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The Illuminati: Conspiracy Theories
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In this episode, Megan and Frank continue their discussion of the Illuminati. Here, the focus is on the afterlife of the Bavarian Order. How did conspiracy theories involving the Illuminati arise? Why is so much pop culture full of Illuminati imagery? And are there any good reasons to believe in such conspiracy theories? Thinkers discussed include: Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, and Maarten Boudry.
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Hosts' Websites:
Email: philosophyonthefringes@gmail.com
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Bibliography:
Michael Taylor- Illuminati in the US - American History Hit | Acast
The Secret School of Wisdom: The Authentic Rituals and Doctrines of the Illuminati (Primary source documents)
CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Illuminati
Kierkegaard - The Crowd is Untruth
The Grand Inquisitor, by Feodor Dostoevsky
Barruel - Memoirs Illustrating The History Of Jacobinism
From Thomas Jefferson to Bishop James Madison, 31 January 1800
Did an Illuminati Conspiracy Theory Help Elect Thomas Jefferson? - POLITICO
Nesta Webster - World revolution; the plot against civilization
Zionism versus Bolshevism - Churchill
Boudry, Maarten - Why We Should Be Suspicious of Conspiracy Theories. A Novel Demarcation Problem
[Reddit] why do the large shadow organizations leave clues that could lead to their downfall?
Megan Fritts & Frank Cabrera, Fake News and Epistemic Vice: Combating a Uniquely Noxious Market
Are Republicans and Conservatives More Likely to Believe Conspiracy Theories? - PMC
The psychological and political correlates of conspiracy theory beliefs
Is Conspiracy Theorising Irrational? - Neil Levy
Predictors of belief in conspiracy theory
Conspiracy theory and cognitive style: a worldview
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Cover Artwork by Logan Fritts
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Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/simon-folwar/neon-signs
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Transcript
Introduction to Philosophy on the Fringes
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to Philosophy on the Fringes, a podcast that explores the philosophical dimensions of the strange. We're your hosts, Megan Fritz and Frank Cabrera. Today, we're returning to the Illuminati.
00:00:15
Speaker
Is the Illuminati still among us? Why does pop culture seem to be full of its imagery? And are there any good reasons to believe the conspiracy theories?
Recap of Bavarian Illuminati History
00:00:39
Speaker
Hi, welcome back to Philosophy on the Fringes. Today we are continuing our discussion of the Illuminati, Illuminati Part 2. So hopefully hopefully you're hungry for more. you know we didn't we We covered a lot in the last episode, but but we have a lot of material. Hopefully we we left you hanging and you're still down to ah talk about the Bavarians.
00:01:02
Speaker
I guess we should remind our listeners what we said in the previous episode in case they listened to it like two weeks ago. Yeah, in case they're not marathoning these two episodes right now. um Right. So the Illuminati... So in the first episode, we covered the actual...
00:01:17
Speaker
established history of the Illuminati. They were a short-lived, I think 10 years long, short-lived 18th century secret society based in Bavaria, whose principles were basically radical enlightenment principles of political anarchy, overthrow of established religion, the the reign of reason as kind of giving us these supreme guiding principles and the eventual equality and communal ownership of all things.
00:01:50
Speaker
ah Kind of basically, you know, your standard utopianism. Yeah, and they sought to infiltrate the institutions of society, the churches, the schools, the Freemason lodges, and spread their ideas. Right. They were very, ah well, they they weren't really evangelical. they were They were sneaky. Yes. They really were.
00:02:10
Speaker
So we mentioned in the previous episode that they didn't last very long. So they lasted about 10 years. yeah ah So in the in the mid 1780s, there was bunch of edicts outlawing the Illuminati on under penalty of death.
00:02:22
Speaker
The founder of the Illuminati, Adam Weishaupt, he fled from Bavaria, to a nearby province in Germany under the protection of an Illuminati ruler. So we mentioned in the previous episode that they had some rulers, some some aristocrats, some noblemen, some monarchs, minor princes and and such as members of the Illuminati. right So he he found protection with one of those guys.
00:02:48
Speaker
He spent the rest of his life defending himself. He was saying he wasn't up to no good, although it's hard to believe that if you look at the
Adam Weishaupt's Legacy
00:02:55
Speaker
documents. You Because they were going to kill him, right? that Kill... Kill Adam Weishaupt. Yeah. I mean, he had to leave under penalty of death. Yeah. yeah You weren't a allowed to be in the Illuminati anymore.
