Truth. Fact. Lies That Hate Them

The truth is knowledge of a "fact". Which is proof or something not open to question. A suitable synonym, "reality" can be expressed as texture (touch) or experience (sense), not an idea of things, conditions, or situations. Truth isn't what we make it, that will be the "lie". The truth happens or it occurs - it's not created, just like any event. While our definition is in the "present-continuous tense", it helps to focus the life-span of truth on the present. It's accurate, authentic, and it is living. Let us illustrate this with a scientifically proven and accepted event.

Matter formed inside an explosive event some 13.8 billion years ago. This reality or fact happened! No human made it. We discovered it. Then read of it from one of Moses or Einstein, maybe both. So, in the search of creation, we found what had occurred, "truth". Yet, who made it? We realize it can only be known, not created. This learning fills us with a feeling of genuine inspiration, it is like we are discovering one great idea. It induces light and creates freedom. That is how the truth works. It's so good, it's impossible to replicate or reverse it. It is hardcoded inside life.

When skirmishes of the Revolutionary War broke out, few in the American colonies wanted to separate from Britain. But, as Britain called on massive forces to enforce its will the Colonists accepted that asserting independence was their only choice. They united under a Declaration of Independence as King George III denounced the colonies before Parliament killing the hopes of reconciliation planned by the Continental Congress. So, "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." came to be! Truth is, therefore self-evident.

The lie is tasked to distort 'truth', and it is effective if the truth doesn't suit people; when we are afraid to tell or own up to it. If we realize that we are living in a fear-based world, then we know all the stuff we do is based on fear. Our financial dealings for one are based on the 'fear of loss'. We use pop culture to push Batman as a 'symbol of fear' to criminals, and as a teacher of morals and justice to children. And today, we have more than 55,000 laws that enforce Moses' 10 Commandments. A fear mindset creates the lie. What is your mindset?

Everyone's got a mindset. If you want to know people, focus on what they do, and what they say. You will find it's all from a mindset. And a mindset can be a set of assumptions, notions, methods held by one or more people. For instance, the 146-year-old culture at The Kentucky Derby, Louisville, where attendees wear very large hats is based on a mindset. There are two basic types of mindsets that shape our thinking and thus our lives; a "fixed" and a "growth" mindset. The fixed mindset trusts success to natural talent. A growth mindset takes failure as a challenge to learning and to success.

The typical attitude of a people is a mindset; optimists have a sunny view of life, business owners are go-getters, and soldiers have military focus. When the word "mindset" appeared in the 1930s, it meant habits of mind formed by previous experience. So, if fear has been an experience, it can determine your typical attitude. Yet, mindsets can spread within people inside a group and can color the outlook of the group. Generally, we fear death! But, (here is the tricky part) whatever "thing" it is that you fear (or are afraid of) say "failure", you have also accepted. And it will go on to form a mindset!

What you accept passes to others, it is how children learn. If a belief moves by imitation, its single moving unit is a meme. It is how our culture spreads through music, fashion, story, or phrase. If a mindset is driven by fear, it will attenuate resistance to other fear types. It will turn a rumor, into belief, and spread it among a group, who act it out. Popular internet memes such as the What If I told You meme from The Matrix spread rapidly on Reddit.

Ong's Hat, NJ a ghost town is haunted by a conspiracy theory from a work of fiction about a gate into a parallel dimension opened by 'The Egg', an inter-dimensional device built by two siblings, dismissed from Princeton's Ph.D. program. This story attracts UFO mindsets. Both these memes can mingle, regroup, bond into a sincere and intense desire for theories. UFO mindsets suck up to the Ong's Hat conspiracy theory and more. Like minds attract. These are people conned by hoaxes; keeping the conspiracy alive!

People say what they know is not true! A long time ago, Jesus advised the Jews "...but don't follow their example. For they don't practice what they teach". Matt 23:3. We haven't learned that we are first, human beings. The truth is that we are one human family with origins in Africa; "The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis", says Craig Venter. 'Race' is a made-up label used to define and separate people. Yet, we never own up to this truth! It is a relief, however, to see the Sun treat each race equally.

When humans migrated out of Africa in two waves, they may have moved through Kush. This Nubian Empire reached its peak between 2000-1001 BC and could have been formed by remnants of the two waves of migration, as it ruled a vast swath of territory along the east bank of the Nile River in today's Sudan. Kush was lucrative in ivory, incense, iron, and gold. It was both a trading partner and military rival to Egypt and it ruled Egypt for the 25th Dynasty adopting its customs. The ancient Kushite capital of Meroe is now home to ruins of more than 200 pyramids, more than that of Egypt's.

