If you consume 100x as much fiction as you do history, you will subconsciously derive your beliefs from fiction. This is a well-studied finding in psychology called “source confusion”: you remember things you “learned” long after you’ve forgotten where you learned them. This applies to moral “lessons” derived from fiction as well. In fact, this is the entire reason we read morality tales with talking animals to our children: we know they will internalize the “lessons” in those stories, even though the stories are fake. After a lifetime of consuming such made up stories, you end up in a state I call “fiction-brained”: your beliefs about the world are subconsciously based primarily on movies, novels, etc. Propagandists have always relied on this effect: Nazi Germany released a dozen fictional movies that everyone knew were fiction but whose plots involved Jews doing villainous things. But the average American today hasn’t watched a dozen hours of fictional content, they’ve watched tens of thousands, making them the most propagandized people to ever live. The only way to combat this on a personal level is to consume much less fiction and to interact much more with the real world and consume history, biography, etc to unlearn your false beliefs.