this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
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Oh no, not more tool users!
How will humans continue to pretend that they're so special and God's gift to the Earth if we go around proving we're not so special!?
I heard a fascinating notion on the radio the other day - the thing that makes us unique as a species is that we're storytellers. Other animals can teach each other things, like whales and dolphins teaching their young how to hunt fish, or crows warning each other that one particular person is shady; but no other species invents Santa Claus to demonstrate that one should give for the joy of giving.
Humans have a unique capacity to not only understand complex, abstract ideas about how we should interact with each other; but also to reinvent and transmit these ideas in an evolutionary eyeblink. This memetic transmission and interpretation of societal ideas is having an impact on the earth as profound as when genetic transmission came along. And it's done through our capacity to tell each other stories, about how things might be and how we think they should be.
I wonder how much of our sense of self, as an ongoing narrative, stems from that ability to invent a story.
I think the ability to amass, retain, and augment information learned by our ancestors is our killer feature. Storytelling is an important part of it, using rhythm and rhyme to help us remember and pass on those stories, being able to encode those stories as art and writing, they're all ways to make it easier for the next generation to get up to speed quickly and then push the boundaries of understanding even further, instead of every generation having to relearn all the basics the hard way. It's not perfect and it's still incredibly lossy, but I think that's why we broke out and became, I think it's fair to say, the dominant lifeform on the planet. Is that the bar for sentience? I don't think so, but I don't really have a better one.
Also we invented santa claus to teach kids that every authority figure in your life will willingly engage in a conspiracy to gaslight and bribe you in order to make you behave the way they want you to.
I absolutely agree with everything in your first paragraph, and completely disagree with the second! That said, stories evolve at least as quickly as the language they're built from, and I'm sure every family that hangs up stockings has their own unique spin for Santa. But intentionally gaslighting your kids in order to teach an object lesson about how people will manipulate you seems like an awfully convoluted way to go about it, especially when the kid comes out ahead for it!
I think it started as a story to get kids excited, because that's fun. In my family, the kids were brought into the act as they got old enough to understand that the point; and I assume this was very common back when kids had to help with everything as soon as they were old enough. The kids then get to practice giving without any intention of getting recognition for it, which helps make more charitable adults.
That's not to say that the story doesn't get used to enforce behavior - the existence of Krampus shows a long history of that! But I don't think it's used primarily for that anymore.
I don't know, the whole thing about Santa keeping a list of good children and bad children (who get toys and coal, respectively) seems to be a primary component of the myth still. I actually think it evolved as a gauge of critical reasoning: there's an age by which children are expected to stop believing in Santa, because the story makes no sense and won't hold up to critical scrutiny. The reward for making this breakthrough is getting to be in on the conspiracy with the adults: secretly helping with the ruse while continuing to reinforce the myth with younger children. It's a coming of age ritual. It's also kind of a culture-wide prank that all adults continuously play on all children, like the tooth fairy who I think exists for similar reasons.
Unlike the tooth fairy though, who's just there to help kids let go of their baby teeth, Santa's largess is explicitly contingent on good behavior, which is where the manipulation comes in. Gifts that come with strings attached to behavior aren't charity, they're a transaction. Children are taught that goodness is rewarded with treats and badness is punished with coal and no treats. I guess calling it a bribe is a little harsh, but it's certainly transactional. Santa also has the benefit of being all-seeing, so he can monitor your behavior even when the grownups aren't watching, which is a pretty convenient way for grownups to control behavior in kids when they're unsupervised. Sort of a spiritual panopticon. The whole idea is to trick children into behaving by making them believe they're being constantly surveilled by a spirit judge, who will reward them or punish them according to his determination of whether they are good or bad.
While I think it's a nice thought, I still find the idea that humans are the ONLY "storytellers" to be falling into the same trap as tool use. Just because we haven't witnessed or recorded it doesn't mean that other species don't tell "stories".
Heck, even crows learn faces and then tell other crows about those faces. If that's not some form of "storytelling" idk what is.
I was incautious with my phrasing, I should have said something like “humans have a singular capacity” etc. There may well be other storytelling species (in fact, I hope there are!) Whalesong seems like it could have the necessary complexity, for instance. I don't think crows warning each other about particular faces quite constitutes a story, though - that seems more like spreading "we hate that guy!" without any of the context a story would provide. Would be easy to check for storytelling with the species that can imitate speech, though.
I suspect this is a big part of what we're looking for when we're exploring personhood in nonhumans, too - whenever talking to animals, aliens, etc comes up in fiction, people inevitably end up swapping stories with them. Suggests to me that storytelling ability is what people are actually looking for.
my cat will throw her toys in the air to chase them herself. That's make believe in a form.
Our tool use and application of our intelligence is still quite unique. Special is a loaded term, but humans are very different from all other life forms on this planet - and of course, in many ways, still very much the same.
We're only so different because we already murdered or fucked the species that were similar enough to be a threat.
Also, scientific advancement has been so rapid that it is wholly inaccurate to compare modern humans to apes and then gesture to technology... It wasn't even 400 years ago that Newton was explaining what gravity is, and 400 years is a damn blip on the evolutionary scale of a species that can live 100+ years.
But that's just further proof that we are special. In just some 5000 years we broke the nature meta countless times, and we're doing it again and again faster and faster, we're so fucking smart we're doing the Paleoproterozoic extinction ("Oxygen holocaust") all over again.
No it's not. No it is not proof that we are special. We have NO IDEA what differences make such things unique. To pretend it is our gift alone is to be a self-centered piece of shit.
What do you mean by this? Make what things unique? Why do we have to understand the differences to be sure that the outcome is unique?
I also think you're a piece of shit, if I may respond directly to this indirect insult; now, can we get back to talking normally?