The Cult Mentality: Why Intelligent People Can Fall for Stupid Things

Hey everyone. Thanks so much for coming out. I want to thank the Secular Hub for hosting this talk and allowing me a platform to speak on my ideas about cults and critical thinking.

Before we get into the meat of this, there’s a couple points I like to make. For those of you familiar with my work, you may have heard some of this before but it is really important and bears repeating.

There are these two things called tolerance and understanding and I put a lot of value on them because as far as I’m concerned, they are the grease that smooths the cogs and wheels of human interaction. Without tolerance and understanding, there can be no common ground or basis for communication and you just get fighting and even violence. There are a lot of misunderstandings and weird ideas about cults out there and if we are ever going to do something about the cult problem we need to approach it from a problem solving point of view instead of a violent or antagonistic one.

Just because someone holds a belief you find odd doesn’t mean that person is stupid and deserves to be called names. There are some brilliant people out there who know all kinds of great stuff but at the same time they believe in things that most people would consider pure madness. It’s not a reflection of their intelligence that they maintain these odd beliefs. In fact, according to my experience the smarter a person is, the more easily they might find it to believe in things that I would say are…questionable. But we should never make the mistake of insulting a person’s intelligence because of what they believe.

These are two different brain functions. The parts of our mind that rationalize or justify belief are not the same parts of our mind that hold knowledge or compute math problems. In fact, there are a number of brain functions involved in belief, not just one or two. We’re going to talk about some of these tonight.

I only stress this at the beginning because we in the atheist and skeptic community have a real PR problem out in the big, wide world. It’s actually getting better among younger people but you can see on this chart from the Pew Research Center that we still have a long way to go. This chart shows the “feeling thermometer” where people were asked to express positive or negative feelings about each of these various groups.

If you spend any time on social media as an outspoken atheist, you probably already know what I’m talking about. But it’s not really that big of a surprise.

We are fighting an uphill battle against firmly entrenched beliefs which are inculcated at the same time children are learning to read, write and walk. In the case of second generation believers, they were never consulted or asked to make a choice about their beliefs. They are so ingrained that it takes a great degree of effort to question them at all. Some of us skeptics have had an easier time than others in letting go of religious ideas or woo beliefs we were raised with, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that your experience with this is universal. People are wildly different. Some people can change their ideas like they change clothes, while others might as well be wearing brick overcoats. And when you talk to them about their beliefs, it sometimes feels like you’re talking to a pile of bricks, so I understand the frustration!

However, while I might preach tolerance and understanding, I also want to be clear that organized religions or cultic groups are not above reproach and should be criticized when they engage in illegal or immoral activities. These groups get up to all kinds of nonsense that deserve our harshest criticism, including engaging in child abuse, sexual assault, psychological and emotional blackmail, breaking up families through shunning, and a host of other offenses including even starting wars as is happening right now in the Middle East. My short version of this is that you have the right to THINK whatever you want, that doesn’t give you the right to DO whatever you want. We in the skeptic community have every right to criticize bad actors for their bad actions.

Now how bad is it out there anyway when it comes to extremist thinking and activity? Well, the truth is that it’s pretty bad. I like to maintain an optimistic outlook and I’m helped in this by the works of people like Dr. Steven Pinker.

If you have read his work or watched his TED talks, you know that statistically things are actually getting better in terms of war, homicide, drug abuse and starvation. This comes down to problem solving. As we evolve better and better technology and expand our scope of knowledge, these problems are surrendering to our efforts to solve them and this is actually a really good thing. You’ll not see this reported in mass media or talked about much on social media and the reasons for this are not so much because of some media conspiracy as much as the fact that our social and news media are reflections of our own psychology.

The unpleasant truth is that our minds are made to focus on bad news more so than good. When we think of something as a threat to our survival, our attention gets riveted on that to the exclusion of good news or pleasant things. It’s pretty obvious how this would be an evolutionary mechanism, but often us thinking, “rational” human beings can take this too far and we end up with a very skewed, unrealistic look at the big wide world as a result. That psychology is what works against us when it comes to cultic beliefs too.

