Truth: A Brief History of Total Bullsh*t

by Tom Phillips

Overview

This is a book about TRUTH—and all the ways we try to avoid it—from the bestselling author of Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up.

We live in a “post-truth” world, we’re 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 other—and ourselves—about everything from business to politics to plain old geography. Along the way, he chronicles the world’s 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 humanity’s checkered past, Truth reveals why people lie—and how we can cut through the bullsh*t.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781335983763
Publisher:	Hanover Square Press
Publication date:	05/05/2020
Edition description:	Original
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	656,004
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Tom Phillips is an author and journalist from London. He is currently the editor of Full Fact, the UK’s independent fact checking organisation; before that, he was editorial director at BuzzFeed UK. His previous book, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up (a history of failure through the ages), was published in 2018 and has sold in 30 territories worldwide.

Table of Contents

Author's Note 13

Introduction: Moment of Truth 17

Chapter 1 The Origin of the Specious 29

Chapter 2 Old Fake News 53

Chapter 3 The Misinformation Age 83

Chapter 4 The Lie of the Land 121

Chapter 5 The Scam Manifesto 147

Chapter 6 Lying in State 185

Chapter 7 Funny Business 209

Chapter 8 Ordinary Popular Delusions 233

Conclusion: Toward a Truthier Future 253

Acknowledgments 269

Further Reading 273

Picture Credits 279

About the Author 283

Endnotes 287

Index 305

Editorial Reviews

2020-03-29
A professional fact checker says that if you think we live in “a uniquely fact-resistant time,” you need to check your facts.

Phillips, the London-based editor of the nonpartisan fact-checking organization Full Fact, sounds a distinctly British keep-calm-and-carry-on note in this anecdotal rejoinder to the idea that “we live in a ‘post-truth’ age.” “Don’t get me wrong,” he writes. “I’m not trying to convince you that our present time isn’tstuffed 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 that there was a ‘truth age’ at some point that we can now be ‘post-’ about.” Lacing profanity into jaunty but often sophomoric arguments, Phillips notes that ancient clay tablets record the misdeeds of an apparently dishonest Mesopotamian merchant. Later dissemblers include showman P.T. Barnum, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, and Benjamin Franklin, a “gleeful perpetrator” of literary hoaxes under pseudonyms. Why do we tolerate lies? The reasons range from laziness (it’s too much trouble to check facts) to the cognitive bias called “anchoring,” “our brain’s tendency to latch onto the first piece of information we get about any subject and give it more weight than anything else.” Phillips allows that lies can kill—“when our leaders lie, sometimes really, really, really large numbers of people die. There can be wars and stuff”—but we needn’t “freak out” about perfidies like “fake news.” We can survive them “just as long as we don’t throw up our hands and go all, ‘LOL—nothing matters.’ ” The author’s jolly style at times has the air of insouciance he warns against, and in a presidential election year in which a candidate’s lies can have perilous consequences, this book may strike Americans as tone deaf.

A lighthearted history of lying that may play better in Britain than in the U.S.

Kirkus Reviews