00:03:04
Speaker
So the the order was dissolved. He spent most of his life trying to defend himself, saying he wasn't up to no good. we mentioned the previous episode that he criticized Kant, so he did some philosophy there. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, he died in 1830, reconciled to the Catholic Church. This is based on the parish documents of of where he was living. So I guess he he saw the light.
00:03:26
Speaker
He's like, okay. He did his last rites or whatever. Okay. Okay. But we mentioned, so we mentioned reviews episode that was mostly ah included members in the German land, but it did spread to other countries.
00:03:40
Speaker
So one might wonder why are we still talking about this if the order only lasted 10 years?
Illuminati and the French Revolution
00:03:45
Speaker
And why do people still talk about the Illuminati? So, ah so i mean, the long, complicated story here, um'll just briefly mention a few important points.
00:03:55
Speaker
So the, the after the the demise of the actual existing order, From there ah arises the Illuminati conspiracy theory. People couldn't couldn't let it go.
00:04:07
Speaker
There were certain figures, certain writers, um who claimed that the Illuminati had a hand in the French Revolution. um so one of these writers was the the French priest, Augustin barwell And he claimed that, look, look what was going on in France.
00:04:24
Speaker
In France, they they overthrew the monarch, the the the French monarchy, which had been around for like almost a thousand years, something like that, like the same dynasty. They got rid of the Catholic Church. They exiled a bunch of priests. They killed some priests, too.
00:04:40
Speaker
They stressed values like liberty, equality and fraternity. They had a cult of reason or a cult of so of supreme being. The the revolution itself is just pretty anarchical.
00:04:50
Speaker
Yeah, right, devolved into kind of anarchy. It seemed like they were willing to use any means to accomplish their ends. And we saw in the previous episode that Adam Weishaupt, he was kind of Machiavellian about things. He thought, you know, whatever you needed to do in order to make the order succeed, you ought to do that. Even if you asked to use women. Even if you had to use women.
00:05:11
Speaker
Yeah. And there are also other parallels, too. We didn't mention this in the last episode, but Weishaupt, he flirted with the idea of changing the calendar. He wanted to have a calendar based on the ancient Zoroastrian calendar. Oh, no way. And and notably, the French revolutionaries did something similar. They changed the calendar completely.
00:05:29
Speaker
They introduced the kind of atheism or kind of deism. So writers like Barillel point out, look, there's all these parallels between the French Revolution and the Illuminati.
00:05:40
Speaker
Clearly, the Illuminati had a hand in this. Yeah, clearly. Suffice it to say, scholars don't accept this this point of view. But this book that he wrote, ah which was called Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism,
00:05:53
Speaker
This was a very, very popular book. It was so popular that even figures like Thomas Jefferson were talking about it and read parts of it. and There's a letter from Thomas Jefferson to a bishop, James Madison, who is not the president. It was cousin of the president. Very confusing. There's another prominent James Madison running around who is corresponding with Thomas Jefferson.
00:06:16
Speaker
But they wrote, a Jefferson wrote him a letter about this book. He didn't have very good things to say about this Barrowell guy. and he said that the book ah included ravings of a Bedlamite. That is, they're they're crazy. think This guy's a lunatic.
00:06:31
Speaker
I mean, it does seem like there's some kind of obvious connection between the Illuminati and the the French Revolution that is overlooked in this posit, which is just like they have a common cause, the principles of the Enlightenment. Yeah, that's what the guy wrote the Catholic Encyclopedia entry on the Illuminati that I read um said. He's like, yeah, like obviously there's similarities because they're all the both the revolution and the Illuminati are deriving from the same zeitgeist, the Enlightenment. Yeah. In the air.
00:06:58
Speaker
This might be a good time to just pause and say quickly why we decided to do two parts on the Illuminati. And it it really has to do with this. I mean, the Illuminati was very short-lived, very impactful when it was happening, I guess, given that so many people kind of went crazy about it afterward.
00:07:16
Speaker
But short-lived and yet continues to have such a large role in our cultural imagination. and not just our culture, I i guess, also in Europe um to some extent, too.
00:07:27
Speaker
So we thought it would be interesting to spend part one talking about the actual Illuminati and their belief systems and philosophical systems and then kind of talk about what's going on with this Illuminati
Modern Conspiracy Theories and Anti-Semitism
00:07:41
Speaker
conspiracy from after the fact. state of the union regarding the Illuminati, the afterlife of of the Illuminati. Yeah. so i So a lot of people think that, no, not a lot. some people and Some people. There are people who think. that Some people are saying That they had a hand in the French Revolution. So Barlow wasn't the only guy that said this. There was another guy writing at this time that basically said the same sort of thing.