So I said it was pretty bad. Let’s look at some numbers.

A 2016 Gallup poll found that 89% of Americans stated they have a belief in God. However, when presented with more than a “yes or no” option, about eight in 10 say they believe and one in 10 say they aren’t sure. It was not made clear in the poll who or what God was exactly, so we aren’t talking specifically about Old or New Testament God or Allah or anything more specific.

Now it is true that belief in God, regardless of how the question is phrased to Americans, is down from levels in past decades but if you’re thinking atheism is taking over and we’ve got this problem solved, then you’d be wrong. For example, here are some other results from that same poll. Can you guess what the percentage is?

Belief in angels: 72%
Heaven is a real place: 71%
Hell is a real place: 64%
The devil is an indivdual, real entity: 61%

Now you can contrast these with the Pew numbers on declining church attendance and show that churches might be getting less people coming around but that doesn’t mean strange beliefs aren’t still a huge problem in the US.

47% believe it is very or somewhat likely the Air Force is covering up proof of ETs
1 out of 4 believe ETs have visited Earth.

37% believe in haunted houses
1 in 5 believe in witches

History professor and conspiracy theory expert Stephen Andrews said “It’s hard not to think that we are living in a medieval world with high speed internet.”

The world we actually live in is much more mystic and magical than most of us want to believe. For a lot of people, the enchanted world that Disney presents is actually more a reflection of reality than what you see on Cosmos or Nova.

Now let me draw a comparison here that might not be obvious but I think is crucial to understanding mystical beliefs and cult thinking. A big factor behind all of this is control.

Again, it’s not hard to see why when you look at our evolutionary development. One thing that is different about human beings from the rest of the species on earth is the degree of control we feel we have to exert on our entire environment. We claim possession over whole swaths of land, give them names and boundaries and borders and we claim ownership of everything in them. This also makes us one of the most aggressive species on Earth. We might walk with caution and a big gun when we are out in the jungles or the savanna and we know we don’t stand a chance in a one-on-one encounter with a bear or a lion. Yet it’s still easy for us to hold the belief that we own the land those animals are living on and we are the ones who claim mastery over not only that land, but all of those animals too.

One of the essential, core beliefs of conspiracy thinking is that someone is in charge, someone is in control. This is why it aligns with religious beliefs at a fundamental level. As bad as any conspiracy might be, knowing about the conspiracy at least gives the believers the idea that they can predict and somewhat control or at least influence the world and their future. Many of our daily rituals and certainly almost all religious rituals come from this desire to predict and control our external environment.

And now let’s bring one more key component into the mix here. These ideas of religious or cultish belief and conspiracy theory are closely related to identity. When you argue belief or close personal ideas, you are not having a rational, objective conversation that has nothing to do with the person you’re arguing with. You have to realize that when you are arguing belief, are attacking them personally because they have made their belief system part of their self-image.

So when you put these statistics and psychology together, you see that rationality is in short supply out there. And I haven’t even touched on implicit and explicit biases, prejudices and a host of other cognitive mechanisms that work against a fully objective or rational view of our world. In fact, it gets even worse.

Oxford University psychologist Dr. Olivera Petrovich stated “Infants are hard-wired to believe in God and atheism has to be learned.” I know this is going to be a controversial statement amongst the atheist community because it goes against everything they’ve assumed but Dr. Petrovich has good reason to come to that conclusion. She is a developmental psychologist with the Experimental Psychology Department at Oxford and also teaches on the psychology of religion. This is her specialty.

