The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.

The quiet power of repeated stories

We usually picture truth's enemy as someone actively lying—a deliberate deception we can catch and correct. But Kennedy points to something sneakier: the myth. A myth isn't someone's calculated falsehood. It's a story that gets repeated so often it feels real, even when nobody's trying to mislead us. It just persists.

Think about the myths swimming around your own life. That you need to hustle constantly to have worth. That successful people never doubt themselves. That one mistake defines you. Nobody sat down and invented these lies, yet they shape how you move through the world. They're persuasive precisely because they're embedded in everything—in what you absorbed growing up, what you see online, what seems "normal." Fighting an obvious lie is straightforward. But a myth disguises itself as just how things are.

The tricky part is that myths feel protective. They give us simple stories when reality is messier. Spotting them requires real work: noticing what you assume without question, asking why you believe it, staying curious about alternative possibilities. That's harder than calling out a deliberate lie, but it's where real clarity actually begins.