00:08:02
Speaker
ah Interestingly, in America, people accused Jefferson of being in the Illuminati. Whoa. Yeah. I can see that, though, because he also loved the Enlightenment. Yeah, he loved the Enlightenment. You mentioned the previous episode that he had a similar view of Jesus. He loved socialist Jesus. Socialist Jesus.
00:08:17
Speaker
Yeah. And also, if you read this letter from Jefferson to Bishop James Madison, he has good things to say about Weishaupt. He says, quote, he seems to be an enthusiastic philanthropist. Oh, my God. oh Unquote. A lover of humanity.
00:08:30
Speaker
Yeah. So he has a good thing to say about him. So people his opponents accused him of being the Illuminati. Where did he say that? In this letter to Bishop James Madison. I feel like that's, I don't know. i would be i would be worried about admitting affection for the leader of the Illuminati. So and what what Jefferson says is that his his doctrines aren't really that subversive. In fact, he only needed to do these things in secret because he lived in an oppressive environment, ok like Catholic, conservative Bavaria. yeah Had he lived here in America, he wouldn't have had to be all secretive.
00:09:02
Speaker
Okay, sure. So people accused Jefferson being Illuminati. Jefferson's supporters accused their critics of being the Illuminati. So accusations of being in Illuminati are being thrown about around 1800, around the that like the election of 1800.
00:09:16
Speaker
So that's two other instances of the Illuminati conspiracy cropping up. ah Perhaps the the most influential person... who popularized the Illuminati conspiracy theory in in the modern times, in contemporary times, is this woman, this writer from the early 20th century named Nesta Helen Webster.
00:09:36
Speaker
So she claims that the Illuminati not only had a hand in the French Revolution, so she buys that, but they also had a hand in the Russian Revolution, right the communist takeover of of Russia 1917, I think. Yeah.
00:09:48
Speaker
seventeen i think yeah Yeah, so, and she does the same sort of thing, where She says, look, look at all these things el Illuminati believe. Abolition of monarchy and all ordered government. Abolition of private property. Abolition of inheritance. Abolition of patriotism.
00:10:02
Speaker
Abolition of the family. Abolition of all religion. Fairly accurate summary of Weishaupt's views, right? Based on what we said in the last episode. We looked at the primary sources.
00:10:13
Speaker
And she says, i should quote her at length here. um She says, communistic theories had been held by isolated thinkers or groups of thinkers since the days of plato but no one as far as we know had ever yet seriously proposed to destroy everything for which civilization stands The plan of Illuminism, as codified by the above six points, has continued up to the present day to form the exact program of the world revolution.
00:10:39
Speaker
How can we doubt that the whole movement originated with the Illuminati or with secret influences that work behind them? Okay, so this is interesting. So two of the three major modern political revolutions are the Illuminati, the French and the Russian. Yes. What about the American? Well, it was before the Illuminati, so it can't be.
00:10:58
Speaker
I see. Or like, ah I guess it was a around... It's basically the same time. Yeah. Yeah, not not the American Revolution. they didn't get They didn't get over here. I mean, it seems actually more plausible that that because that was when the Illuminati actually existed. I'm that Their influence continued. So what she wants to say is their influence continued to to this day. But not the American Revolution. that one is i don't I don't think so. ok so So unfortunately, this this writer, Nesta Webster, she connected the Illuminati to anti-Semitic Jewish conspiracies about the Jews trying to control everything. Yeah. And this is a connection that clearly still continues yeah to this day. Contemporary Illuminati theories are pretty much inextricable from anti-Semitic Jewish people run the world conspiracy theories, which is deeply ironic.
00:11:47
Speaker
um yeah Given that Jews were not allowed to were not allowed to be in the Illuminati. The Illuminati was itself an anti-Semitic organization. So, pretty funny. So this this writer, Nesta Webster, is yeah obviously a kind of a crank.
00:12:01
Speaker
But during the time when she wrote this book, there were... prominent people who were like, you know what, she's on to something. i' not Prominent people. None other than with Winston Churchill. The man himself.
00:12:12
Speaker
He praised this book. He he he thought that she had had gotten it right, that the Illuminati, along with certain, what he calls international Jews, were... yeah He distinguishes the good Jews from the bad Jews.
00:12:24
Speaker
International Jews. Yes. Yes. he So they, along with the Illuminati, were trying to destroy civilization. Winston Churchill bought that. He thought that was right. You know, I mean, can't say that surprises me that much.
00:12:35
Speaker
He was supposed to be a historian, though. He wrote all these lengthy tomes about the English peoples, and yet he's buying this book. I guess I read a chapter of this book by Nesta Webster, and it's not like, you know, it is it she does cite her sources. She includes lots and lots of quotes from Adam Weishaupt and all of that.
