Hey there Shankar here. One lesson that 2020 has taught us over and over again is that it's very hard to predict the future.

We don't know what will happen tomorrow, much less what the world will look like in a month or a year from now.

But one thing we can do is to use the past to try to understand the present.

We've been thinking a lot in recent weeks about a conversation I had a while ago with historian Annette Gordon Reed.

Annette studies the life of Thomas Jefferson and the enslaved people who lived on his plantation.

Thomas Jefferson of course is the founding father who wrote the phrase,

all men are created equal in the Declaration of Independence.

The gulf between his professed values and his behavior is rich psychological terrain.

It also reveals something about the gap between our own professed values and our actions today.

Here's the show.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

All nations are built on stories.

The stories about ideals, the values around which people take their identity.

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing ground, might self-imite.

That's what it means to be Australian.

The only thing that Germany is saying is Wunderbarusland.

Let's build on brains, God bless Africa.

I thank you.

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.

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