Today, adults are told fairy stories, fables, legends, and myths, and a large number of them apparently believe them. Many men apparently believe that government is a kind of Santa Claus who can bestow goods for which there is no charge, that in a democracy people may legitimately play Robin Hood by taking from the rich to give to the poor, that we have solved the problems of production and that the good fairies will continue to produce goods when the incentives to production have been removed, and that there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow which the politician describes if only we will follow his policies.
Supplying children with illusions in felicitous stories and myths may have the effect of an inoculation against illusion (following the principle of inoculation of inducing the disease in a mild form). As the child grows up, he sheds the illusions one by one, or in bunches. The legends, stories, and myths may provide him invaluable points of reference for the discernment of reality. He knows, from them, what sort of things belong to the real world and what sort to illusion. Those who do not have some embodied illusions as points of reference may have much greater difficulty in separating illusion from reality, or, to put it another way, may succumb much more readily to the illusory.