00:12:54
Speaker
It's not like mad ravings, but there also are ah just a lot of fallacious inferences, for instance. I mean, history as a discipline was still kind of getting itself together at that time, so...
00:13:06
Speaker
So that's that's sort of ah how we get the Illuminati into the 20th century. right And it continues from there, even if not directly inspired by Nesta Webster. How it gets into modern contemporary conspiracy theorizing is through her.
00:13:21
Speaker
So in sum, basically what what's happening is because the Illuminati's founding principles and motivations for actions were so deeply embedded in just straightforward principles of the Enlightenment, anything that also you know stems from these principles, it has the potential to look tinged by the Illuminati. Yeah, I think in addition to that, these revolutions were just, at least from the point of view of so other some people, very surprising. Yeah.
00:13:50
Speaker
But I think, I think. and And I think, and I think seemed evil. Yeah. A lot of I mean, you know, French Revolution, you have the the reign of terror. The Russian Revolution, obviously you have, you know. They killed Anastasia, right? So. yeah You have quite a lot of famine.
00:14:04
Speaker
um it it it didn't look like it was doing good things. And I think you, if you already have this like, you know, shadowy nefarious picture of the Illuminati, you think maybe the Illuminati is like the dark side of these enlightenment principles. And yeah.
00:14:17
Speaker
We're already in kind of ahead of ourselves. We'll come we'll come back to these sorts of things like near near the end of the episode. um Yeah, sort of trying to give an account of why people are so liable to attribute the events in the world, revolutions, large scale events to the Illuminati.
Illuminati in Pop Culture
00:14:35
Speaker
Yeah. But of course, in the contemporary world, we're not so much concerned with the Illuminati doing revolutions. We're more concerned with the ways the Illuminati influences our pop music.
00:14:47
Speaker
Megan read a very interesting article in preparation for this episode. So you want to talk about this article? back I did. Yeah, um it was in Salon. It was called the Music World's Fake Illuminati Problem.
00:14:59
Speaker
And guess I kind of knew I had a vague idea that that people thought Beyonce was in the Illuminati. I really didn't. This is surprising to me. ok I'm not paying attention.
00:15:12
Speaker
I knew that much. I really didn't know how just truly crazy it was. But here's just a few examples. So a few examples that that the the article itself mentions. So Beyonce, apparently, I'm going to get, I don't know any of these people's music. so But apparently she has a song called One Plus One, which is it is said, a parable for demonic possession.
00:15:37
Speaker
Rihanna's music video for her song Umbrella. I remember that one. I remember the last song i remember that one. Well, unfortunately, it depicts the devil in Illuminati organized mind reprogramming. You know I don't remember that. Well.
00:15:50
Speaker
You just missed it because it was in there, apparently. ah Oh, when Beyonce invited Taylor Swift on stage at the ah Video Music Awards. Surely you remember this.
00:16:01
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. ah In 2009. Well, this was actually Taylor Swift's invitation into the Illuminati. Yeah. Right. That's that's when it happened.
00:16:13
Speaker
And in case you didn't know when it happened, it was then. I guess Beyonce or somebody wore a pair of shoes that each had one eye on them, kind of like the the Freemason all-seeing eye, yeah like that symbol, which is supposed to be a a message, a symbol to the public that she's in the Illuminati.
00:16:32
Speaker
and And this was my favorite because I saved it for last. Jay-Z and Beyonce's daughter, who is named Blue Ivy, Blue Ivy is an acronym for Born Living Under Evil, Illuminati's Very Youngest, which to me is extra funny because obviously younger Illuminati people are going to come here. Like she's not going to be the youngest forever. all right. so So like what's what's going on here? So like presumably the the people saying these sorts of things do not want to claim that they are connected to Adam Weishaupt. Right. They're not descendants of the Bavarian order.
00:17:10
Speaker
i mean, I would be shocked if any of them knew who that name was. Yeah. So they they just think that these these folks, these folks in Hollywood and the music industry are part of a secret organization controlling things.
00:17:25
Speaker
For sure. Yeah. So that's basically just what they mean. so it's so it's become very generic then, right? I think it's more than just control. So here, so the the article interviews several people who spend quite a lot of their time thinking about and writing yeah about this.
00:17:43
Speaker
There are people like this. One of them, a YouTube documentarian named Mark Dice said, quote, these symbols, so like the shoes or the the hand signals flashed during stage performances, these symbols represent power.
