Moment of Truth
You’re full of shit.
Wait! Don’t go. That was a terrible way to start a book—sorry.
I’m not really having a go at you in particular, here. That’s especially true if you’re browsing this book in a shop and wondering whether you should buy it. You should! You’re very wise! Also, witty and stylish. To be clear, there’s nothing about you especially that marks you out as being unusually untrustworthy or particularly given to falsehoods. (Unless you actually happen to be a professional con artist, I guess? In which case: Hi! You might enjoy chapter 4.)
You are, nonetheless, full of it: you’re a liar, a bullshitter, and you’re almost certainly wrong in hundreds of ways, large and small, about the world you live in. You shouldn’t feel bad about that, though, because—here’s the important point—so is everybody else around you. And, in the spirit of complete honesty, so am I.
What I’m saying is simply that, as humans, we spend our everyday lives swimming in a sea of nonsense, half-truths and outright falsehoods. We lie, and we are lied to. Our social lives rely on a steady stream of little white lies. We’re routinely misled by politicians, the media, marketers and more, and the real problem with all of this is that it works; we are all suckers for a well-crafted fib. Perhaps the most pervasive lies of all are the ones we tell ourselves.
Right now, everywhere you look, you see dire warnings that we live in a “post-truth” age. Oxford Dictionaries crowned “post-truth” their Word of the Year in 2016; in 2017, no fewer than three books titled Post-Truth were published in the UK on the same day. Politicians seem to distort and spin and lie with increasing impunity. The public, we’re confidently told, “have had enough of experts.” The internet has turned our social lives into a misinformation battleground, one where we’re increasingly unsure whether our Uncle Jeff is a real person or actually a Russian bot.
In fairness, it’s pretty easy to see why people think we live in a uniquely fact-resistant time. To pick one rather obvious example: right now, the USA has a president who tells lies on a daily basis—or maybe they aren’t even lies. Perhaps he simply doesn’t know what’s true and doesn’t care to find out. The effect is roughly the same. According to the Washington Post’s fact-checking team, at the time of writing, President Trump had made 10,796 “false or misleading claims” in the 869 days since he took office,1 following what they have described as “a year of unprecedented deception.”2
That’s an average of more than 10 untruths every single day, and if anything, the rate of his dishonesty seems to have been increasing as time goes by. He crossed the 5,000 fibs mark thanks to a particularly intense squall of bullshit on September 7, 2018, when he made no fewer than 125 false or misleading claims (according to the Post3) in a period of time totaling only 120 minutes. Which is more than one falsehood every minute. That wasn’t even his most dishonest day—that dubious crown is claimed by November 5, 2018, on the eve of the midterm elections, during which the Post recorded 139 inaccurate claims over the space of three campaign rallies.
This is, it’s fair to say, not especially normal. But does it mean we’re living in the age of post-truth? I’m here to say: nope.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not going to try to convince you that our present time isn’t stuffed to bursting with a hundred thousand flavors of horseshit—it absolutely is! It’s just there’s a simple problem with the idea that we live in a “post-truth age”: it would mean there was a “truth age” at some point that we can now be “post-” about.
And, unfortunately, the evidence for any such age is...uh...patchy, to say the least. The notion that we’ve recently left behind some sort of golden era of scrupulous honesty and a passionate devotion to accuracy and evidence is, to put it bluntly, a load of old baloney.
Yes, there’s an awful lot of nonsense around these days. We all contribute to it in some way, whether it’s large or small; we’ve all passed on an unfounded rumor, and we’ve all clicked that share or retweet button without checking the basics, because whatever it was appealed to our personal biases.
But, despite what you might have been told, we’ve been this way for a very, very long time.
That’s what this book is about: the truth, and all of the ingenious ways throughout history that humanity has managed to avoid it. Because none of this is new. Donald Trump is very far from being the first politician to spray falsehoods in every direction like a fucked-up garden sprinkler. We’ve never needed a Facebook log-in to spread unverified and spurious rumors from person to person. For as long as there’s been a quick buck to be made, and gullible people to make it from, there’s always been someone willing to get creative with the facts in order to part people from their cash.
Of course, defining exactly what the truth is—and what it isn’t—has never been as easy as some people might think. Then there are other questions, like...where does falsehood come from? Is dishonesty built in to humans and human society? Are humans the only creatures that lie? That’s what we’ll try to get our heads around in the first chapter, “The Origin of the Specious,” where we’ll explore the subtle differences between “lies” and “bullshit,” discover the unexpected fact that there are different colors of lie beyond “white,” and ponder the terrifying reality of just how many more ways there are of being wrong than being right.
