santa comes only once per year. Which supposedly means it’s a precious event.
The basic idea is that a child should “behave” (more definitional problems; what the hell is that supposed to mean?) and be obedient (ah, obedience! The last refuge of a scoundrel who has no arguments to convince even a ten-year old) in order to get an impressive reward at the end of the year.
The whole thing is foundationally frail, set up to fail. The cause-effect pattern, though ostensibly clear, it actually isn’t. As with every psychologically predicated abuse, Santa is an emotional abuser because he assumes any form, duration, method, and scope the parents require:
- “Behave” is an ethical assessment that isn’t defined in a way a ten-year old can understand. “Behave” means “do what I say” and – get this! – it is valid retroactively: The parent often tells the child they misbehaved (and why) after they have done so.
- More still, there isn’t a clear window where the behavior is monitored. Should the child “behave” from December 26th already for next Christmas? Or is it OK to do so only during November-December, when the parents sort-of-remember to issue warnings? The whole thing is unenforceable.
- The cause-effect pattern becomes muddled: Kids quickly realize that they “misbehaved” yet still they got a pretty good gift. Conversely, they might have done their damnedest to acquiesce to their parents’ impossible demands, yet still they didn’t get the gift they’d asked – for example, because the parents could not afford it. Instead of honesty and transparency (suitable to the child’s age), the parents resort to the all-too-easy “Ah, maybe Santa thought you misbehaved a little, so you didn’t get what you wanted, but hey, at least you got this”.
Further, remember scarcity: Supposedly the whole thing is special, it happens once per year. Which, again supposedly, should act as a motivating factor. But in reality, the average child can receive gifts on other occasions too.
Even parents with moderate or low income try – and succeed, with creativity and good intentions – to offer their children something for their birthday. For many families, children get to buy stuff throughout the year. This further erodes the cause-and-effect pattern of the Santa thing.
Santa, the Emotional Abuser: Personification
Santa is old, imposing, bearded, and a little bit scary. Even his corporate image retains some of the traditional menacing aspects, albeit in a clownish, uncanny-valley sort of way. After all, the grotesque has two sides, the carnivalesque and the menacing, and it is precisely their peculiar balance that creates a destabilizing effect.
Santa as a tool of emotional abuse becomes a hilariously fitting, meta-like, yet unintended personification of the people employing the abuse, that is, the parents (and society at large): Ultimately unrepresentable, unknown, impossible to emotionally truly know.
Just as they do with their parents, little kids don’t quite understand why, how, or when Santa “sees them when they’re sleeping” (panopticon, anyone?) but they know they should try to please him. They can’t really negotiate the terms – perhaps ironically, considering the fluidity of these terms, as we saw – and they can’t even rebel against their condition, in the manner of the Camusian absurd.
The worst aspect of them all is that responsibility is placed on the little shoulders of the child (which is of course what makes it abusive). “It’s up to you, really. Pick if you’ll be naughty or nice.”
In this peculiar twist, Santa as an emotional abuser also becomes peculiarly modern.
Santa as an Emotional Abuser: a Great Fit for Modernity
Slavoj Žižek has put forward a remarkable observation on authority and modern power structures. I’ll give you the brief version below, but if you want you can see it explained here (27:08):
Click to display the embedded YouTube video
According to Žižek, expression of traditional authority was black-and-white, direct. If, for instance, you had as a child a traditional father who wanted you to visit your grandma in the weekend, he would say “I don’t care how you feel, you will just go and visit her, end of story”.
Perhaps counterintuitively, the choice offered by the modern authority figure is much more insidious. Today, Žižek argues, the modern father would tell you: “You are your own person, you can decide. Do what you want. But grandma loves you, and it would really mean a lot to her if you visited. Still, it’s up to you”.
It’s precisely this illusion of choice that renders authority both dangerous and effective. And it’s precisely the illusion of choice that renders Santa an emotional abuser. A child is threatened with mostly meaningless repercussions (“you won’t get a nice gift”) that never seem to materialize anyway (“well, whaddya know, you got a gift after all”), if they don’t conform to an ambiguously defined set of rules (“behave!”)
Still, it’s… their choice!
“Oh, Come on, Don’t Be a Grinch”
That I loathe Christmas (especially its corporate modern version) is a personal preference. You might or might not like Christmas; I don’t know (and I don’t care, as long as you keep lights and songs away from me). But that we use a concept like Santa as a justification to perpetuate patterns of emotional abuse isn’t something I like in society.
True, not all Santa expressions are abusive. Indeed, I’d hope most are not. As long as there isn’t any authority/control pattern like the one I described in this post, I suppose it’s (mostly; depending) harmless.
Indeed, children sooner or later become aware of how the whole thing plays out. As Žižek has also argued, parents don’t believe in Santa, kids don’t believe in Santa, and the whole thing “works” precisely because nobody believes in it.
As long as Santa is portrayed in purely imaginary terms, as unlikely to care about little Johnny’s behavior as Donald Duck or Ember, and he doesn’t become a proxy for parents’ desire to emotionally control their children, I don’t care.
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Another great post (as usual). I could actually tolerate the holiday season if I didn’t have to endure the Christmas songs over and over.. Maybe 2 days a year would be tolerable, but that is all. Also, I keep getting invited to participate in White Elephant gift exchange, which I am finding to be less fun over the years. This year I bought almost everybody I know a box of high quality pencils (cost $4). Robert Nagle aka idiotprogrammer
High-quality pencils are at least useful – provided people know how to use them, which I no longer take for granted nowadays! 😀
My mother used to say “if you don’t behave yourself santa won’t come”
I knew she didn’t believe his existence and neither did I which kind of invalidated the precept she gave
There are certain patterns in parental behavior that can undermine one’s authority, and presenting threats that are not materialized is one of them.
Also I’d add that Christmas is a time for calm, resourcefulness and kindness. That includes intellectual kindness. All we get is vapid excitement, commercialism, mushy films and daft maudlin songs