Tom Phillips - Truth: A Brief History of Total Bullsh*t

This is a book about TRUTHand all the ways we try to avoid it.

We live in a post-truth world, were told. But was there ever really a golden age of truth-telling? Or have people been lying, fibbing and just plain bullsh*tting since the beginning of time?

Tom Phillips, editor of a leading independent fact-checking organization, deals with this question every day. In Truth, he tells the story of how we humans have spent history lying to each otherand ourselvesabout everything from business to politics to plain old geography. Along the way, he chronicles the worlds oldest customer service complaint, the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 and the surprisingly dishonest career of Benjamin Franklin.

Sharp, witty and with a clear-eyed view of humanitys checkered past, Truth reveals why people lieand how we can cut through the bullsh*t.

Praise for Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

A laugh-along, worst-hits album for humanity. With the delicate touch of a scholar and the laugh-out-loud chops of a comedian,
Tom Phillips shows how our species has been messing things up ever since we evolved from apes and came down from the trees some 4 million years ago.

Steve Brusatte, University of Edinburgh paleontologist
and New York Times bestselling author of
The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

Tom Phillips has proven beyond a doubt that humans are goddamn lucky to be here and are doing nearly nothing to remain relevant and viable as a speciesexcept, that is, for writing witty, entertaining, and slightly-distressing-but-ultimately-endearing books about the same. And if you care to avoid orbiting the earth in a space-garbage prison of your fellow humans design, you should probably read it.

Sarah Knight, New York Times bestselling author of Get Your Sh*t Together

Humans is Tom Phillipss timely, irreverent gallop through thousands of years of human stupidity. Every time you begin to find our foolishness bizarrely comforting, Phillips adds another kick in the ribs. Beneath all this books laughter is a serious question: where does so much serial stupidity take us?

Nicholas Griffin, author of Ping-Pong Diplomacy: The Secret History Behind the Game That Changed the World

Tom Phillips is a very clever, very funny man, and it shows. If Sapiens was a testament to human sophistication, this history of failure cheerfully reminds us that humans are mostly idiots.

Greg Jenner, author of A Million Years in a Day

Chronicles humanitys myriad follies down the ages with malicious glee and much wit...a rib-tickling page-turner.

Business Standard

Also by Tom Phillips

Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

TRUTH:
A Brief History of TOTAL BULLSH*T

Tom Phillips

To my parents, who always taught me the value of truth.
Although just FYI, I worked out that you were the tooth fairy.
Santas going to be so angry when he finds out you lied.

Contents

The most striking contradiction of our civilization is the fundamental reverence for truth which we profess and the thorough-going disregard for it which we practice.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Adventures in Error, 1936

AUTHORS NOTE

T his is a book about things that arent true. For fairly obvious reasons, this has meant that Ive spent the past year in a state of almost permanent anxiety.

The book deals with history, and history is messy enough at the best of times, filled with provisional truths and half-truths and outright myths. In my previous book, which was about failure, I wrote that the chance of this book about fuck-ups not including any fuck-ups in it is, frankly, minimal. (And yep: we have since found a few, thankfully none of them especially awful.) If writing about the topic of failure seemed like tempting the Gods of Fate, then choosing falsehood as the follow-up topic is basically presenting the gods with an open goal. And lets be honest, the Gods of Fate are unlikely to miss a tap-in to an empty net from two yards out. Not with the kind of form theyre in right now.

So yes, there will undoubtedly be some mistakes somewhere in this book. Ive done my best to avoid them: double and triple checking, going back to original documents wherever possible, trying to avoid the traps of overinterpretation. The endnotes should help you to check the facts yourself (and Id encourage you to do so). But still, something will have crept through. Errors are inevitable; all we can do is try to minimize them, admit them, and mitigate them. Thats one of the main points of the book! To that end, if you do spot a factual errorno matter how smallplease email me at

INTRODUCTION

Moment of Truth

Y oure full of shit.

Wait! Dont go. That was a terrible way to start a booksorry.

Im not really having a go at you in particular, here. Thats especially true if youre browsing this book in a shop and wondering whether you should buy it. You should! Youre very wise! Also, witty and stylish. To be clear, theres 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: youre a liar, a bullshitter, and youre almost certainly wrong in hundreds of ways, large and small, about the world you live in. You shouldnt feel bad about that, though, becauseheres the important pointso is everybody else around you. And, in the spirit of complete honesty, so am I.

What Im 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. Were 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, were confidently told, have had enough of experts. The internet has turned our social lives into a misinformation battleground, one where were increasingly unsure whether our Uncle Jeff is a real person or actually a Russian bot.

In fairness, its 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 basisor maybe they arent even lies. Perhaps he simply doesnt know whats true and doesnt care to find out. The effect is roughly the same. According to the Washington Posts 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,

Thats 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 Post) in a period of time totaling only 120 minutes. Which is more than one falsehood every minute. That wasnt even his most dishonest daythat dubious crown is claimed by November 5, 2018, on the eve of the midterm elections, during which the