For several centuries, the news industry has been one of our main sources of information about the world. Journalism, they say, is the first draft of history—but, as we’ll see, it’s often been a terrible first draft, the kind that has editors tearing their hair out. We’ll look at the origins of our insatiable desire for news in chapter 2, “Old Fake News,” where we’ll meet a dead man who wasn’t dead and discover that our modern anxieties about untrustworthy news sources and information overload are perhaps not quite as modern as we thought.
If the news business had humble origins, it didn’t stay that way for long—it quickly expanded into an industry that shaped our societies and our view of the world in profound ways. That doesn’t mean it got much more reliable, though. From the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 (when the New York Sun sparked a nationwide sensation with a series of entirely fabricated articles about how the famous astronomer Sir John Herschel had discovered a complex civilization living on the moon) to some complete bullshit about bathtubs, the Hitler Diaries and the infamous cat serial killer who stalked Croydon, a lot of what we’ve read about what’s going on in the world has been total nonsense. That’s what we’ll look at in the third chapter, “The Misinformation Age.”
Not only have we been wrong about what’s happening in the world; we’ve done a terrible job of getting anything right about the world itself. In chapter 4, “The Lie of the Land,” we’ll take a journey through several centuries of, uh, “creative geography.” Whether it’s vast mountain ranges that never existed, implausible tales of mythical lands, or explorers who may not have actually been to the places they claimed to have explored, we’ll see how our maps have been shaped by the fact that it’s traditionally been quite hard to go and check when people just make stuff up about the far side of the world.
That’s something that was exploited by possibly the greatest con artist of all time—a man who scammed a country by inventing a whole other country. He’s just one of the small-time crooks and big-time fantasists we’ll meet in the next chapter, “The Scam Manifesto,” which explores our eternal fascination with grifters. From the bafflingly simple scam of the original confidence man, William Thompson, via the Soviet grifter who played bureaucracy at its own game, to the Frenchwoman who lived the high life for decades based on the unknown contents of a mysterious safe, we’ll look at history’s most incredible charlatans and ask the question: How much was a con, and how much did they believe themselves?
If there’s one thing everybody knows about politicians, it’s that they lie. The leaders of our great nations are not always honest with us. Now, in fairness to (some) politicians, that might be a little unfair—but the untruths of statecraft still deserve their own chapter. In “Lying in State,” we’ll examine the ignoble arts of political deception: from spin to conspiracy theories to failed cover-ups to wartime propaganda.
Wherever there’s money to be made, there’ll be someone willing to twist the truth to make it. In “Funny Business,” we’ll look at two of the biggest culprits: the worlds of commerce and medicine. Business has rested on deceptions small and large throughout history, from Ea-Nasir, the ancient Mesopotamian copper merchant who took people’s money but never produced the copper (prompting history’s first recorded customer complaint letters), to Whitaker Wright, who made himself a fortune in the nineteenth century on a series of frauds. And we’ll meet a selection of history’s snake-oil salesmen, from the infamous “goat-gland doctor”—a new-media pioneer with political ambitions who got rich from surgically implanting goat testicles into impotent men—to the man who sold a few hours in his high-tech sex bed to the great and good of London for vast sums of money.
By this point, we’ll have met many of history’s most impressive liars. But if we think that liars are the only problem we have, then we’re in for a nasty shock. It turns out that, when humans get together, we’re very good at creating myths out of thin air. In “Ordinary Popular Delusions,” we’ll see how manias, moral panics and mass hysteria lead us to believe some ridiculous things—from the phantom airships that haunted Britain, to the remarkably common belief that something’s trying to steal men’s penises, and from monster hunts in the American pines to...well, literal witch hunts. When it comes to living lives of truth, it turns out, we’re our own worst enemy.
And in the final chapter, “Toward a Truthier Future,” we’ll ask: What can we do about all this? If lies and bullshit have been ever present throughout history, what does that mean for the knowledge industry—things like science and history and all our other ways of trying to establish facts about the world? Are we doomed to live out our lives in a fog of misinformation, or are there steps we can all take to move the dial back a little toward honesty?
This book will take you on a whistle-stop tour of just a few of history’s most incredible lies, most outrageous bullshit and most enduring falsehoods. A lot of what you’ll find in here is unbelievable—and yet all of it was believed by somebody. By the end of it, you’ll understand why there’s never been a Truth Age, and you’ll have a newfound appreciation of the wonderful variety of nonsense we’ve come up with as a species. Bluntly, this book will make you a better, smarter and more attractive person.
Honest. Would I lie to you?