Daylight Savings Time is a deception. Even advocates for the policy admit that it is to make people think of an untrue time as true.
Daylight Savings Time is a deception. The purpose, even according to advocates for the policy of moving clocks an hour or more off from standard time, is to make people think of the untrue time as the true time. It is a deception with particularly sinister origins. When first adopted by Austria and Imperial Germany in 1916, it was an effort to enable continuation of a war that had become unexpectedly long, cruel, and senseless. The policy was meant by belligerent governments to squeeze more resources and time on task out of an already suffering population. The United States’ entry into the war in 1917 brushed aside the objections of Americans whose principled arguments had kept the policy at bay until then.
Changing clocks to intentionally read an hour or more different from the time as reckoned by the sun is not like wearing corrective lenses for eyesight anomalies. Corrective lenses make the true state of things clearer. Daylight Time intentionally makes an untrue state of things seem correct. Daylight time is more like wearing a pair of glasses that cause a particular astigmatism, on the theory that this deception will make the wearers more productive and use less fuel, for the benefit of their group.
When Benjamin Franklin suggested that getting up earlier in the summer, to take advantage of the additional light of summer mornings, he did not recommend a government-enforced time change, like Daylight Savings Time. Franklin was giving good advice. People can gain benefits by adjusting their habits to seasonal changes in the length of the sunlit day. People have chosen to do so for as long as anyone can remember. No lie about the true time is needed to get humans to act in their own interests, and not everyone benefits from making the same change.
This is a clear example of individuals being the best judges (for themselves and their legitimate charges) of how to respond to changes in their environments. Legislators and experts, arrogating to themselves the authority to decide for whole states or nations, that everyone should be encouraged to rise an hour earlier by falsifying the time of day for half the year, violates individuals’ right to know the truth and to tell the truth, and it robs society of valuable information about which neighbors’ choices have lead to success, which to failure, and which to little consequence.
In the United States there has been a push for several years to make Daylight Savings Time (DST) permanent. That is, to stay year-round on a time standard that is an hour ahead of solar time or Standard Time. This is just cementing a lie in place, so that people are no longer inconvenienced on the days when clocks spring forward or fall back. But there is a reason that year-round DST was not adopted from the beginning. Year-round DST would mean that the sun does not rise in latitudes like Michigan, New England, and Washington state, until an hour later, during the darkest, coldest, most depressing part of the year. That would be disruptive! And for people working outdoors, it would compromise their safety. No, the answer is not to try to eliminate the time-change blues each spring and fall, which remind us that we are being abused. The answer is to stop the state-enforced lie and let people adjust for themselves.