"To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true" - Aristotle. Truth is knowledge, it is complete knowledge. It is light. It is freedom. It improves its beneficiary. Truth is universal, unbiased, it is independent of people, time, and space. That's why it is the truth because it is self-evident. It is hardcoded into reality and it is right in front of our eyes.

An experience can teach truth, yet it is a cruel teacher; it gives a test before it gives a lesson. It is a reverse of in-class learning, a head-on collision with facts. We struggle with the truth via instruction. I don't mean that learning by experience is wrong because most learn differently, but it leaves scars of doubt, fear, regret, and a mindset sets in. And to draw from such a mindset is to be prejudiced, or traumatized. Let's take a lesson from Chief Brody in Jaws (1975), who learned by experience to never face a great white shark.

A mindset is marred by emotion, so, it is unreliable. A mindset can change the color of a car, or create a separate reality; it can make truth subjective or objective. So, nature made us discover 'truth' by instruction, perception, sensation, and or observation. A mindset plays like it's a certainty, but it is only an illusion of certainty. That's why fear is effective, we only feel it, yet we think it is real. It's a mindset, and a big moneymaker; horror films sell fear, now they make a worldwide current gross of about $1 billion annually.

A mindset can distort 'truth' to serve prejudice if it's driven by hate or race and not love, or humanity! The terrifying part of our history was made by such choices; it drove the efforts of wars, treaties, and identity. This history became oral narrations; Once Upon A Time by a campfire under moonlight became a conduit of stories to generations. History then becomes our story of valor, heroism, identity, or wars that weigh on our 'innocent' today.

But history must be told accurately and weighed against proof. In practice, history often takes the mindset of its narrator. While people won't stop telling stories to serve personal interests, they must at least, choose to tell history in its earliest form. Heather C. McGhee (below) walks through her "research experience" during a TED Talk in 2019, she offers a distinct example, how the personal interest of a group of people, shaped by racism, deprived their families, and how racism costs the US economy $18 trillion.

In 2017, I traveled to Mississippi, where a group of auto-factory workers was trying to organize into a union, says Heather. The benefits they were fighting for were higher pay, better health care coverage, a real pension and they would have helped everybody at the plant. But person after person that I talked to white or black, for the union, or against the union, "race" kept coming up. Joey (white) put it this way, "white workers think, I ain't voting, yes, if the blacks are voting yes. If the blacks are for it, I'm against it." Chip (white) told me, "The idea is that, if you uplift black people, you're downing white people". It is like the world's got this crab-in-a-barrel mentality (mindset), says Heather. The union vote failed. Wages at the plant are still lower than their unionized peers' and people there still worry about their healthcare.

Heather says, "It's tempting to perhaps focus on the prejudiced attitudes of the men and workers that I heard in Mississippi. But, I'm more interested in holding accountable the people selling racist ideas (racist mindset) for their profit, than those who are desperate enough to buy them. It costs us so much to remain divided. I believe it is time to reject that paradigm and realize that our fates are linked. An injury to one is an injury to all." Now, the narrative the men at the plant expressed was developed during Jim Crow or segregation in the south. It is from a prejudiced mindset. It profits a few and goes further to hurt white families than they are willing to admit.

A story properly told on film is Harriet Tubman as a hero. Harriet is told from the point of view of black filmmakers. The script took 25 years to get made into a film. Why? The screenwriter chose to make the film authentic: he didn't want to change the story. Picture 1994 when it had its first pitch: “This is a great script. Let’s get Julia Roberts to play Harriet Tubman,” said the then-president of a studio sublabel. Fortunately, there was one single black person in that studio meeting 25 years ago who told him that Harriet Tubman was a black woman. The president replied, “That was so long ago. No one will know that.” Reports, LA Times. This is a classic example of an attempt to alter history for personal interest. But this truth did get out!

Two Professors were debating possible COVID-19 cures on LCI, a French TV channel, and one asked: "If I may be provocative, should this study not be done in Africa?" the other replied: "You're right. We're thinking about a study in Africa regarding the BCG vaccine. We'll seriously consider it." The comments drew criticism from Didier Drogba. "Africa cannot and will not be a testing ground for any vaccine," said Tedros Ghebreyesus W.H.O. DG. These racist comments was on broadcast TV that reaches 72 million people in 43 countries. Yet, they never owned up to the truth.

The main cause of climate change is burnt fossil fuels which release carbon dioxide causing the planet to heat up. Until recently, natural factors like volcano eruptions, changes in the Earth's orbit, and shifts in the Earth's crust caused these changes. Earth experiences a series of ice-ages (glacial periods) and warmer periods (interglacial) that cycle every 100k years. We are in an interglacial period. Since the 1800s Industrial Revolution, the global temperature has increased at a faster rate; human activity is now the leading cause of climate change. Yet, some leaders deny this truth.

