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Here was my first life “teaching moment”.

I was taught a lie.

I believed the lie.

I told others the lie.

I trained others and convinced them to believe the lie.

Then—only many years later did I find out it was a lie.

In my younger days I had a summer job and then for a year or so a full time supervisory job for the U.S. Census Bureau. This was doing “off year” surveys of the public.

Part of the training for a newbie Census employee was the official creed of the Bureau—and one key element was the following claim:

“The U.S. Census Bureau information is confidential—and information about individual people (such as their name and address) will never be released to any other government agency.”

Many years later I found it was a lie.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-the-us-census-b/

As a naive young person I thought “never” meant “never”.

Apparently it meant “well hardly ever”.

Lol.