Every argument you've ever had about "fake news," "my truth vs. your truth," or why nobody can agree on basic facts anymore - didn't start with the internet. It started over a century ago, in the books of a handful of thinkers who had no idea they were quietly building the exact toolkit modern disinformation would later run on.

This episode starts with a declaration so famous it's been turned into a t-shirt slogan. Then moves to a thinker who insisted none of us can ever see the world clearly - only through a window someone else built. And runs into a third idea so unsettling that it suggests the story you tell yourself about your own choices might not be true at all.

And that's just the opening act.

What follows is a chain reaction - one idea after another, each one brilliant in its original context, each one eventually weaponized in ways its author almost certainly never intended.

Then there's a moment where an entire generation of thinkers decided that even the most "obvious," natural categories of human life were never quite as natural as they seemed, an idea whose consequences are playing out in headlines today.

But buried in the middle of this story is a confrontation almost nobody talks about. One thinker stood up and accused the others of a contradiction so basic, so almost embarrassingly simple, that it should have stopped the whole movement in its tracks.

But it didn't. And untangling why - what got ignored, what got weaponized, and what we're still missing today, is where this episode ends.

Press play and find out how a fight that started in 20th century university libraries became the argument we are all having today.

• ‘Belief is the Battlefield’ is a multimedia, multiplatform, self-explicating conceptual art project to mark 25 years since 9/11.
• It will last for one year.
• You can join in at ⁠⁠beliefisthebattlefield.com⁠⁠ or on our social media platforms.
• You can meet the others in groups that are popping up all over the internet.