The need the myth of the noble savage fills is the need to believe that our situation, our pain and guilt and disappointment, is not the fault of either the fundamental structure of the universe or of ourselves, but is the fault of someone else. The world is good. We by our nature are good. And if something wasn’t screwing it up and making it go wrong somehow (and how is a very good question, if the myth of the noble savage is true).

We don’t want to believe that the natural state of the universe is pain and suffering and failure. And we especially don’t want to believe that we are part of that pain and suffering and imperfection, that we are participants, that we are part of the infection, part of the cause of the problem. We want to save ourselves and save the world from original sin and have someone or something else to blame.

We have to believe that if we could just take away whatever it is that someone else is doing, what would be left between us and the world would be beautiful and paradisical and we would be happy. If we could just remove the satanic influence of X (whoever or whatever we choose to blame), then the garden would return to paradise, and we could live in it whole and in peace.

Today, our serpents take many forms. Corporations, capitalism, racism, white privilege, the government, religion, prejudice, bigotry, cisheteronormativity, the patriarchy, and inequality are a few popular serpents you’re likely hear preached about from the pulpit if you flip on the news today. If you search through enough channels you might hear a different list. Socialists, elites, anarchists, and deviants might come up.

The myth of the noble savage is much more entrenched in the left than the right, however. The left gives more credence to the utopian vision, that paradise is the natural birthright of all but it stolen or denied by their list of villains. The right, rather, seems to argue that utopia, or as much of it as is possible, is already here. It’s an illusion that paradise is a default, failure and chaos are the real default, but if you try and compete sufficiently, success will be winnowed out of the chaff and emerge thanks to “the market”, which is essentially just competition to achieve positive outcomes. And so however much of paradise is actually possible, we are already achieving through the process of our competition, struggle, and striving.

If you study personality theory, it’s clear why the left would take more to utopian visions. They’re generally high in openness, full of creativity and the belief in possibilities and open horizons. And the right is generally more conscientious, more concerned about the limits the world places on us and what we have to do to survive within them.

This isn’t an endorsement of either mode of being. In a strict sense, conservatives are right about the world. It is a certain sort of thing, it does have real limits. And to succeed we need to learn to live within them. But we need the left to help us test what those limits actually are and to prevent us from getting locked too much into our habits and assumptions. We need hope, we need innovation, we need creativity. The situation is always changing. There may be more opportunities available than we thought. The limits of possibility need testing. We just need to be able to do so without risking what we’ve achieved, since we know that it wasn’t easy to achieve and is so easy to lose.

The terrifying possibility for the utopian, if it turns out that the noble savage myth isn’t true, is that they’re trapped. The world is confining, it is limited, it is tyrannical, it is dismal, it isn’t free and open. And that means that their whole mode of being is in question. Who they are is wrong, the way that they see the world is wrong. The world and their innate way of approaching it are mismatched. Either they or it shouldn’t be. They’re in conflict, and only one can survive.

We shouldn’t pretend that that isn’t a serious concern and an excellent basis for motivation. The utopian need to believe in the noble savage, and in the existence of the spoilers (the enemy that ruins it all), for their whole vision of the world and of themselves to survive and have value. Their place in the world and their ability to live with themselves and with the world depend on these beliefs.

So there’s not much hope or understanding when people from the other side (those of the constrained vision, as Thomas Sowell would describe it) tell them to wake up and get real and act dismissively toward their most essential convictions and the project that defines their entire lives (removing that which prevents goodness from emerging). And let’s be perfectly honest, the “realism” of the right can be just as unrealistic in its failure to consider possibility, its willingness to ignore the costs and injustices that occur as part of the process of life. They might be right that the best way to overcome problems is to seek production of good outcomes through effort and competition to succeed, but that doesn’t mean that nothing can be done about the collateral damage, that nothing can be done to abate some of the difficulties, that it might be possible to make recovery and recuperation and new attempts possible for more people.