Her findings were based on several studies, particularly one of Japanese children aged four to six, and another of 400 British children aged five to seven from seven different faiths. You can look into her studies yourself but here’s a rather telling quote from a 2008 interview with Science & Spirit:

“I tested both the Japanese and British children on the same tasks, showing them very accurate, detailed photographs of selected natural and man-made objects and then asking them questions about the causal origins of the various natural objects at both the scientific level (e.g. how did this particular dog become a dog?) and at the metaphysical level (e.g. how did the first ever dog come into being?). With the Japanese children, it was important to establish whether they even distinguished the two levels of explanation because, as a culture, Japan discourages speculation into the metaphysical, simply because it’s something we can never know, so we shouldn’t attempt it. But the Japanese children did speculate, quite willingly, and in the same way as British children. On forced choice questions, consisting of three possible explanations of primary origin, they would predominantly go for the word ‘God,’ instead of either an agnostic response (e.g., ‘nobody knows’) or an incorrect response (e.g., ‘by people’). This is absolutely extraordinary when you think that Japanese religion — Shinto — doesn’t include creation as an aspect of God’s activity at all. So where do these children get the idea that creation is in God’s hands? It’s an example of a natural inference that they form on the basis of their own experience. My Japanese research assistants kept telling me, ‘We Japanese don’t think about God as creator — it’s just not part of Japanese philosophy.’ So it was wonderful when these children said, ‘Kamisama! God! God made it!’ That was probably the most significant finding.

 

“I’ve also established that children’s natural concepts of God aren’t purely anthropomorphic. They certainly acquire a conception of God-as-man through their religious education, but no child actually links the representation of, for example, God-as-Jesus with the creator of the world. Rather, their images of God the creator correspond to abstract notions like gas, air, and a person without a body. When you press them, they of course fall back on what they’ve been told, saying things like, ‘I know he’s a man because I saw him on the telly,’ or ‘He’s just like my daddy.’ These are very rational responses, but they’re not natural conceptions formed by children. Rather they’re imposed by the culture in which the children live.”

Our default setting is to believe in God or at least in supernatural forces beyond our control or knowledge, so learning critical thinking is already at a disadvantage because we’re fighting our own natural instincts to think otherwise. Given what I’ve been doing over the past five years learning, talking about and teaching critical thinking skills, this is no surprise to me at all. It’s a totally uphill battle trying to get people to think with evidence-based reasoning and I dare say there are probably people in this room tonight who hold beliefs that some of us might call unreasonable, even if it’s just a fear of the dark or ESP.

And here’s the thing: even if our own internal setting has been changed from “belief” to “non-belief” we are still compelled by social and societal obligations and responsibilities to be hesitant about our lack of belief, to want to get along with others who have very strong convictions about the supernatural or God. “No man is an island” and because we don’t live alone, we are constantly under the sway and influence of the beliefs of others around us.

This is most easily seen in familial or romantic relationships, the ones we actually value most, where our family or spouse put pressure on us to see things they way they do out of love and respect. The psychology behind this is legion, including attachment theory, which is another default state for us. We want to be loved and cared for and have very natural urges in that direction. We also want to love and care for others – this is our compassion or “empathy gene” in full flower.

So how does all this tie in to cultic thinking? Well, let’s define what a destructive cult is first because this is a loaded word, to say the least.

In its most basic sense, a destructive cult is an abusive relationship. This could come down to a one-on-one romantic or friendship based relationship or can be as large as a council of leaders and millions of followers. The dynamics and mechanisms are the same. Beyond the abusive relationship, another important component is a focused belief that feeds hope in a goal which could not otherwise be accomplished without that relationship in place. In a romantic relationship, this is obvious because you wouldn’t have the romance or the relationship without the other person, so the relationship itself as well as all the attendant pleasure and happiness it’s supposed to bring is the goal.

For people in group-based cults, the goal could be anything from living a slightly less depressing life to attaining supernatural abilities to becoming trained or successful in some endeavor or field. Destructive cults are not only religious in nature, but you’ll find religious frameworks and language are often used including tying in familial language such as referring to the leader as Father or Mother and fellow members as brothers or sisters. It’s not any accident that organized religion uses these familial terms to subconsciously gain a level of intimacy or closeness that they do not deserve.