Europe raped Africa for economic, political, and social gain. They saw a place to get resources for their industrial ambitions, to compete for new markets for their goods, and to get raw materials. So, in 1884 the Berlin Conference divided Africa for occupation. It's known as the Scramble for Africa or The Rhodes Colossus. They justified it with a story of savages in need of civilization; an idea Cecil Rhodes vehemently pushed in Southern Africa, where he found gold and named Rhodesia for himself till it became Zimbabwe. Europe stole, yet they covered it up with a lie!

People choose to believe things that are clearly a fabrication. They are at ease with moral ambiguity and act as though morality doesn’t exist. Yet, we are all aware of the effect of such acts of injustice, cruelty, and inhumanity on the silenced voices in our history. So, in the portrayal of one or both old and recent history, the acknowledgment of our biases; white, black, brown, or yellow is key to achieve a more equal presentation of a story. This world is toxic with disinformation, and we choke on weaponized lies daily.

You can skip to the end to read the closing advice by Master Yoda.

Mindsets Created Historical Events

Let's face it, morality is decaying. We are tumbling down the rabbit hole, like Alice unable to break our fall, unyielding to the truth as history sets a premise for future mindsets. In 3200 BCE man creates hieroglyphs in Egypt; in 4 BCE, Jesus Christ was crucified and resurrected; in 1214 UK, the English nobles forced King John to restrict his powers. In 1347, the Bubonic Plague killed 1/3 of Europe; the 1500s saw Africans kidnapped and sold as slaves in the US and Haiti.

In the 1900s the Wright brothers' glider, Henry Ford's Model-T, Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity, and Georges Melies' 400th film "A Trip to the Moon" was made. By the 1910s it was the first "total war"—WWI, the Russian Revolution, and the unsinkable Titanic took 1.5k lives and the Spanish flu struck. With the roaring 1920s came speakeasies, short skirts, and jazz. Women's Suffrage secured rights of women to vote. Archaeology boomed at the discovery of King Tut's Tomb and Mickey Mouse kicked off.

The Great Depression hit 1930s. The Nazis took power, persecuted Jews, and sparked WWII. Amelia Earhart is lost, Bonnie and Clyde happened, as Al Capone is imprisoned. By 1940s WWII brought death and courage to stop it at a heavy price. The 1950s were marked by a post-WWII boom, the Cold War dawned, and the Civil Rights movement rose. The 1960s gifted Africa independence as MLK delivered the I Have a Dream speech. JFK is killed, Neil Armstrong walks the moon, and Sesame Street premieres.

Tragedy fated 1970s with Vietnam War and Munich Olympics massacre. Steven Spielberg's Jaws creates the blockbuster, and Watergate trashes Nixon. 1980s launched Michael Jackson's Thriller, CNN, and Space Shuttle Columbia. Prince Charles weds Diana, Chernobyl hits ground zero, and The Berlin Wall falls. Peace and prosperity ruled the 1990s, Clinton is President. The Iron curtain fell, Diana and JFK Jr. die, as O.J. Simpson wins trial of the century as the decade shuts down to a millennium.

People made history. "Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.…" says Steve Jobs. Marlon Brando snubbed his Oscar for Best Actor of The Godfather to protest the misrepresentation of minorities. "...I don't think that people generally realize what the motion picture industry has done to the American Indian, as a matter of fact, all ethnic groups, all minorities, all non-whites, and people just simply don't realize and they just took it for

granted that the way people are going to be presented and these cliches were just going to be perpetuated. So when someone makes a protest of some kind and said no please don't present the Chinese this way or please on this network every night well perhaps not every night but you can see, silly renditions of human behavior; the leering Filipino house boy, the wily Japanese, the kook or the gook, and the idiot black man and the stupid Indian and it just goes on and on and on and people actually don't realize

how deeply these people are injured by seeing themselves represented. Not so much the adults because they are already inured to that kind of pain and pressure, but children; Indian children seeing Indians represented as savage, ugly, nasty, vicious, treacherous, drunken. They grow up only with a negative image of themselves and it lasts a lifetime."

Why The Truth It Must Be!

When you lie, you know! A fanatic you have become, concealing 'the truth'. Fact-checked that information, did you, before wolfing it down? Weigh! I say, weigh that talk, before you respond? Truth vs. Lie, a battle to win, we all must!

You can fine-tune the internal monologue that scores every aspect of your life, from leadership to love - Maria Popova.

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