Is Santa Claus real?

At one point as a child, I was told by my parents that Santa Claus doesn’t exist.

Of course, my immediate reaction was anger and confusion.

What about the presents under the tree?

What about the piece of beard I found in the fireplace? What about the half eaten cookies and milk? The half eaten carrots in the yard? What about the Santa Claus sleigh-tracking segment played on the news the night before Christmas?

What about the songs? 

What about the decorations?

What about the movies & TV shows?

What about the joy I experienced when thinking about Santa bringing me gifts? What about the intense fear I experienced when I was told that I needed to behave because Santa was watching me? I had measurable and observable biological responses to Santa Claus— he HAD to be real, right? Right?

Of course, I grew up and realized all of these other things had plenty of other plausible explanations, and I’d simply been conditioned to believe what authority figures said. I then took the conditioning given to me by these authority figures and projected that onto my reality. Santa Claus doesn’t exist, but I believed he did, and I had measurable and observable biological responses to Santa Claus. Ah, the power of belief.

Luckily we’re adults now, and we’ve moved on from our conditioning, no longer relying on what’s told to us by authority figures while projecting this conditioning onto reality, right? Right…?

You’d hope so. But that isn’t reality. The overwhelming majority of adults— even amongst the so-called freedom community— are doing the same thing with viruses. There is no proof that adheres to the scientific method, or to logic, of their existence. 

Experts assign characteristics to them (a reification fallacy) despite having never proven their existence. We point to symptoms of disease, especially when experienced amongst 2+ people in the same space, as proof that they exist (an affirming the consequent logical fallacy) when they’ve never been established to exist. We toss in the position of the majority (a bandwagon fallacy) or a position of a so-called expert (an appeal to authority) as our primary or sole justification for our beliefs about viruses. We then get angry and say “well, where’s your proof viruses don’t exist?”, a nonsensical burden of proof reversal fallacy.

Can I conduct a scientific experiment on Santa Claus? No. I can’t. Why? Because Santa Claus has to be shown to exist, first, in order to proceed with experimentation on Santa Claus. Virology has an observed phenomenon (people getting sick) but no independent variable. They must show that the virus actually exists, in nature, in the fluids of a sick host, in order to proceed with experimentation. This has never been done. Ever. Virologists acknowledge this. They assume the virus is in the fluids of a sick host, add that unpurified fluid to a monkey kidney cell alongside several other substances (many of which are toxic to kidney cells— amphotericin B as an example), watch the cell breakdown, assume none of the other substances have an effect, and assume that it must’ve been the virus that they assumed was in the fluids of the sick host. It is nonsense. It is anti-logical pseudoscience. It would be akin to throwing 100 people in a blender, pulling out a fragment of a red hat and some white beard and shouting “here’s my proof that Santa Claus exists!”

Belief isn’t bad. I have beliefs. You have beliefs. We all do. However, beliefs can and will be weaponized against us causing us to create a pseudo-reality in which that belief appears to be real despite the overwhelming lack of proof for that belief in reality. This is why it’s important to continually check our own beliefs and distinguish between what we believe and what we know— especially when we’re uncertain of where they’re coming from and when we notice someone trying to provoke fear within us.

It’s time for us adults to wake up. Just like there are more plausible explanations for all the things that are wrongly assigned to Santa Claus, there are also much better explanations for the things that make us sick, even when we experience sickness together when in proximity to others who are sick. And, lastly, our belief surrounding symptoms being ”bad” actually perpetuates the reality that they are, thus overwhelming our system. Your symptoms aren’t bad. Your body is doing exactly what it was designed to do.

-Alec