This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

All nations are built on stories.

The stories about ideals,

the values around which people stake their identity.

The values around which people stake their identity.

The first thing that we say is that we are the people of the world.

Often, these stories contain contradictions.

Some so profound that most of us simply look the other way.

The United States has its own set of founding myths and its own set of contradictions.

One of the most striking unfolded in 1776 at a house on the southwest corner of 7th and Market Streets in Philadelphia.

That summer, 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson rented rooms at this house.

While he was there, he wrote the document that would formalize America's split from Britain,

the Declaration of Independence.

It says, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created.

They are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.

They are among these are life, and the pursuit of happiness.

And yet, even as he was writing these words,

Jefferson was attended on by an enslaved person, a 14-year-old boy named Robert Hemings.

Jefferson, in fact, owned hundreds of people.

He fathered six children with an enslaved woman.

Today, as we celebrate the Independence Day holiday in the United States,

we use history as a window into psychology.

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