When I was growing up in Lithuania, then occupied by the Soviet Union, indoctrination was simply part of everyday life. Of course, as a child, I did not call it indoctrination.

I called it school.

I remember being in the second grade and reading Stories About Lenin’s Childhood. For those who may not be familiar with Soviet history, Vladimir Lenin was the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the founder of the Soviet state, but that was certainly not the Lenin we met in second grade.

We met Volodia, the affectionate diminutive of Vladimir.

Young Volodia was wonderful. He helped his mother, respected older people, studied hard, behaved beautifully, and appeared to be thoughtful, kind, responsible, generous, and altogether exceptional in every possible category.

I remember thinking, Wow. What a wonderful boy.

And why wouldn’t I? I was eight years old, and nobody handed us another book afterward called Now Let’s Look at What Happened Later.

Around that same age, Soviet children became Octobrists, named after the October Revolution of 1917, and we were given a small red-star pin with the face of young Volodia in the center. I remember wearing mine proudly, as everyone did, without having the slightest understanding of revolutions, political terror, executions, civil war, ideology, or the enormous human cost that followed the Bolsheviks’ rise to power.

I knew only the smiling little boy on my pin, and I believed the story I had been given.

For quite a while.

Years later, when I began learning history beyond the carefully sanitized version presented to Soviet children, the picture became considerably more complicated. That experience stayed with me, not because it convinced me that everything we are taught is false — that would simply replace one form of certainty with another — but because it left me with a question that has followed me throughout my life:

Who told you that?

Who told me this was true? Where did the story come from? What was left out? Who benefits if I believe it? And perhaps most importantly, have I ever examined it for myself?

It is an uncomfortable question because so much of what we call our beliefs did not actually begin with us. We inherit ideas from our parents, schools, governments, religions, cultures, newspapers, television, professors, experts, friends, and now, of course, algorithms. Some of those ideas are true, some are partly true, some were once true and are no longer, some are opinions wearing very respectable clothing, and some have simply been repeated so often that eventually nobody remembers to ask where they came from.

Repetition is remarkably persuasive. Hear something once and you may question it; hear it a hundred times and it becomes familiar; hear it for twenty years and suddenly it begins to sound like “common knowledge.”

Human beings have always told stories about the world, and we probably could not function without them. The problem begins when we forget that a story is still a story and start treating it as the whole picture.

And propaganda, of course, was never exclusively Soviet. Countries have preferred narratives, political movements have them, institutions have them, generations have them, and even families have them. Sometimes we grow up believing that Uncle George was a brilliant businessman, only to discover years later that Uncle George actually went bankrupt three times and Aunt Mary quietly paid all the bills.

History is not the only place where editing occurs.

That is why I do not think the answer is to distrust everything. That would be exhausting. Imagine having to investigate every statement before breakfast: Is this actually coffee? Who told me that?

At some point, we do have to function.

But healthy skepticism may simply mean stopping occasionally, especially when something feels completely obvious, and asking: How do I actually know this?

There is another danger as well. Once people discover that they have been misled about one thing, they can become tempted to believe the opposite of everything. If the official story was wrong, then surely the unofficial story must be right.

Not necessarily.

Discovering that one explanation was incomplete does not automatically reveal the truth. Sometimes it simply creates an empty space that another illusion is very happy to occupy.

That is where discernment becomes so important. We should be able to question conventional ideas without automatically rejecting them, just as we should be able to consider unconventional ideas without swallowing them whole. We should be able to say, “This is interesting. Let me look,” and after looking, still be perfectly comfortable saying, “I don’t know.”

There are worse places to be.

As I wrote in my previous Editorial, the longer I live, and the more I learn, the more comfortable I become with not knowing everything. But there is one thing my childhood taught me very clearly: if someone gives you a beautiful little red star with the face of an exceptionally well-behaved child in the middle, it might be worth asking a few questions.

Preferably before wearing it for several years.

So every once in a while, I take one of my comfortable certainties off the shelf, dust it off, and ask myself:

Do I actually know this?

Or have I simply believed it for a very long time?

And then comes my favorite question:

Who told me that?

— J.B. Gattini
Founder & Editor
Enlightenment Media News