Cults take these cognitive mechanisms and turn the dial up to 11. This is what I call extremism. This manifests itself in certain, easy to spot ways.

Sociologist Dr. Janja Lalich wrote in her book “Take Back Your Life” a checklist of destructive cult characteristics. Here are a few of them:

* The group displays excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader and (whether he is alive or dead) regards his belief system, ideology, and practices as the Truth, as law.

* Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.

* The leadership dictates, sometimes in great detail, how members should think, act, and feel. For example, members must get permission to date, change jobs or get married. Leaders prescribe what types of clothes to wear, where to live, whether or not to have children, how to discipline children, and so forth.

* The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s) and members. For example, the leader is considered the Messiah or a special being and is usually on a special mission to save humanity.

* The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which may cause conflict with the wider society.

* The leader is not accountable to any authorities. This is the polar opposite of teachers, military commanders or even ministers, priests, monks, and rabbis of mainstream religious denominations, who do have a chain of command and are answerable to it.

So you can see that destructive cults are not just isolationist but are actually anti-social. Cultic relationships are all about power and control. Money and sex are often used as tools of domination but only to the degree that they give the leader power and control. In order to gain the kind of control that cult leaders want over their followers, they have to isolate them from the rest of society.

Cult leaders are unique personalities that are definitely different from your average Joe or Mary. We use words like narcissism, sociopathy and even psychopathy to describe anti-social personalities who lack empathy and compassion but who are very good at faking it. The exact definitions of these terms changes over time but common to all of them is not just an unwillingness but an actual inability to empathize with others or experience emotional commitment, trust and honesty in the same way the average human being does.

I don’t think anyone knows the exact percentage of these kinds of people in society at large, but based on psychological diagnoses, narcissists make up 1% of the population, sociopaths 5% and psychopaths 1%. Given that these diagnoses may overlap to one degree or another, 5-7% of the population is a good guess. In the US alone that makes 21 million people who are in it wholly and completely for themselves.

Cult leaders gain power by circumventing our critical thinking and they do that by knowingly using our minds against us. I want to just take a moment to stress that they are knowingly manipulating people. There are no cult leaders, there are no narcissists, there are no sociopaths who do what they do out of ignorance or just “by accident.” They may be doing some of what they do by instinct instead of by premeditation, but they are well aware of the fact that they are manipulating and using people for their own ends. The difference with them is they don’t care.

Of course, like almost everything with behavior, and personally I find it sort of fascinating, this kind of personality is on a spectrum. Narcissism isn’t a black and white thing. It’s not a matter of you’re good, you’re good, you’re good, oh! now you’re a total psychopath. It’s a graduated scale and on the extreme ends are the Hitlers and Stalins and you can have lesser versions of those things.

So how do smart people fall for the nonsense that destructive cult leaders put out and how do they find themselves engaging in the shenanigans of cult activities like excessive fasting, chanting or meditating for days at a time, etc. etc? Well, again, it’s a spectrum that one is gradually indoctrinated in as one progressively accepts more and more of the cult teachings.

Learning is a fascinating process. To the degree a person can personally relate to the material and find examples of how that information applies to them personally, I believe they learn it that much faster and easier. And no matter what cult you are talking about or what it’s belief system might be, something I think they all have in common in their recruitment process is finding something important and personal about yourself that can be exploited. It doesn’t have to even be just one thing, but it has to be something that matters to you.

