This reminds me of my dad, who saw how much his family worried when his older brother was sent to Vietnam and decided not to tell them when it was his turn.<p>For the rest of her life my grandmother used the Army training my dad for jungle warfare and then stationing him in Alaska as an example of government mismanagement.
At least part of this is about a real world example of a family hiding the existence of WWI from their elderly relative until she died at age 100.<p>Fascinating to think about from a number of angles. We all exist within some set of beliefs that shape our lives, for better or for worse. They no doubt routinely contain inaccuracies on a routine basis, often for benign reasons, but we also get intentionally deceived plenty.
however well intentioned, this boils down to people deciding for and controlling others. disrespecting them, treating them less than fully human, less than themselves. that is the underlying evil in all evil actions.
I feel the author badly misses the point here. It's not that a person in difficult conditions will necessarily suffer horribly from knowing bad things; they <i>might</i> give up in despair, or they might rise to the occasion and do something startling with the limited options that are available to them.<p>What's really being protected here are the feelings of the more knowledgeable people; preserving an illusion for the vulnerable serves as a reservoir of hope for those already in despair. This is the 'noble lie' of Plato's <i>Republic</i> (sometimes referred to as a 'pious fiction' in religious terms; likewise the field of law is awash with 'legal fictions' that everyone knows are fictional but which are easier to maintain than addressing the underlying problem). The false picture of a reliable teleology serves to soothe the anxiety that would arise if it was widely appreciated that the people in charge don't know what they're doing a lot of the time and are just making slightly better informed guesses.<p>While individuals, tribes, and small societies can overcome that anxiety, accept uncertainty and persevere or even thrive, the larger a society becomes the more difficult it is to promulgate ideas and actions within it, and (perhaps more importantly) the greater the incentives for those who benefit most from the fiction to uphold or elaborate it at the expense of others.<p>Of course, most of us are wired to be protective of children and minimize unnecessary anxiety in favor of harmony. It can be both a kindness and good strategy to shield the vulnerable in hopes that they'll make it through bad times relatively unscathed. But taken to excess, it robs individuals of their agency for the sake of a comforting sentiment, imprisoning them in a gilded cage for the nostalgic pleasure of their jailers who are mourning their own loss of innocence. Should the cage be breached, the unwary inhabitant may fall from a cradle into a horror for which they are utterly unprepared, a far crueler fate than the most pessimistic decline.
Not a war, yet still a pretty big happening, a paradigm shift that can be very traumatic too - East Germany from socialism into capitalism and unification. How you hide that? A good and funny movie <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Bye,_Lenin" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Bye,_Lenin</a>! :<p>"The story follows a family in East Germany; the mother (Saß) is dedicated to the socialist cause and falls into a coma in October 1989, shortly before the November revolution. When she awakens eight months later in June 1990, her son (Brühl) attempts to protect her from a fatal shock by concealing the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism. "