Everything You Know is a Lie
Have you ever heard that fun fact about chewing gum? They say that you shouldn't swallow chewing gum because it gets stuck in your digestive system and could even remain there for years, potentially causing blockages and even leading to your untimely demise. This fact is totally unequivocally bullshit by the way. It's something that I was told as well, but at some point when I got older I swallowed some gum accidently and looked it up to see if I really needed to care and nope. Nothing to worry about at all. Might cause a bit of irritation at most, but that's it. It's just one of those pieces of common social knowledge we all sorta hear about and accept as fact even though we never bother to take the time to really think about it.
And isn't that interesting? Learning isn't something that we do actively. We can turn it on to try and learn harder, but that doesn't mean that we're not always picking up new information and storing it away in little corners of our brain for later. A lot of the time, that's a good thing. I can remember people's names without having to sit down and actively study. I can remember how to get to work without looking at a map every time. I know a lot of fun facts about my town and state not because I read through their Wikipedia pages. I've just lived here long enough to pick stuff up. I just kinda know.
Have you ever heard that periods sync up when they spend a lot of time together? How cool is that? I mean, there must be some kind of biological or evolutionary advantage o that, right? Maybe it's because it allows for less time when the theoretical "tribe" is out of commission? Or maybe it's something to do with fertility cycles? Or, it could be complete bullshit. That's right. There was one study back in the early 70s where they found the data to "prove" that. But people have tried to replicate that finding for decades now and it's never been redone. It's total bullshit.
Have you ever been at a pool party with your friends, and you eat a hot dog or two straight off the barbeque, and you get into your swim suit and you're just about to jump in when someone yells "WAIT! YOU HAVE TO WAIT 30 MINUTES FOR THE FOOD TO DIGEST!" Well, from now on, feel free to tell them that that's a total lie. If you eat a full course Chinese food buffet and then try to swim a marathon, you're going to feel uncomfortable. But that's true if you tried to do that and then run that same marathon too. The discomfort comes from the exercise, nothing to do with the pool. If you just eat a normal amount, or even if you do eat those 6 orders of General Tao but then kick back a little, you have absolutely nothing to worry about.
I like to describe all these fun little things as "social delusions". Things that socially everyone "knows", but also that on a more technical level we actually know is false. It comes down to a problem of advertising at the end of the day. When you're a kid, you might hear a line like the swimming one, and you just never have that belief challenged and so it stays in your head as true. Maybe if you were confronted with it, you might not try all that hard to defend it, but at a base level you do have a stance. And this is a problem mostly because if you then go on to have kids, and your kids are the one jumping in the pool, maybe you're the one that shouts at them to stop, thus implanting the idea into their heads.
Did you know there's no actual scientific evidence that says that reading too close to your eyes or sitting too close to a TV causes damage? Feel free to slam those pages or that screen directly into your eyeballs, you're not going to damage your vision at all. What does damage your vision is time and strain. Eyes are meant to change focus throughout the day. It helps keep them limber, much like a muscle needs to stretch. If you stare at a screen for hours on end, or read a book for the same amount of time, then there's a chance that you can be doing damage to your eyes. But the proximity to the screen really doesn't matter at all, unless you're willing to put your screen about twenty feet away. Human eyes are made to see things at a farther distance. Which is why if you really want to keep your eyes strong, you should follow the 20-20-20 rule. Every 20 minutes you're really making your eyes work you should look at something 20 away for at least 20 seconds.
So remember that whole thing in France where the populace were pissed about unfair wealth distribution between the populace and the elites? There's a very famous line from that time said by the Queen at the time, Marie Antoinette. When people complained of the fact that they had no food to eat because of all the taxation, she responded to them "Let Them Eat Cake" totally seemingly blind to the fact that the cake is a luxury food, and not the way to fix a national crisis. However, Marie Antoinette never actually said this. Not even close. When the quote was first published she was 9 years old and had never even been to France. The reason that she's "famous" for speaking the quote is because the book that the quote is actually from attributes it to "a great princess" who was commenting it in a similar situation, a response to peasants who don't have enough to eat. It wasn't until well after her death that someone somewhere was like "yeah that sounds like something she would say" and thus centuries of misinformation began.
The funny part to me is that it doesn't even matter what the source really was. Maybe someone intentionally made the comparison as a point of criticism. Maybe legitimately didn't remember. Maybe someone who was researching the topic just made an assumption 'cause it sounded good. Whatever the source, we're left with this tidbit of information that just isn't true, that we carry forwards into the future like one grape in a bushel gone bad.
The thing about knowledge when you learn it is that it's hard to unlearn. Just ask any noir hero in an action movie drinking non stop trying to forget about their dark past. Information sticks with us. And worse than that, we use it as building blocks for other information. Our brains are very good at saying X + Y = Z statements. If a cube is a shape with 6 equal sides, and a di has equal sides, a di is a cube. If a quote was said by a famous French royal during a famine and also there was a famous French royal during a famine, it's likely the same person. That's called higher order thinking. The idea that you're using ideas built on other ideas to tackle more complicated problems. The downside, however, is if you find out at some point that one of your building blocks is rotten, what are you supposed to do? You could go and challenge literally all of your beliefs and try to reverify everything you know that could be entially related to that belief in order to regain confidence in your structure. You could also try removing the block and not replacing it, but boy does it suck to have to say "I don't know" when someone asks why you believe something. And "Because of this thing I later found out was a lie" is even worse. And then there's the third option. Get defensive, make shit up, and refuse to believe there's a problem.