If you passed a stranger on the street who said “Hey, would you like to know the secret teachings of Master Blutowski that will enable you to control the universe?” you probably and correctly would think that person was a bit nuts and you’d ignore them and keep walking. But if someone said “Hey, would you like to know why you sometimes feel down for no reason at all?” or “Hey, you see pictures in your mind all the time but did you ever stop to wonder what’s looking at those pictures?” then you might be a little more interested in what that person had to say. Maybe enough to stop and talk to them. What the cult recruiter is doing is actually like any other sales pitch, except in order to get you to buy, they have to get you to open up and tell them your doubts, your fears or what you feel is ruining your life. They have to get past your social niceties and manners and that means they have to build some degree of authority and some degree of trust. That takes time and it takes work and the successful cult recruiters are the ones who are best at making it seem like they really care about you.

By implying, or sometimes just outright stating, that they have knowledge you don’t have, or have some leg up on things that you would like to have too, they catch your attention. They reel you in by getting you to talk about yourself. There are very few people who don’t like to talk about themselves. As far as each of us is concerned, we are the most interesting and important thing in the universe. And we know ourselves and the issues we have better than anyone else. If someone takes an interest in you and stands there expectantly and doesn’t say anything, you’ll feel compelled to talk. Once they get you going, it’s usually fairly easy to keep you going. The key in the recruitment process is getting you to trust and to open up a little. Then when you see that you’re not getting a face full of judgement and argument back at you, you feel safer and you’re willing to open up a little more. So long as the cult member does their job and just listens to what you have to say with compassion and even concern, the more you’ll tell them and the more ammunition you are giving them to eventually take what you’re saying and start using it to manipulate you.

They may use some kind of gimmick to get you to open up, like Scientology’s personality test or using their E-meter to do a stress test. These gimmicks aren’t the sales pitch, they are just a tool used to get you to sit down and start talking.

There are two things the recruiter is trying to accomplish here: (1) get you to open up and (2) then use what you have said to convince you that the cult leader has information or techniques which you could use to make your life better. If you were to get a recording of the whole conversation later, you’d have a lot of material to deconstruct in terms of how they take advantage of your cognitive mechanisms but really it comes down to two logical fallacies they are using against you: appeal to emotion and then appeal to authority.

For anyone unfamiliar, appeal to emotion simply means that rather than use facts or evidence to convince someone, they are instead told that if something feels good or feels right, it must be true. There are lots of variations of this including the idea that if something makes you fearful or produces almost any kind of emotional response, there must be something valid and true about it.

Appeal to authority is when you take someone’s word or testimonial as true or probably true because you have been convinced that their knowledge, education, background or experience has given them knowledge or experience you don’t have. There are plenty of examples where it’s not necessarily wrong to do this, but there are plenty more examples where it can be a disaster to blindly accept anyone’s word as law.

The process of making you a cult member is simply the process of playing on these fallacies and indoctrinating you in the techniques of the cult. This is where things can get wildly variable, because the methodology of every cult is different. In Transcendental Meditation, for example, you’re going to be indoctrinated into the wonders of meditation according to the infinite wisdom of Maharshi Mahesh Yogi. At first, you’re just given a simple mantra and told to meditate for 15-20 minutes a day. If you get some kind of benefit from that, you’ll be told that a little is good but a lot is great! In fact, hours and hours of meditation every single day is the only real path to spiritual enlightenment. Once you start doing that for hours on end, basically engaging in hypnotic trance induction and opening yourself up to post-hypnotic suggestions, you’ll be introduced to the idea that through meditation you can levitate or fly. And not only that, but through your meditation and flying, you’ll be spiritually cleansing the entire planet of its negative energy. You’ll be convinced that by sitting in a room, chanting a mantra to yourself for hours or even days at a time, you’re bringing about world peace. I’m not even kidding.

Clearly there is no way anyone would buy into that on Day 1 or even Day 2 or Day 20. It takes time to build this up. You help the process along through a couple of cognitive mechanisms that every single one of us have:

* confirmation bias: the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories. When any of us receive new information, our brains immediately start processing it by comparing and contrasting it with what we already know, automatically looking for similarities or points of agreement with the new information. We don’t have to think about doing this – our brains do it for us because we want to be right in our thinking and so we want everything new coming in to either confirm or reinforce what we already have accepted to be true. This is the exact opposite of critical thinking, which is one of the reasons critical thinking is so hard to do. We are fighting our natural thought processes when we are critically analyzing new information.

