"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: if we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new ones rise.* - Carl Sagan, 1995, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark - Chapter 13: "Obsessed with Reality", Page 229

Joseph Campbell
Lecture I.1.4 - New Horizons
November 16, 1961

TRACK 4: Society’s Choice: Tradition or Truth?

Now this is a very serious affair. It is serious because these symbolic worlds were the supports of the civilizations, of the moralities of the civilizations, of the self-confidence of the civilizations, of the vitality and creative power of the civilizations. And with the cutting down, the frustrating of the self-confidence that derives from images of this kind, there is a disequilibrium within the society itself. And everyone is challenged in his loyalty—are you going to be loyal to the tradition, to the form, to the morality and myth of your society, or are you going to be loyal to truth? They are two different things.