What if history is a lie

I think that textbooks fail to teach what causes what. Everything is just one damn thing after another. You need to learn all those little facts. During this time, you could actually see our society become less racist both in attitudes and in terms of our social structures. If we want to make society more racist, then we can do some of the things we did between and , because we can actually see our society becoming more racist both in practices and in attitudes.

So by not teaching causation, we disempower people from doing anything. By teaching that things are pretty much good and getting better automatically, we remove any reason for citizens to be citizens, to exercise the powers of citizenship.

Nothing good happens without the collective efforts of dedicated people. The preface to your latest edition addresses the problem of truth in the age of Trump. I actually think our situation is far worse than it was in the past. They assumed something had to be seen as true in order to matter, so they lied in order to further their agenda.

Trump has basically introduced the idea that there is no such thing as facts, no such thing as truth — and that is fundamentally different.

He is attacking the very idea of truth and thereby giving his opponents no ground to stand on at all. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all. Here are 10 of my favourites. The Complete Works of Shakespeare Have you ever noticed how every play Shakespeare wrote hinges on lies?

Some more than others. People lie, misunderstandings abound, hilarity ensues. But the tragedies and romances all hang on lies and liars as well. Now Othello, that was an interesting love story about liars. Beyond the more complicated motives you have to ask, who was actually in love with whom?

Well, inconsistently, and with a great deal of contradiction according to one of the brilliant evolutionary theorists of our time, who argues that self-deception has been selected for on every level of biological life, from the microscopic, to us, the readers, because to lie to others we must first possess the ability to lie to ourselves.

The Folly of Fools is evolutionary biology at its best; dense with bench science and psychology, yet wonderfully readable. The Confidence Game is dense. Konnikova breaks down exactly how and why con artists manage to do what they do; and she gets granular as hell in the process.

The difficulty with this approach comes when a virtuous person tells a lie as a result of another virtue compassion perhaps. The solution might be to consider what an ideal person would have done in the particular circumstances. Some philosophers, most famously the German Immanuel Kant , believed that that lying was always wrong. He based this on his general principle that we should treat each human being as an end in itself, and never as a mere means.

Lying to someone is not treating them as an end in themselves, but merely as a means for the liar to get what they want. Kant also taught 'Act so that the maxim of thy will can always at the same time hold good as a principle of universal legislation. If there was a universal law that it was generally OK to tell lies then life would rapidly become very difficult as everyone would feel free to lie or tell the truth as they chose, it would be impossible to take any statement seriously without corroboration, and society would collapse.

Christian theologian St. Augustine taught that lying was always wrong, but accepted that this would be very difficult to live up to and that in real life people needed a get-out clause.

Augustine believed that some lies could be pardoned, and that there were in fact occasions when lying would be the right thing to do. He grouped lies into 8 classes, depending on how difficult it was to pardon them. Here's his list, with the least forgivable lies at the top:. Thomas Aquinas also thought that all lies were wrong, but that there was a hierarchy of lies and those at the bottom could be forgiven.

His list was:. The reason for lying that gets most sympathy from people is lying because something terrible will happen if you don't lie. Examples include lying to protect a murderer's intended victim and lying to save oneself from death or serious injury.

These lies are thought less bad than other lies because they prevent a greater harm occurring; they are basically like other actions of justified self-defence or defence of an innocent victim. Since such lies are often told in emergencies, another justification is that the person telling the lie often has not time to think of any alternative course of action.

Threatening situations don't just occur as emergencies; there can be long-term threat situations where lying will give a person a greater chance of survival. In the Gulag or in concentration camps prisoners can gain an advantage by lying about their abilities, the misbehaviour of fellow-prisoners, whether they've been fed, and so on.

In a famine lying about whether you have any food hidden away may be vital for the survival of your family. When two countries are at war, the obligation to tell the truth is thought to be heavily reduced and deliberate deception is generally accepted as part of the way each side will try to send its opponent in the wrong direction, or fool the enemy into not taking particular actions.

In the same way each side accepts that there will be spies and that spies will lie under interrogation this acceptance of spying doesn't benefit the individual spies much, as they are usually shot at the end of the day.

This legalistic device divides a statement into two parts: the first part is misleading, the two parts together are true - however only the first part is said aloud, the second part is a 'mental reservation'. One common occasion for mental reservations was in court, when a person had sworn an oath to tell the truth and expected God to punish them if they lied. If they'd stolen some sheep on Tuesday they could safely tell the court "I did not steal those sheep" as long as they added in their mind "on Monday".

Since God was believed to know every thought, God would hear the mental reservation as well as the public statement and therefore would not have been lied to. Sissela Bok says that this device is recommended to doctors by one textbook. If a feverish patient, for example, asks what his temperature is, the doctor is advised to answer "your temperature is normal today" while making the mental reservation that it is normal for a person in the patient's precise physical condition.

The Dutch philosopher and lawyer Hugo Grotius taught that a lie is not really wrong if the person being lied to has no right to the truth. This stemmed from his idea that what made a wrong or unjust action wrong was that it violated someone else's rights. If someone has no right to the truth, their rights aren't violated if they're told a lie. This argument would seem to teach that it's not an unethical lie to tell a mugger that you have no money although it is a very unwise thing to do , and it is not an unethical lie to tell a death squad that you don't know where their potential victim is hiding.

In practice, most people would regard this as a very legalistic and 'small print' sort of argument and not think it much of a justification for telling lies, except in certain extreme cases that can probably be justified on other grounds.

If someone lies to you, are you entitled to lie to them in return? Has the liar lost the right to be told the truth? Human behaviour suggests that we do feel less obliged to be truthful to liars than to people who deal with us honestly.

Fallacious claims have been brazenly repeated after, and in spite of, evidence produced to the contrary. Postmodernism tells us that objective truth is hard to reach; that facts do exist but are inaccessible. But now even the idea that truth can be found has been eroded. This is deeply problematic for historians. Our grasp on the truth may be flawed and imperfect — we are humans, after all — but to shrug off the possibility of finding out what happened — to give up on at least seeking the full truth — is deeply nihilistic.

We are left afloat in a sea of misinformation, half-truths and, ultimately, indifference and narcissism. When all we believe is what we experience, then what we experience is all that appeals.