00:17:59
Speaker
The Illuminati is the ultimate powerful organization. He says, these scumbags like Jay-Z want that power, and their whole message is that of materialism.
00:18:12
Speaker
So this is interesting because... How at least mark die Mark Dice sees the Illuminati is as an organization grabbing for power via grabbing for material goods and wealth.
00:18:28
Speaker
Right. So power through the material world, which is I mean, this kind of like a very Marxist idea that material conditions is what is what enacts change. Yeah. That's like the the vehicle for power.
00:18:40
Speaker
But it's interesting. It's also a bit ironic because, as we talked about in the last episode, the actual Illuminati saw private property ownership as the original sin that leads to violence and oppression and and war and all these other bad things.
00:18:58
Speaker
and And were, in fact, you know, communist in their basic principles about yeah property. Yeah, right. So in order for people to have material wealth and in these sorts of extravagant ways, that depends on the survival of civilization. But the the conspiracy theorists we cited at the outset, like Nesta Webster and Augustine Barrowell, they want to say ah the Illuminati wants to destroy civilization.
00:19:19
Speaker
Right. You can't how. That's also confusing. Yeah. yeah So I guess we really lost contact with the original Bavarian order, which which is is kind of interesting because when Barrowell and Webster say the Illuminati did this, they did the French Revolution, they did the the the Russian Revolution, they really did mean Weishaupt, like the followers and descendants of Weishaupt.
00:19:41
Speaker
But now we've we've lost Weishaupt, unfortunately. Right. He's gone. Right. Things are really changed. so um So another conspiracy theorist that the article cites, Dr. Henry Macau.
00:19:52
Speaker
I don't know what he's a doctor of. I probably should have checked. Probably chiropractic. I was just going to say that. Anyway, ah he has some stuff to say about the the music industry's Illuminati as well.
00:20:06
Speaker
So he says that the ultimate goal, this is another quote, the ultimate goal of the Illuminati is to morally degrade humanity as a way of inducting humanity into their cult at the lowest level and enslaving it mentally and spiritually, if not physically.
00:20:26
Speaker
So the idea is that the i Illuminati wants to induct people. They want to bring more people in. Everybody. ah it as As many people as they can. yeah Right. Everybody would be great. But the only way to do that at such a large level is to get them in at the at the very lowest level.
00:20:43
Speaker
and And the only way to do that, i'm i'm I'm not really totally sure what the reasoning here is. They probably aren't either. ah But they want to get to them and into the Illuminati at the lowest level, which for some reason means in mentally enslaving them through moral degradation. So they they have this pop music that's just full of vice.
00:21:03
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Like like materialism and, you know, greed and all these all these kinds of vices, drug use and, you know, whatever. and And they get people into this music. They like it. And maybe they start thinking, well, I want to do some drugs and whatever.
00:21:22
Speaker
You know, the more they listen to the music, the more they they want to be like the people singing it, which is to say maybe, you know, morally bad. um And now they're easier to control that way. And that's and that's how they get you.
00:21:34
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. It's like the the the whole bread and circuses thing. How do you control the Roman masses? You give them bread and circuses. yeah right Yeah, right. Yeah, this is also like interesting if you contrast contrast it with the Bavarians too, because the Bavarian order, they they emphasize virtues, right? like they And not these sorts of materialistic, hedonistic things. Yeah, certainly. And it being inducted into the Illuminati, even at the lowest level, requires, as we talked about before, you passing a pretty rigorous test. A lot of homework, right?
00:22:02
Speaker
right And also they were the the Bavarians were much more exclusive too. They didn't seek out you know any old person to be in their organization. they They really did seek out like professionals and aristocrats and and all of that.
00:22:14
Speaker
So they it was a ah ah ah much more exclusive club than apparently what some people think the Illuminati is up to now. So ah one... shifting gears a little bit. One topic I find a little interesting, and I know you have some thoughts about this, Megan, is the very fact that there were secret societies and presumably still are.
The Allure of Secret Societies
00:22:35
Speaker
And Adam Weishaupt mentioned this several times. He's like, I want to start a secret society because these are like all the rage. And to hit to end and he's right about that to some degree. The Freemasons were formed around this time in the early 18th century. Mm-hmm.
00:22:50
Speaker
And so he's he's saying that secret societies, therere they're very popular. these These are in the air. And just to give you some choice quotes about why he thinks this is, um he says, ah man has a very, quote, natural inclination for mystery, and the world loves the miraculous.
00:23:08
Speaker
So obviously, if you have these sorts of plans to challenge authority and radically reshape society, you you want to adopt some secrecy. But he also thought that people were just into the very idea of belonging to a secret society.
