There's a more tragic example in the news today, which I was just discussing with my wife. A woman was shopping in a Walmart with her 2 year old son, and had a loaded handgun in her purse. She had a concealed carry permit and the gun was inside some sort of gun-safety purse which she had received for Christmas, which I presume is designed to prevent fingers accidentally catching in triggers and so on. Unfortunately her toddler reached into the purse, managed somehow to discharge the gun, and it killed the mom.

So we were wondering what do you tell the kid, and how, in a case like that when he gets older, because the psychological burden of having killed your own parent is pretty crushing. I was speculating that a few decades back, everyone might have agreed to bury the exact details and just write it up as an accidental discharge caused by the woman herself that would be just as tragic but not as disturbing for the kid, whereas today that simply isn't possible - at some point in the future the kid will consult a search engine to find out where his birth mother went (or to see what search engines say about him) and come across the facts of the situation, at which point he'll presumably have some sort of psychological crisis if he wasn't fully aware of them.

I'm not sure what the 'right' course is here. On the one hand we tend to assume that having more information is better than being deceived, but on the other Plato may have been right to suggest that society functions better thanks to the existence of a 'noble lie' - if we're constantly beset with evidence about how awful people are then it's hard to avoid falling into cynicism - arguably this is one of the big problems facing Western democracy at the moment. We know the danger in idealizing leaders and institutions and overlooking their actual shortcomings - that is, their capacity for acts which result in socially undesirable outcomes as opposed to some inherent flaw. By facing this, we can identify the circumstances which incentivize such acts and see that they might be emergent from systematic structures within which we operate, rather than being coordinated or planned by a malign central agency or guided by any overarching philosophy. On the other hand, we want out political representatives and institutions to operate effectively on our behalf, and if they keep collectively letting us down then there's a decline in our socioeconomic stability and ultimately our personal safety. We need to believe in the possibility of a higher ideal if we are not going to give up hope for the present. The tension between our rational apprehension of the a flawed social model and our idealistic wish for one within which we would enjoy a reasonable balance of freedom and security is both a strength and a weakness of our current social structures. If we have reached or breached the operational limitations of our democratic/republican (small d/r) models of governance, then what comes next? Proposals for widespread individual digital sovereignty do not sound so different from Hobbes' notion of 'the war of all against all.' I worry that we're headed into an era of craptastic social institutions that don't work well at all, and turbo-charged economic ones that work very well above a certain threshold but which involve an ever-increasing computational security burden to stave off incidental attacks.

/handwave