* motivated reasoning: When people form and cling to false beliefs because of emotional bias despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, this is called motivated reasoning. According to a 2006 article in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience,”This is a form of implicit emotion regulation in which the brain converges on judgments that minimize negative and maximize positive affect states associated with threat to or attainment of motives.” And since that’s difficult to understand when said outloud, let me put this way: rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief, people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe. This is the exact reason why smarter people are more susceptible to and will hold on to irrational beliefs more easily than people with less reasoning power. We use our intellect to seek out information that will reinforce what we believe and reject anything that counters our beliefs. Again, this is the opposite of critical thinking but it’s automatic and almost effortless. It takes a great deal of effort to overcome this.

* appeal to authority: I mentioned earlier how in the recruitment process, the recruiter has to sell you on the authority of the cult leader. But there is a lot more to the appeal to authority than just raising the cult leader on a dais. There is also the Milligram experiments and what they teach us about authority. You know why Scientology staff members wear uniforms? Because it grants them subconscious authority. Symbolism is everything when it comes to how we think about things. When you walk into any place which is clean, orderly and the people are uniformed, you automatically think that these are people who have it together and you automatically grant them a degree of authority. The exact opposite happens if you were to walk into say a smelly, dirty record shop where last week’s food is still on the counter and the guy sitting there looks like some drugged out hippie reject. This guy might be the world’s authority on Led Zeppelin but subconsciously there’s going to be a rejection of this shop and this man based solely on how he presents himself.

Now everyone’s different so what I’m saying here isn’t universal. I’m sure some people would have the exact opposite reaction to what I’m describing. The point is that however it’s gotten, a cult that knows what they are doing are going to try to set themselves up as authorities. Hell, Tom Cruise flat out said in that infamous turtleneck video that Scientology is the authority on the mind and life. He said that because he believes it and because L. Ron Hubbard said so. He’s just parroting the man who Cruise has accepted as an authority figure in his life. That’s what we do with authorities. We believe them. We follow their orders. We don’t question them. Our entire culture, and I’d say every culture on earth, raises its children to not question authority. Otherwise no parent would ever be able to control their kids.

What Milgram shows us is how powerful a motivating force, authority can be. We don’t just have a little tiny bias to sometimes do as we’re told. We are practically slaves to authority.

Milgram set up an experiment where the subject of the experiment, let’s say in this case it’s a guy named Joe, thought they were actually part of a test. The subject was instructed to teach word-pairs to another person who was out of sight called the learner. When the learner made a mistake, the subject was instructed to punish the learner by giving him a shock, 15 volts higher for each mistake.

The learner never received the shocks, but pre-taped audio was triggered when a shock-switch was pressed.

The person actually running the experiment would have on a lab coat and a clip board and would be seated in the same room as Joe. If Joe hesitated or asked questions, the experimenter would answer with predefined ‘prods’ (“Please continue”, “Please go on”, “The experiment requires that you go on”, “It is absolutely essential that you continue”, “You have no other choice, you must go on”), starting with the mild prods, and making it more authoritarian for each time Joe questioned what was going on.

If Joe asked who was responsible if anything would happen to the learner, the experimenter answered “I am responsible”. This let Joe off the hook and made it easier for him to continue shocking the learner.

Although most subjects were uncomfortable doing it, all 40 subjects obeyed up to 300 volts.

25 of the 40 subjects continued to give shocks until the maximum level of 450 volts was reached.

Before the Stanley Milgram Experiment, experts thought that about 1-3 % of the subjects would not stop giving shocks. They thought that you’d have to be pathological or a psychopath to do so.

