The Founding Contradiction

[0] Hey there, Shankar here.

[1] One lesson that 2020 has taught us over and over again is that it's very hard to predict the future.

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

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

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

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

[6] Thomas Jefferson, of course, is the founding father who wrote the phrase, All men are created equal in the Declaration of Independence.

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

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

[9] Here's the show.

[10] This is Hidden Brain.

[11] I'm Shankar Vedantam.

[12] All nations...

[13] At the stroke of the midnight tower...