"It seems likely that in every culture, there have been truths, which…

"It seems likely that in every culture, there have been truths, which moreover everyone knows to be true on some level, but which are so corrosive to the culture’s moral self-conception that one can’t assert them, or even entertain them seriously, without (in the best case) being ostracized for the rest of one’s life. In the USSR, those truths were the ones that undermined the entire communist project: for example, that humans are not blank slates; that Mendelian genetics is right; that Soviet collectivized agriculture was a humanitarian disaster. In our own culture, those truths are—well, you didn’t expect me to say, did you? 🙂"

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3376