When we teach a child that electricity flows like water through a pipe, we are not lying. We are building a scaffold — a useful simplification adequate to the moment, a partial truth that enables further learning. The lie-to-children is not the simplification. It is the failure to recognise the simplification as a simplification.
This book argues that the dominant framework of the modern Western world — the machine model rooted in Newton's physics and Bacon's scientific programme — is a lie-to-children of extraordinary power and scope. It provided the intellectual foundations for four centuries of achievement. It also, precisely because of its power and scope, was elevated from a scaffold to a building: treated as a complete description of reality, applied to domains far beyond those in which it had earned its authority, and defended against revision by the institutions built around it.
The costs are visible everywhere: New Towns that destroyed the communities they were meant to house; more roads that generated more traffic; vitamin supplements that harmed the people they were meant to protect; economic models whose confidence outlasted their accuracy. Each failure has the same structure. Each is a story about what happens when the scaffold is mistaken for the building.