“The map is not the territory.”
Saul Alinsky
We had a quiz in school this week where we had to label countries on a map. Easy, I thought- until I noticed something odd. The map we used showed Europe in the center, made Africa look tiny, and didn’t even name most of the Pacific islands.
I went home and compared that map to another one online. This second map was different. Africa looked bigger. South America was no longer squished. Australia wasn’t floating in the corner like an afterthought.
That’s when I realized: maps aren’t facts. They’re choices.
A map can’t show everything, so it shows what the maker wants you to see. And what the maker wants you to see can say a lot about how they see the world.
When I look at a globe, I see how connected everything is. But when I look at most flat maps, I see borders and divisions- lines that say “this belongs here” and “that doesn’t belong there.”
But what makes a line real? A river might make sense as a boundary. But a straight line through a desert? Or a border that splits a mountain range or a village?
Those lines didn’t come from nature. They came from people. And those people had power.
Drawn on paper, carved by pen,
The world is shaped again and again.
A border here, a country there,
A truth declared from someone's chair.
But land is land, and sky is sky,
No matter how the lines may lie.
Maps do not own the rivers they trace,
Nor the stories hiding behind every place.
I learned that the map most of us use in school—the Mercator projection—was made 500 years ago to help sailors cross oceans. But we’re not all sailors. So why are we still using that map to teach geography?
The truth is, maps don’t just show the world. They shape how we understand it.
If Africa is drawn smaller, do we treat it as less important? If Europe is centered, does that make it feel like the center of everything? If some countries aren’t named, do we forget they even exist?
Maps don’t lie because they’re evil. They lie because someone decided what the truth should look like.
And sometimes, the scariest lies are the ones that hang quietly on the classroom wall.
