What is the most Successful Lie in History?

YolkBrushWork402@kbin.social to Moving to: m/AskMbin!@kbin.social – 47 points –

Whenever my mom says "Tell the truth you won't be in trouble." I would almost always end up telling the truth and i end up getting in trouble and she would talk to my dad and all kinds of things, what's the most successful Lie in History?

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I’d say the Donation of Constantine

It was a forged Imperial Roman decree supposedly from Emperor Constantine the Great, which gave all temporal power over the Western Roman Empire to the Pope. Now, how is this important? This was how the papacy came into possession of the Lateran Palace, which was the Pope’s residence for much of history. It also served as the justification for the pope to break the formal convention of the five episcopal sees (i.e in the early church, Rome was just one of the important seats of power, the others were: Constantinople, Jerusalem, Alexandria and Antioch and all had equal authority) and declare itself supreme over the other centres. It also played an important role in the events of the Great Schism of 1054 (which formally separated the Western Latin church from the Eastern Greek church) and the investiture crisis in the 11th to 13th centuries.

Way to make me learn. On social media.

Seriously though, thanks for this great comment!

If you subscribe to the right subs/magazines/communities/whatever, there is a ton to learn. History, science, archeology, sociology, psychology, medicine, marine biology, mycology, geography, foreign languages, programming.... On and on and on. Social media doesn't have to be utter crap.

I'm trying to rebuild my sources after losing the useful ones on Reddit. Which ones in Lemmy/Kbin can you recommend?

Religions. All of them.

The exact lie would be: "There's a supreme being watching you. Now do as I say!"
That's the gist of all religions I know.

Richard Dawkins first coined the word ‘meme’ to describe a self-replicating idea, akin to a gene. He gave religion as a prime example with the form something along the lines of “statements X,Y,Z are true. It is your duty to make others believe this, or they will go to hell”.

It’s been 40 years - I can’t remember the original formulation 🙂

"Iraq has WMDs" - W

Though it's important to remember that the whole WMD thing came from British intelligence; Bush's fault was blindly trusting their intelligence or, perhaps more accurately, accepting our own intelligence's appraisal of "maybe" as enough confirmation.

3 more...

The lost cause doctrine and related overall glorification of the u.s. civil war era confederacy. The fact that there are confederate statues in states that fought for the union is insane…

Brexit. Millions voted against their own interests and to make themselves poorer and more insular in order to empower the wealthy elite, thanks to the unrelenting torrent of lies emitted by the Leave campaign.

For a lie to be completely successful I think none of us would ever know it was a lie.

Carrots are good for your eyes (particularly night vision).

For what it's worth, vitamin A is good for your eyes, particularly night vision. However, the carrot thing was in fact a lie. While carrots do have vitamin A, vegetables are not a good source of it; you need a meat-based source in order for it to be readily available to your body (sorry vegans--fortunately, it can be supplemented with pills). And no matter how much of it you eat, you will not get super night vision.

Diamonds are rare and should be expensive. Laughable.

"Money can't buy happiness." "If you work hard, YOU TOO can be a billionaire." and other snips of class warfare/propaganda made to trick poor people into feeling complacent or even aggressively attached to their position of being shat on by oligarchs.

We (collective) eat that shit up and then beg for seconds when we should be erecting guillotines.