00:23:24
Speaker
So, I don't know, have thoughts about this, Megan? Does this seem right to you? What sort of connections can we draw to this? What can we learn from this? Well, I think, I mean, he's obviously right.
00:23:34
Speaker
You can, you know, you see this kind of tactic being used all over the place. So in like the early 20th century era of like tent revivals, right? I mean, sure, you had some people who were genuine, but you have a lot of people who are trying to make a buck by having fake healings and... So you're referring to like ah evangelical Christianity and movement. Yeah, right. Precisely. yeah And like the congregationalist movements and such.
00:24:01
Speaker
Right. Definitely. i mean i mean, I think this has pretty much been known for forever. I mean, in in his most famous novel, The Brothers Karamazov, the author Fyodor Dostoevsky has it part of the novel and a chapter called The Grand Inquisitor is this parable the Basically a person who's supposed to represent Jesus Christ, who's taken captive by the leader of the Spanish Inquisition.
00:24:30
Speaker
and he's taken captive because the the leader of the Spanish Inquisition knows that this guy is Jesus Christ. And he's basically like, hey, you can't like return and and wreck what we're trying to do. We're getting like a lot of people into the church.
00:24:43
Speaker
by giving them what they want. and And you're going to come back and you're goingnna you're going to say, hey, none of this stuff is ultimately... Well, what do they want? Well, what they want ah is... Here, I'll just read this passage from it. He says, the Inquisitor says, There are three powers, three powers alone, able to conquer and to hold captive forever the conscience of these impotent rebels for their happiness.
00:25:07
Speaker
These forces are miracle, mystery, and authority. So he's I mean, he's he's basically mentions but two of those. at least ah Yeah. Miracle and and mystery. Yeah. And I mean, certainly authority is part of it. Yeah. Well, we said the organization was very hierarchical. Right. You were you were basically under the the thumb of your superior if you were an initiate.
00:25:27
Speaker
And the Grand Inquisitor here, like I'm guessing Bysop would also agree with it, it's it's not just that that's what people want. It's also that giving them these things will help them out, I guess, because it will it will bring them into the place they need to be.
00:25:43
Speaker
There's one ah passage from ah from the the primary sources that I found really amusing with respect to this theme. So Weishaupt says that one should give the initiates these mystifying commands for no reason at all, just to like keep the mystery going. And he gives an example.
00:26:01
Speaker
Let the subordinate find a missive of the order under his plate at the inn in another town when one could have Handed it to him much more conveniently at his home. So leave leave secret letters. ah you know write Write notes in disappearing ink. Let people think we're controlling things even if we're not. like He really wanted to play it up, the secrecy thing.
00:26:20
Speaker
Oh, no. did To lead to an even greater air of mystery. That's like if if i if Mr. Miyagi had people wax his car, even if it didn't help them with their karate at all.
00:26:33
Speaker
He's just like, I just wanted my car waxed. um but But do you think that this sort of allure of the mystery can help explain why some people are attracted to conspiracy theories? Whereby a conspiracy theory we mean, and I guess we should say what we mean.
00:26:48
Speaker
We mean that ah there's a secret group of people who are trying to accomplish some end, some goal, and usually that goal is bad, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think... These are all the rage these days.
00:27:02
Speaker
There's something about a lot of us that makes us really want to be in the know. We really want to know more than everyone else. We want to have, you might call it like secret knowledge or special knowledge.
00:27:16
Speaker
I think, I mean, this is a subject for another episode, but you already know this, Frank, but this is why I think a lot of people are drawn toward alternative medicine and stuff like that. You know, they think That there is some kind of knowledge that that can't be widely known or isn't widely known and they want to be the ones that have it.
00:27:34
Speaker
So I think things that look potentially like keys to that secret knowledge are going to draw them in. Yeah. Yeah, that seems right. And I guess one thing we want to talk about in this episode is a conspiracy theories like in in general. right I think there's lot we can learn from the ah Bavarian order when it comes to conspiracy theories and like why they tend to why conspiracies tend to fail.
00:28:01
Speaker
I think we can think of the the Bavarian order as a kind of case study in why conspiracies fail. Because they they were They were a conspiracy. They were a conspiracy, right? So there are some conspiracies that that occur. Julius Caesar was assassinated via conspiracy, right? The Watergate um scandal, just to name it few.
00:28:18
Speaker
And yeah, and and the Weishaupts organization, they had some minor successes. They didn't ah succeed in eliminating established religion and all world governments and all of that. But they did have some minor successes. They were a conspiracy.
