The Past

"History"

I used to believe all of it.  I think I was just extremely naive.  I believed everything that anyone told me, or that I read.  

But how do we know ANYTHING?

Just because someone tells us doesn't make it true.  Also, believe it or not, reading it in the paper, on the Internet, or in a book is the same as someone telling us, and it STILL doesn't make it true.  So what do we know?

We know what we've seen ourselves and what we choose to believe.  

Scary thought isn't it?  

For all we know, Napolean Bonaparte may not have even existed.  We only take someone's word for it.  We CHOOSE to believe that he existed.  We choose to believe the stories.

We don't know anyone, who knows anyone, who ever met the guy. Every single thing you've ever read or heard about him may be completely made up, or at least embellished. 

It's been said that "history is written by the victors."  Now if you think about that for a moment, you'll realize that most of history is an embellished telling of a story. Always biased by who won the war, the battle or the argument. 

If a country conquers a land, the culture and the history of that land is basically overwritten by the conquerers. How can you tell what is the truth and what is a lie? What is fact and what is propaganda?    

My advice: Learn what you can, but remember to take everything with a grain of salt.  

Do you remember the old game they had you play in school, where they had you whisper a long secret in someone's ear and they tell it to the next person and so on down the line until it returns to you?

I think they were trying to teach this to us in school.  Remember that everything you hear has gone through a filter, unless you hear it firsthand.  Even then, you have to BELIEVE the person reciting it to you.  Is it exactly as it happened, or has it been embellished? 

Maybe the story is incredible, but it has been told to us in a way that makes it more believable.  

You never know, unless you were there.  

This world is a funny place, and what we think we know, is never really what we actually know.