As a dad, it’s easy for me to think that I’m saving my kids by making them face what’s hard. I want them to be strong, to be able to face what the world throws at them and not be overcome. I want them to discover their own strength. And I don’t want them to be naive and not realize how hard the world can be. And sometimes that means facing the world as it is, not as what we wish it was, and doing what needs to be done, whether it’s what we wanted or not.

And I think that I am perfectly justified and correct in that belief. I believe that the best information available shows that that is indeed a necessary and excellent pathway to success in life. My own experience, traditional wisdom, and modern psychological research all confirm it. But! But, that belief, however realistic or correct, does not exhaust the category of what it is true or helpful to know and do. Reality and its possibilities and our possible ways of dealing with it are not exhausted by my perspective on it. It is correct. It is not complete.

I have seen my wife do some amazing things. She comes at things from the opposing strategy, as often but not always happens in marriages. And I have seen myself do some terrible things. I have seen my own “correct” realism turn tyrannical. I have seen it overwhelm my children and cause them to retreat and collapse. I have seen it be counterproductive. And I have seen my wife succeed where I failed and provide essential support from her end that made the success of my efforts possible. Life isn’t exactly a walled garden or a harsh wilderness. It’s a bit of both. And so we need to carry a bit of both with us to keep our wits about us, wherever we end up.

In many ways my wife and I aren’t really so different. I prefer to lead with confrontation, and then once my children are willing to listen and to submit to learning, then I’ll switch to softness and encouragement and remonstration, now that they’re on the right track and back in the right places. My wife prefers to first create a soft and inviting environment and then try to work from that pleasing space toward venturing forth to where we need to go.

And the answer to which approach is actually best is: both. Sometimes you definitely need one. Sometimes you need a balance. Sometimes one just won’t work and you need to switch tactics. And it’s often hard to tell which strategy is called for. So you either need two different people who can offer both and trade off and support one another, or you need to at least be aware on your own of the potential value of both and be willing to switch when necessary (which is hard to do, but possible).

To be perfectly honest, I think the noble savage myth (or at least its appeal) is an entension of our innate belief in the goodness of children. That the small and undeveloped must be innocent and good. It’s an understandable belief, and a useful and perhaps even necessary one. Our children, especially small children, demand so much of us and cost us so much. When they’re small, they scream at us and cry at us and scourge our ears with their demands, and they are often incredibly hard to understand or please.

What keeps you going through all that? What keeps a mother caring for an infant that has turned her practically, emotionally, and physically into their personal slave and offers almost nothing back in return? What gives us tolerance for such behavior? To some degree, the essential conviction in our hearts that our child is fundamentally good (despite appearances) and will develop toward the expression of goodness, if we can only meet their needs and provide a secure environment that protects and provides for them. That is also why the noble savage myth is so persistent, despite plenty of evidence to contradict it. Our minds are already accustomed to maintaining it despite everything our children put us through. It keeps us from tossing our kids out the window every day. That’s a very personal power. It’s tenacious.

That optimism is essential for getting through what your child will put you through. If you had real future knowledge of the worst moments of your child’s adult life (or lack of an adult life), it would be much harder to face and do what you need to do in the present. We need to believe in our children. And considering all that we put into them and how precious they are to us, we also need to believe that the world isn’t just some terrible, devouring place that we’re bringing them into. We need to believe that if we can just keep the wolves at bay that our child will be good and the world will be good to them. If we cannot believe in the world as a good place, then it is cruel to bring an innocent child into it. If we cannot believe in our child as a good person, then it is cruel to the world and to us to bring them into it.

The noble savage myth is simply the optimistic prejudice toward children writ large, across time or across social development. And even mothers of grown adults, even criminals, can have a hard time accepting the imperfections and even dangers of their own children. They simply can’t believe it. Because believing it would contradict everything they gave they their life to, the assumption that made them able to make those necessary sacrifices. Someone must be doing an injustice. They cannot believe it of their baby.