But the harsh reality is that 65% never stopped giving shocks. None stopped when the learner said he had heart-trouble. How could that be? We now believe that it has to do with our almost innate behavior that we should do as we are told.

These experiments have been peer-reviewed and replicated many times. There have also been some very interesting variations done on the conditions of the testing which you might want to read about some time but which all point to one solid and inarguable conclusion: we might say in private conversation that we have strong moral compasses and we would never blindly just follow orders, but when push comes to shove and the rubber meets the road, most of us do exactly what we’re told regardless of the consequences.

I’m sure you can see how this plays in to cult recruitment and membership. A cult authority figure will order their followers to do the most ridiculous, annoying, dangerous or even criminal actions and the cult members will obey those orders. The sad but true reality is that in most cases, they will do that because we are pre-programmed to obey authority figures, regardless of what the belief system even says. For example, in Scientology, Hubbard talks quite a bit about the importance of communication and how any problem with personal relationships or conflicts can be resolved with communication alone. Yet he then created a policy of shunning or disconnection which ensures that no one can ever resolve their problems with communication because Scientologists are told to cut off their friends or family members if Scientology deems those friends or family to be anti-Scientology. This apparent contradiction in Hubbard’s dogma versus practice is easily rationalized by Scientologists using the cognitive mechanisms I mentioned earlier. So this whole appeal to authority thing is a much bigger deal and a stronger motivation than most people realize.

So given all of this, our evolutionary deck is stacked against us. The fact is that it’s a bit of a miracle we are not all wrapped up in some kind of oddball or weird belief and caught up in some cult situation. So is there a bright side to any of this? Yes, there is. I never want to just end a talk like this with how bad it all is. So let me point out a couple rays of hope.

First off, we like to rag on how poor our public education is, but let’s take a good look at some of the fundamental concepts which we get in school these days that people in ages past did not get. These are ideas that we all take for granted now because we were raised with them, but we don’t really appreciate how revolutionary and new these ideas are in a historical context. It’s only been in the last few generations that these ideas have been around. They are:

• questions have answers
• answers can be found in the physical world by observing, guessing at what those observations mean and re-working our ideas accordingly. This is the basis of the scientific method.
• therefore, if we don’t have the answers, we can find them
• therefore, the material universe is capable of being understood
• also, there is the relatively new idea that life has value
• therefore, people have value
• the potential exists to understand ourselves
• we are capable of eventually resolving any problem we pose
• Do you see how these ideas on a large scale are relatively new? These are the basic ideas that have pushed our society forward and forced it to evolve with such things as civil rights, equal rights under the law and our industrial and scientific revolutions. We don’t think about it much, but if you went back in a time machine to the Dark or Middle Ages and told someone these things, they’d laugh in your face at how ridiculous you are. It takes time for cultures to change and evolve but we are making forward progress.

We are faced now with many challenges to that evolutionary progress. We are in a place now where we can push that evolution forward or we can keep pushing back against it. We see the battle every day on social media with old cultural prejudices and fixed ideas and biases pushing back against progress towards equal rights for all, against critical thinking, against human rights. Sometimes it can be really disheartening to see the levels of ignorance that still exist, especially in the US where we like to think we are the land of the free and the home of the brave. In many ways we are but we still have a long way to go. For those of us who can see these things, I think we have a responsibility to spread our knowledge and help that evolutionary process along.

On a more personal level, the way we get fooled is we don’t just let it happen but we actually help make it happen. We use our intelligence and our emotional needs and desires to dream up reasons why we should do something rather than stop and question and reason out what is actually going on. But if we can keep a level head, it doesn’t take much to counter this. Just a few reminders to ourselves to not go so fast, not be in such a hurry to jump at what is probably too good to be true. If we were to be just slightly more active thinkers and use a little more critical thinking, these con artists and destructive cults would never gain any momentum.

I hope that this has been helpful. I’m happy to answer any questions you might have now.