BELIEF #1: Our history is very different than what we thought.

In most 'Westernized' (read: sanitized) nations, we believe what we see on TV, what we learn in school, and what our parents and friends tell us. These institutions are trusted because the people who represent them have credibility with us. For instance, "Mommy would never lie to me" or "Mr. Smith would never teach us something that wasn't true. He's the smartest guy I know."

I am sad to say that I have been studying history for over two decades and I fell for the trap too.

So many of us end up buying into the paradigms that are presented to us because we begin life with a curious, inquisitive nature that eventually is mentally beaten out of us. Our parents are under a lot of stress at work because of the mountains of paperwork that they're expected to turn out in addition to the regular work that is required of them. So when we ask them, "Hey Mom -- why did this or that happen?" their answers tend to be brief & uninterested at best and grossly uninformed & standard at worst.  This is not a condemnation of parents as a whole, because it is one of the most difficult jobs in the world to do well.  But, for our purposes, we're going to have to be okay with making some generalizations from time to time.

Then we grow up a little and go to school. We ask the same questions, but we have teachers who are generally taught to help us to master certain material but don't always necessarily teach us how to think. (And believe me: I have GREAT respect for teachers, but we know this is largely true.) There's only one way that something happened...everybody knows that...so stop thinking otherwise. At this point, most of us would give up. I know I did for much of my life.

But as we get older, we find that there's just so many things that don't add up. So, in between earning that next paycheck, taking care of our children and pets, or playing softball with our buddies from high school, we might Google something and find some 'conspiracy theory' (more on this idea in a future posting) regarding the question. Yet we never see anything on TV that supports that theory and when we run it by our friends, they look at us like we're crazy.

We're taught all throughout our lives to avoid that at all costs. We are taught uniformity from a very early age. Thinking outside the box is either outright not allowed or is just rarely genuinely supported. Don't you dare color outside of those lines.  So we tend to swallow hard and stop looking into ideas that will make us social outcasts. That would be the worst thing ever. And besides, there's no way that's true.  It goes against everything I have ever learned, so it must be wrong. I wonder if the baseball game's still on...

And that's why most of us don't know most of what's really going on.

So what if history were actually remarkably different from what we have been taught? How would we ever know? If 98% of people are wrong, 1% of people aren't talking because they're in on it, and the other 1% who are talking about it end up being discredited or silenced by the institutions of power that we allow to determine our reality...how are we ever supposed to find out what the truth is?

Would we even believe it if we did learn it? How would we know if we were right or not?