People routinely invoke history in order to claim membership in a group and to sound important, not because they wish to call attention to the intricacies of the historical record or indeed the impermanence, ephemerality or triviality of the present in light of the vast range of actual realities or potential scenarios, the majority lying forever hidden from our view. Yet from this many will forcefully claim that the ancients knew better than the moderns regarding some practice or set of beliefs, or that our contemporaries must finally have arrived at the truth after so many untold centuries of error. What is held to be true changes; this much at least must be admitted  But what happens when the notion of truth itself is called into question? What happens when, publicly or privately, the only truth becomes 'nothing is true; everything is permitted'? The old skeptical argument that disagreement between peoples across world regions and historical eras implies that no universal truths can be established succeeds by default where people are incapable of making truths for themselves.