Did you know the whole idea of a "sugar rush" is totally made up too? Sugar in no way gives you a burst of energy. This has been studied over and over, and it's been proven time and time again. It mostly comes from correlation instead of causation. Where are kids normally eating tons of sugar? Birthday parties maybe? Holidays? Places where kids are already encouraged to be a little extra. And I dunno about y'all, but just the prospect of getting a bunch of sugary stuff was exciting enough for me to go a little crazy. It makes sense right? Kids act crazy, kids ate sugar. Therefore sugar makes kids go crazy.
Speaking of food did you know the fruit in the garden of Eden wasn't an apple? Seriously. The book never ever specifies what kind of fruit it was hanging on the tree of knowledge. It could have been a plum, a banana, a grape. Anything. The best guess from the history nerds is that it was actually just a pun added somewhere in translation. The Latin word for "Apple" is "Malus", and the for "Evil" is "Mal". Either through someone making an intentional joke or a mistranslation evil became apple, and we've just gone with it ever since. Think about just how much pop culture has been influenced by that one decision. From Snow White to Bad Apple, apples have been used as a symbol for sinful desire for literally of years, and it's actually all just wrong.
If you've made it this far, I'm guessing that you're already picking up the pattern I'm laying down. A lot of things that people "know" they don't actually know at all. And boy howdy is that relevant for us. The idea that humans and animals dating was bad stretches all the way back to those biblical times. The rules of most religions can be seen both as a social contract as well as tips for survival. Stories made it more likely for that word to spread. Halal for instance exists because meat needs to come from and be prepared in specific ways to be safe. Don't steal from your neighbor means that you can feel safe having things without feeling like you constantly have to defend them. And don't have sex with animals is from the fact that, especially back in those times, animals were very dirty. Diseases were much less understood, but it was believed that animals were likely to give you diseases if you lay with them similarly to how they would if you ate them.
As the power of religion grew however, things changed. People started to see religion as a weapon that could be brandished against others in order to gain control and power. And that control and power extended to more and more the more rules were enforced. In some religions the concept of pleasure as a whole was seen as bad, because only the lord should give you pleasure. This of course included sexual pleasure. We all know how this goes, with the persecution of sexuality. But also any kinds of self pleasure, or sexual acts outside of just procreative sex. And of course bestiality isn't procreative, so i fell into the same boat.
And over time and time and time, this idea never really had a reason to be challenged. Instead, it just sort of settled. It became part of the social consciousness. Bestiality is bad. Just like homosexuality was bad a couple generations before. But, like we talked about, you can't just delete information from your brain like that. Especially when it's something that feels so foundational. So what do people do? Some of them take it head on and actually listen to arguments. But for the most part they do one of two things. They say "it's bad because I say it is" or they get super defensive and shut down, repeating the same tired arguments over and over again until the other person gets tired and gives up. Because to accept what they know is wrong would be too hard.
It feels worth mentioning that religion itself might be the biggest example of social knowledge out there. It's hard to pin point the exact origin of every religion, but it's easy to see where they came from, isn't it? People needed a way to explain the world around them before science existed, and they came up with all different kinds of stories in order to do so. And doesn't that explanation make WAY more sense than the alternative? I don't want to turn this into a "Tarro hates god" article, but considering what it's done to people like me allow me this small tangent. The bible is filled to the BRIM with fantastical stories. There is constantly stuff happening that defies reality, explained by the power of god an miracles. And yet we've had nothing since we were able to start recording? If god wanted to make people believe it would be very easy for him to just pop down for a sec and record a TikTok of him doing some god shit and then heading back. But that doesn't happen. And yet it doesn't matter. We're thousands of years out from the premise of religion and the concept still exists because it's embedded itself into our social knowledge, and there are people out there more willing to trust that social knowledge than they are willing to believe what's right in front of them.
And as zoos, that's really what we're fighting against. Not religion specifically, although it is sometimes. No, it's the idea of social knowledge. How do you tell someone that they're wrong about something without causing them to disengage or not really care?
I'm not sure, but I'm hoping that showing that everyone has false things they believe is a good start.
For fun, a few bonus things!
-Napoleon was actually tall for his demographics, not short. That comes from British propaganda. Literally the equivalent of people calling streamers bald except it changed his social perception forever.
-We use WAY more than 10% of our brains. Different activities trigger different regions and the more complex the task the more activation there is, but even while sleeping we can use more than 10%.
-Vikings never wore horned helmets. That's just a costume design from an Opera ages ago but the look was good and it stuck as a part of Viking style from there on.
-Shaving doesn't change how your hair grows back at all. It grows at a steady rate, with or without you cutting it.
-There is no "left brain" vs "right brained". In terms of one being more artistic vs logical. Both sides are used for most tasks.
-Cracking your knuckles has never once shown any kind of correlation with arthritis, that's totally made up.
-Carrots don't help your eyesight at all. It was just a weird wartime joke from the Brits to explain how they were so good at spotting enemy planes. In reality they actually just invented radar.
-Bulls don't hate the color red, they're actually colorblind to red. What they hate is when people abuse them, and then when they're let out they attack the motion of the red cape fluttering.
-Fortune cookies were invented in California.
-Article written by Tarro (December 2025)
-Find them at https://twitter.com/hereforthezoo
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