Trompé

Marcus Meredith

December 23, 2023

Trompé

How I learned how I had been deceived

There is a very prescient phrase from Latin about the human condition I wish I had known when I was younger and oh so naive: Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur - “The world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived.” After having retired and earned the freedom to devote a good amount of time to being a raging autodidact, the veil of ignorance of social and historical norms and dogma that I was indoctrinated into through the educational system has been ripped away… And liberty of mind has come to me in a most unexpected way.

There are so many things in education (both personal and professional as well as scholarly) that were withheld from me that to have learned about them now, later in life, has been edifying, infuriating, disappointing, frustrating, and ultimately liberating. The origins of this journey of discovery are really rather innocuous as a scientific interest in the archeology of Meso-America and ancient cultures from there such as the Maya and the Aztecs. I looked for texts and read their reviews and I happened upon the texts 1491 and 1493 by Charles C. Mann. The science was fascinating but the history that I read was frankly astounding. To realize the ancient cultures of the Americas were as advanced and sophisticated as they were before The Conquest just mesmerized me. [Aside: at the end of this essay, I will include a small bibliography which reflects just what I’ve read in my time of personal discovery so that anyone interested can, if they wish, retrace my route to the truth.]

In the reading of these texts, I came to realize just how much American History education, classes, and curriculum have played down the contributions of the Native populations. The lifting of the fog of dogma was illuminating and infuriating… to have been deceived by the same educational system I had been a part of and the lies I had been party too, rage festered and boiled inside. “You bastards lied to me!” was the mantric thought process that stayed with me for months. The situation would only be exacerbated and accelerated when I got to other texts mention in the first two starting with Lies My Teacher Told Me.

The text by James W. Loewen, fully titled Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything You American History Textbook Got Wrong, drove me to want to know more like a blind man desperately trying to find the way out of a cell when the door is heard to open. The complicity of government in so many plans to keep white, christian ( and often Southern) men in an exalted position of power over everyone else just made my blood boil. It seemed as though every other paragraph I reached a new level of exasperation at the injustices I had never learned about before. For instance, I’ll NEVER put Woodrow Wilson in a place of significance with men such as Lincoln, Washington, or Roosevelt (take your pick which one) for all the things he did to African Americans during his administration. That Southern bigot is a stain upon the American Dream and his erasure, though misguided to make it complete, is utterly understandable to me now. Then finding out Helen Keller helped start the American Civil Liberties Union BUT was a eugenicist just blew my boat out of the water. And the list of the in dignities visited upon the natives by deliberate means bent on the destruction of native culture… my head wanted to explode. In the time I was reading Lies, a new text came upon my radar: The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

The book by Nikole Hannah-Jones and the NY Times was one I downloaded so I could read it digitally not being sure if the text and I would be seeing things eye to eye. My first week with the text was frankly quite hard to read. I began to check all the historical references that were given to slave laws and Jim Crow and red lining. My mental state was getting increasingly stirred to a constant point of anger, rage, and a seeing of revenge. I was trying very hard to take Southerners and White people just as individuals without prejudging due to their inclusion in a group they have had NO say as to membership… but IT WAS HARD.

The readings continued at a good clip. I moved over to the more scientifically oriented side of the way that people see things by starting with books such as Atomic Habits by James Clear, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnaman, FLOW: The psychology of optimal experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Ours Was the Shining Future by David Leonhardt, and a whole series of books on the Stoic perspective on life and living. The shift in historical and sociological (not to mention political perspective) was seismic. I was a child in the 1960’s but this is the “when” that David Leonhardt takes on in the section of his book he titles “The Fall.” The political shift from how America and Americans had seen themselves was beginning to accelerate… I can only barely remember these days. But, one of my oldest memories is still fresh in my mind to this day… The day Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and then in the months following, the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Many of the moments of tension and shift in perspective we are dealing with today are really echos of these days that must finally be dealt with. But those days had echos of the Civil War and the inability of The North to fully realize the promise of Reconstruction to change the plight of the “Negro” by following through on the promises of the 13th thru 15th Amendments to the Constitution. You’d think 158 years after the end of “those most recent unpleasantries” we’d have figured out how to bring bigotry and the “Southern Cause” to heal while shining the light on the lies spread about the history of the United States… but no.

The psychological study that went along with the historical study sent a shiver up my spine at just how irrational the human species really is. I’ve become almost convinced that Isaac Asimov was correct in his distrust of those who are not scientists and thus trained in the arts of skepticism and investigation. Not consciously at first did I realize that my training as a scientist, my love of psychology and history, and my own insatiable thirst for knowledge would be … well, my saving grace. But a ‘grace’ that so few of my fellow citizens seem to have as part of their make-up as peers in both citizenship and humanity.

The myth of American Exceptionalism should be one that we strive for, but not one that accept blindly as being true or accurate. We CAN be the kind of country we’d like to think we are, but the road we’re on may not get us there without a significant lane change. Now, I’m not one of the ‘New Left’ intellectuals that holds America to irredeemable or even ‘evil.’ I’m also not ‘Neo-Patriot’ who buys the lie that “all things American” are good and beyond reproach. I take the middle road because it’s really the only one that heads toward the factual, empirical, historical truth that all Americans should have been taught and that our social institutions have fallen down on in their attempts. Changing the history books and the manner in which they are approved, possibly by nationalizing public education, seems to me to be the only honest and reasonable path to the ultimate clarification of, redemption due, and consummation with the truth.

Reading List:

1. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen | Jul 17, 2018

2. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

by Nikole Hannah-Jones , The New York Times Magazine , et al. | Nov 16, 2021

3. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear | Oct 16, 2018

4. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman | Oct 25, 2011

5. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi | Jul 1, 2008

6. Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization

by Neil deGrasse Tyson | Sep 20, 2022

7. Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream by David Leonhardt | Oct 24, 2023

8. How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell | Sep 20, 2011