It’s hard as a parent not to do this. My own father is particularly loathe to admit that his daughter, my sister, even did wrong or was anything other than wonderful. Deep down, he knows better, and never let it stop him from pushing back when he thought she needed it. But he clearly had a strong prejudice and a desire, at least, for a blind spot. It was clear what he wanted to believe. And my wife’s parents think she’s an angel that fell from heaven, basically. I mean, sure, she’s wonderful, and probably in comparison to many people is pretty close to divine. But as someone who knows her well, which her parents must, I of all people know that she’s far from an angel.

There is real utility in believing the best of people, and of the world, and there’s real utility in approaching them that way. You may help that possibility to grow into being. You may succeed in providing just the protections and opportunities that allow new beauty and goodness to flourish. On the other hand, you might be blindly naive and fail to appreciate the real internal and external dangers and respond to confront them. You might enable when you should have resisted and believed when you should have questioned. You might have set a sheep among the wolves or a wolf among sheep. Because although it is beautiful and kind and correct and useful and captures a fundamental reality, your optimistic belief does not exhaust reality. It does not describe or cover all the possibilities of being or necessary action. It is good. But it is inadequate.

Useful as it might be, and as much as we might tell it to ourselves about our own children, or by extension about all children, the whole human race, the myth of the noble savage is simply that, a myth. It’s a story. And it’s not the whole story. And sometimes it’s a false story. And maintaining it may actually harm the object we’re trying to protect, ourselves and our children.

Refusing to face and confront the real dangers the world will present and that our own children can present to the world and themselves does neither any favors. In fact it makes the danger more likely. And it can make them weak and unprepared, or confused and frustrated and bitter when they are disappointed. It can make life traumatic. There is nothing so traumatic as finding out that the whole world and even yourself is something far different and far worse than you had believed. That can kick the whole life out of you, if you’re truly unprepared for it, if you’ve never been inoculated by a little harsh “realism” to know how to integrate and overcome it.

Sometimes you need the knowledge that neither you nor the world is perfect, and you shouldn’t expect things to behave like they are. And if you have no other explanation, when things do go south, you’ll be endlessly searching for those spoilers, those enemies, that are somehow ruining the whole perfect system. You’ll see them, in contrast to yourself and your world, as unutterably evil and unjust, and be willing to do anything to remove them. And when removing them does not remove all the evil from the world, what then? Will you broaden your net? Will you seek new scapegoats to condemn? The French Revolution didn’t start with the overthrow and execution of the aristocracy and immediately end with civil utopia. It went on, and on. Until even the people who had started the revolution were themselves being led to the guillotine, as revolution after revolution followed, trying to ferret out who exactly was still getting in the way of paradise.

So what is to be done? It may a fact that the myth of the noble savage is, strictly speaking, untrue. But it is something we desperately want to be true. And when it comes to people, especially our children, we need it to be true. And among those who have the love and kindness and energy to wish to extend their protection beyond their own children to others, to help and protect them, which is a noble and wonderful sentiment that we desperately need to protect and make use of, they will have that energy and have that resiliency in part because of their naive, uncynical belief in that story, that instinct, that belief in the world and in others.

The problem is, such an approach is quite likely to have exactly the opposite effect we hope for. It can harm even the object of our love just as much as it can hurt them. And partly because it isn’t the full truth, it leaves out some terribly important realities that we need to be aware of to navigate the world and even ourselves. But it’s a useful belief. We need it. We need that approach, or we would never get through the infancy of our children or of our societies. We need a foot in what the world could be, and what we could be, not only in what it is and what we are. As humans, we need a foot in possibility, as well as versimility. And it’s often easy to mistake harshness and extremity for versimility and miss the full scope of reality. That something an eye for possibility helps guard us from.

I can agree, having thought through all this, that I understand the myth of the noble savage. I understand its genesis, its appeal. I understand why it needed, both by individuals psychologically and socially by humanity. It has value. It contains some truth. I don’t think this is a mistake that is cured by expunging falseness, but rather by adding truth. By correcting the incompleteness. By balancing our approach and understanding. By marrying the different halves of our interpretational approaches.

If I could suggest any possible cure to those who suffer from an excess in one perspective or another (inducing those who believe in the myth of the noble savage), it would be to get married and have children. That should teach you a lot. Or at least it should offer you the opportunity, if you can just take advantage of it. If you can actually learn the lessons available from a husband or wife and children, you will likely arrive at a more balanced and nuanced perspective.

