Lies and False Rumors of Lies

There is a belief that is trending among a large minority of people. Demographically I can't describe who they are. But I know there are many who ascribe to it because I read it all the time online, and have heard people refer to it.

It is the line that "Everything they taught you in school was a lie."

There are some lies told to us in school, but they weren't made up by school teachers or even text-book writers. Rather they come down from past centuries and are known by real historians to be untrue. These scholars even regret that teachers have not gotten the memo.

The irony is that these false stories known to be untrue are not the ones these conspiracists are calling lies. They actually believe the ones known to be lies.

I am specifically speaking of:

• The false belief that Atlantis was a real place.
• The false belief that Oswald didn't act alone.
• The false belief that mischief went on at the 1st Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.
• The false belief that Christopher Columbus argued with the scholars of his day that the world was round.
• The false belief that reincarnation was removed from the teachings of Christianity.

So, as I said, the irony is that these false ideas are believed in by the very people who say that everything you learned in school was a lie. One can easily discover the truth about these false assumptions by reading modern scholarship about them. But another irony is that people who believe there is an academic conspiracy to lie to them won't read these books. This is like putting a veil over your own head so you cannot see.

I have never seen any remedy for the circular form of thinking these people have. I once told two engineers, so seemingly smart people, that the scholars at the time of Columbus knew the world was round, and they denied it ardently. I told them they could look it up on Wikipedia. Their reply was sarcastic. "Who wrote the Wikipedia article, you?" Ha ha ha. You can't correct these people. As Jeffrey Burton Russell, author of Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians writes, scholars and historians have been unsuccessfully trying to correct this historical misconception since the 1920s. Incidentally, the idea was invented in the early 1800s.

While I have studied epistemology and written many papers on the topic, it seems to me that far beyond lack of knowledge of the methods of scientific reasoning and logical principles, the greater culprit in man's ignorance is his own prejudices.