00:28:31
Speaker
So, but but they failed. Like, they were discovered and and suppressed. And I think we can see why conspiracies tend to fail if we look at what happened in the with respect to the Bavarian order.
00:28:44
Speaker
So, for instance... There was a lot of ideological disagreement among the members of the actual Illuminati with respect to a lot of different things. One of those things was how much of the mysticism and esotericism to include in in the in the organization.
00:29:02
Speaker
So we mentioned last time that the the second in command for the Illuminati was a prominent ah Freemason. He really wanted to include a lot of Masonic symbols and other sort of esoteric things.
00:29:13
Speaker
and and And folks like Weishaupt and the other philosophy professors, they weren't really into that. One of these guys, Johann Georg Fader, he complained about the, quote, religious play acting that was going on. He wasn't really into that. So there was a lot of ideological disagreement.
00:29:30
Speaker
It was interesting, though, because free Freemasonry symbols are now, in fact, associated with the Illuminati. Yeah. So i guess I guess the other guy won. Yeah, they got they got like melded together. all the Although like you know historians want to keep them separate because the Illuminati was something else.
00:29:47
Speaker
But yeah, they did get kind of conflated yeah popular consciousness. um There's also political disagreement. So some members of the Illuminati, they they wanted... Bavaria to be annexed by the Holy Roman Empire and some members didn't and then the the the members that didn't, they betrayed the organization to the authorities.
00:30:07
Speaker
So there was political disagreement. it was hard to form a coalition. um they left a lot of evidence behind, all the writings, like hundreds of pages of writings. that was one of their requirements, right? they They have to write down like their thoughts. Everybody's writing all this stuff.
00:30:22
Speaker
And also there was some bad luck, right? We mentioned in the last episode that one guy that was struck by lightning. i guess this guy has a name. We should give his name. It was Johann Jacob Lanz. He was struck by lightning, and then the authorities discovered some of the papers in on either on his person or in his house. So just bad luck.
00:30:40
Speaker
And so these are some reasons why the Illuminati failed.
Failures of Mass Movements and Conspiracies
00:30:44
Speaker
And I think we can apply these sorts of things more generally. Why is it really hard for elaborate conspiracy theories, ah conspiracies to it succeed? It's probably for reasons like this. Disagreement among the members.
00:30:56
Speaker
disagreeing with the ideology, what the organization should do, other various political disagreements. You're going to leave behind a lot of traces. And there's some and just do you could always just be struck by lightning. You could always be struck by lightning. Right. And due to bad luck, you can your your conspiracy could fail. Yeah, I mean, I think yeah the reason conspiracies fail is just the reason that any kind of large movement is going to have a hard time doing what it's trying to do and probably isn't going to be able to do it all the way. i mean, the 19th century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, he has a lot to say about mass movements.
00:31:35
Speaker
And he he he he refers to ah these sorts of political or social or even religious movements as a crowd. yeah And he says, in his typical kind of polemical way, wherever there is a crowd, there is untruth.
00:31:52
Speaker
And what he means by that is that no individual person is going to be able truthfully in good faith to sign on completely to the full purpose of ah of ah of a mass movement.
00:32:09
Speaker
and and And this is just because, you know, there's so many different people with different ideas necessary to make up a mass movement that kind of like by definition, it's never going to represent any individual person's true convictions.
00:32:22
Speaker
That's why mass movements often have these kinds of meaningless slogans that every individual in the crowd interprets differently. Right. Exactly. And why often you end up getting break off factions.
00:32:33
Speaker
um Yeah. Weishaupt seems a little bit attuned to some o to some of this in when he's talking about why we need to have a secret society. He mentions that, quote, men who would otherwise turn their backs on us having satisfied their curiosity. Like they learn what the organization is about.
00:32:51
Speaker
And they're like, oh, this isn't really that cool. And and then they and they leave and they stop giving donations and paying their dues. Yeah. ah Relevant to our lives right now,
00:33:01
Speaker
ah we something we've been doing. ah Our nightly ritual. Our nightly ritual are of late has been watching the show 24 for all of you gent probably Gen X and millennials will know what this show is. Yeah.
00:33:18
Speaker
I actually never seen it before. so this is ah this is a first time viewing for me. But what's significant and relevant about this is that in this show, which focuses on the counterterrorism unit of the U.S. government based in Los Angeles in the show, there's always a terrorist conspiracy happening on, which is just wildly complex. Yeah.
00:33:39
Speaker
So many moving parts. In the season we're watching right now, the terrorist conspiracy literally took five years to plan and pull off. Like this terrorist cell had to infiltrate different organizations and like get promoted to the top of these organizations and...