If that seems like too unlikely or too difficult or costly a solution, reading a little history works pretty well too. You can get the benefit of other people’s experiences, even if you can’t get your own. And history provides plenty of examples, of you can just keep your mind open enough to learn the lessons that are available. You have to approach it with the attitude of attempting to add to your understanding, not merely confirming it, though. And that can be tricky. You need an assumption of value to be found. Which is also the same assumption you need for a good marriage.

Any good human society is much like a good marriage. It brings together different people who have enough in common to appreciate and understand one another, but enough different to add something to each other’s lives that we couldn’t provide sufficiently alone. We balance strengths and weaknesses and diversify our ability to respond to the many, varying needs and challenges that may arise.

As in any marriage, sometimes our partners will disappoint us. Sometimes they won’t be great. Sometimes they will hurt us dreadfully and drain the goodness and life from our lives. That is why we need love. That is why we need faith and belief and hope in our relationship. If we have only naive love and childish dreams, we will be terribly disappointed and heartbroken. We will be vulnerable and foolish and thoughtless and easy to exploit, and even prone to mismanagement and exploitation of ourselves. Faith and love is why we need realism, and realism is why we need faith and love.

Life isn’t a static system that you simply set in motion and iterate on, it’s a living dynamic. Conditions and possibility, limitations and opportunity. Understanding and imagination. Caution and adventure. Comfort and challenge. Yin and yang, anima and animus. It’s a dialogue between the world as it is and the world as it could be. We need the myth of the noble savage, and we need to grow beyond it. We need to understand where it comes from and where it is leading us. Because we can’t quite believe in it, and we can’t quite give it up. This idea needs a home, and it needs a better home than we currently have for it. And I hope we can find it.

P. S. As I hope I’ve made clear, I don’t like the term “realism”, and I believe it to be a bit of a misnomer. People often point to things that are dark and gritty as being “more real”, as if only harsh realities and not pleasant ones were real, which is terribly reductive. But I couldn’t think of a good term to use for this viewpoint, and I think that’s how it might represent itself. As bracing realism. Harsh reality. A competitive, confrontational approach. Less nice, less agreeable, but honest. Pragmatism over idealism. Taking the world as it is, not how we wish it was. Especially as a counterpoint to the attitude behind the noble savage myth, I couldn’t think of a good term for it.

Obviously, as an ideology, “nature red in tooth and claw” is the historic counterpoint to the noble savage myth, and is just as naive and limited in its own way. Both positions are, that’s part of my point. We know what it is and have terms to describe it when a mother (or father) is excessively positive about their child and wants to protect them and thinks they can do no wrong. We know about mama bears. But what do you call a dad who deliberately cajoles and pushes their hesitant kid off the diving board or tells them how to punch back the next time a bully tries to mess with them? In particular, what images and language do we have to talk about it that don’t immediately condemn it but recognize the potential value (as well as the potential problems and excesses)?

I’m not sure we have that vocabulary, we’re so focused on being idealistic and nice and agreeable and harmless and pleasant and kind. And I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be those things, only that they too have their pathology and they too are incomplete, and being pragmatic and disagreeable (while having its own pathology and incompleteness) is also important and needed and valuable and life-problems serving and affirming. Humans aren’t either sheep or wolves, though they can be, to their ruin; our power is in being something between both of them.

It’s very important that we have the language and imagery, the mental mythology, to help us see the value in “realism”, and to see the dangers in idealism. We wouldn’t have both of these innate instincts and viewpoints persisting across all time and cultures if they weren’t both fundamentally necessary and didn’t both have some truth to them. And we wouldn’t need both of them if either of them were complete and sufficient and didn’t need a counterbalance and watchdog to protect them from becoming pathological. We wouldn’t have men if women could do everything men can do. And we wouldn’t have women if men could do everything they can do. We wouldn’t keep finding right wingers and left wingers everywhere if we didn’t actually require two hands to rise to highest heights.