Few figures in modern intellectual life are as polarizing — and as paradoxical — as Sam Harris. As one of the “Four Horsemen” of the New Atheism movement, the perpetually perplexed-looking polemicist burst onto the scene in the mid-2000s. First came his blistering critique of religion in The End of Faith, quickly followed by explorations of consciousness, spirituality, and, most intriguingly, the ethics of honesty. A philosopher at heart, a neuroscientist by profession, and a provocateur by reputation, Harris seems willing to incinerate reputations and friendships in pursuit of truth. Or, more specifically, what he considers truth.

And yet, the deeper you follow Harris into his thinking, the more unsettled that word “truth” becomes. Especially now.

His latest assertion, made in a recent interview, is about children. More specifically, about whether it is ever morally permissible to lie to them. “No,” Harris says. Not even about Santa Claus. Not even for the sake of wonder or nostalgia. He argues, as he did in his 2011 long-form essay “Lying,” that every lie, even the innocent kind, damages the trust that underpins all meaningful relationships. And this includes the one between parent and child. The moment they discover you’ve been deceiving them, you’ve invited doubt into the bond. You’ve made truth negotiable.

It’s a bold claim. And on one level, it is exactly what we expect from Harris: absolute moral clarity, surgically argued. But it also invites something more provocative, something Harris himself may not have intended. It begs a larger, messier question: Can a man who advocates radical honesty in all things still justify, as he once did, lying to the public about things like Hunter Biden’s laptop because Trump is a “worse person” than Bin Laden?

Let’s start with the principle. Harris believes that lying — any lying — is a kind of violence. A severing of mutual understanding. In “Lying,” he writes, “To lie is to recoil from relationship.” Even small, white lies are corrosive because they create illusions. You may think you’re sparing someone’s feelings. But in truth, you’re controlling what they know, deciding for them what version of reality they can handle. In Harris’s framework, this is infantilizing. It erodes autonomy.

This becomes especially sharp when applied to parenting. Harris sees teaching a child to believe something false, like the Santa myth, not as a harmless tradition but as a deliberate deception. For him, it’s not about wonder or joy but about creating a temporary illusion destined to end in disappointment. He believes it sends a dangerous message. Basically, parents are willing to lie if the story is entertaining enough.

But if that logic holds — and Harris insists it does — then what do we make of his now-infamous defense of suppressing damaging information about a presidential candidate because, you know, the alternative was Donald Trump?

In a 2022 interview, Harris stunned even some of his longtime supporters when he said, “Hunter Biden could have had the corpses of children in his basement,” and he still wouldn’t have changed his mind. What mattered more than anything, Harris claimed, was preventing Trump from being re-elected. That justified everything: deplatforming, media censorship, collusion between intelligence officials and Big Tech. Whatever it took. The lie, in other words, was virtuous.

That moment revealed something troubling. For all his moral precision, Harris had made room for the noble lie — the very thing he wrote an entire book to condemn.

He would probably argue that there’s a difference between private deception and public moral calculus. That lying to a child about Santa is personal manipulation, while suppressing a story about a laptop in the name of national stability is utilitarian ethics. But that distinction collapses under scrutiny. Because the very core of Harris’s moral philosophy has always been its insistence on consistency. Ethics cannot be contingent on convenience. That truth is not situational.

So, is he right about lying to children?

Let’s consider the alternatives. Childhood is, by nature, a hall of mirrors — fairytales, cartoon logic, Santa, the Tooth Fairy. These stories are not just lies. They are frameworks. They offer children a first model of a moral world: generosity is rewarded, virtue is real, and the invisible can be good. Parents don’t just tell these stories to manipulate. They tell them to build wonder, scaffold imagination, and instill magic before the world delivers numerous harsh lessons.

Is that deception? Yes. But it is also developmentally appropriate. Developmental psychologists argue that fantasy play is a key part of cognitive growth. Children live in a world of pretend long before they understand the concept of objective reality. Telling them about Santa isn’t about creating delusion; it’s about participating in a cultural story, one that millions grow out of naturally, without losing faith in their parents’ love or honesty.

There’s a deeper tension: Harris’s argument assumes a version of childhood that is rational, linear, almost adult in its sensibilities. But children are not miniature grown-ups. They are mythmakers by default. They engage the world not by measuring data but by absorbing stories. Telling them the unvarnished truth about everything at every stage is not only impractical but may also be inhumane.

So maybe the problem isn’t with Harris’s stance on Santa. Perhaps the problem is that Harris has always believed that clarity is enough, that ideas can be squarely separated from human mess. That if you just think hard enough, feel little enough, and speak plainly enough, the truth will win. But the world has never worked that way.

It certainly didn’t work that way in politics. His single-minded hatred of Trump — so fierce it led him to abandon his own anti-lying principles — wasn’t just hypocrisy. It was a philosophical collapse. A man who spent years warning that lying corrupts the soul convinced himself that lying was necessary, even noble, when the target was sufficiently monstrous. To many, that’s a contradiction; I consider it a confession.

And perhaps that’s the cautionary tale here.

Sam Harris is not wrong that lying has consequences. But he is wrong to believe that truth is always clean and nothing more than a binary switch. Some lies — especially the ones we tell to protect a child’s well-being — may be closer to care than deceit.

The question isn’t whether Santa is real (he’s not). The question is whether it’s always moral to force reality on people not ready to bear it. And here, Harris might take a page from his own childhood, or from the mystics he once admired: sometimes, a story is more than a lie.

Sometimes it’s the safest way to live, love, and limit pain.

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