00:33:57
Speaker
And it's just really, I mean, it it's really implausible the that that this would be able to be pulled off kind of as well as it is when it takes so much planning, so many different people, so many moving parts and so much time to pull it off.
00:34:12
Speaker
And notably, Jack Bauer always discovers them. He does. I know. Yeah, that's that's the that's the one thing you can always count on. The one thing that's always going to foil your conspiracy. Another case study of why conspiracies often fail. Just watch 24.
00:34:25
Speaker
ah There's a lot more torture in this show than I remember. Man, it's bad. So much torture. ah But, okay, let's try to play devil's advocate here. and What's the conspiracy theorist going to say, Megan?
00:34:38
Speaker
You know, oh, that's what they want you to think. They want you to think that that these groups can't pull off these really big bad things. Because then you won't be afraid of them. You won't be on the lookout. You won't be on your toes.
00:34:51
Speaker
Yeah, and that's what makes us kind of hard to, it's it's kind of hard to convince a conspiracy theorist out of what they think because they'll just say, well, there's massive cover-ups or if there's apparent counter-evidence, they left that there to mislead us.
00:35:07
Speaker
And this kind of this sounds like kind of a goofy thing to say, but this is importantly what Nesta Webster says about the Illuminati. So she's aware that the Bavarian order broke up after about 10 years.
00:35:21
Speaker
But she says, quote, quote This apparent breakup of the society admirably served the purpose of the conspirators, who now diligently circulated the news that Illuminism had ceased to exist, a deception carried on ever since by interested historians anxious to suppress the truth about its subsequent activities.
00:35:43
Speaker
That's such a funny thing to say. Like, how could you ever prove that was true? We can't prove it's not true. I guess. Okay, Nesta. Okay. um A companion quote here, I guess Nesta might point to, is that Weishaupt says things along these lines. right So here's what he says. He says, quote, where one has a hand in the government of a country, one should pretend to be least influential. Thus, we will not be opposed.
00:36:10
Speaker
So the conspiracy. A lot of really damning quotes. Yeah. Yeah. But the point is the be the conspiracy is going to, they're going to leave counter evidence. It's going to seem as though they're not up to what they're up to. That's just part of the conspiracy. When really what they are. Right. Yes. Right. right yeah So you think you've discovered the Bavarian order. You think it's all been settled, but yeah that's what they want. They only lasted 10 years. Wink, wink. Yeah.
00:36:39
Speaker
That's what they want you to think. Mm-hmm. I mean, I guess they got what i that they wanted because I do think that.
00:36:48
Speaker
Yeah, but what but when it comes to like why, so you know both you and I, we we accept that there's like a general a general presumption against conspiracies. but Yeah, although a lot of people don't like that. They don't like um the term conspiracy being or conspiracy theory being kind of normatively loaded, yeah carrying the insinuation of like something that you rationally ought not to believe. Because I think there are situations where obviously it is rational to believe that a conspiracy is happening.
00:37:16
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Yeah. so there's a lot of philosophers that have they've staked their claim here. a lot of there's So there's a philosophical literature on conspiracy theories. yeah It's actually fairly We're actually part of that literature. I guess so. I guess so. I guess we are part of that.
00:37:30
Speaker
It's actually fairly old. I mean, people started talking about conspiracy theories in act in academic writing, I guess, around the 2016 election or something.
00:37:41
Speaker
ah So, but there's a lot of folks who want to say, yeah, you shouldn't, we should really have a neutral definition of a conspiracy theory. A conspiracy theory should just be a claim that some ah group of people were trying to accomplish some goal. that That's it, and in secret.
00:37:57
Speaker
And then whether we ought to believe that theory or not ought depend on the details of the particular conspiracy theory. We shouldn't have a general presumption against conspiracy theories. We should be complete particularists about this. Yeah. So like if if I know that like my siblings are playing a surprise party for someone, is that a conspiracy theory? Yeah. i am They might say, yeah, they might say, yeah. and and And there's so many conspiracies out there that there shouldn't be a general presumption against them. Julius Caesar, or Watergate scandal, right? all like Any assassination is a conspiracy, right?
00:38:30
Speaker
Pretty much. I guess unless it's- Not really. It's just one person. Yeah, and besides besides the lone gunman. But like a lot of a lot of assassinations are conspiracies right involving in groups of people. So there's so many conspiracies, there shouldn't be a general presumption against them. You should always just look at the details of this of the of the case.
00:38:46
Speaker
but But I think I am kind of attracted to a kind of what's called generalism about conspiracy theories, that that there is something generally wrong with most conspiracy theories.
Skepticism Towards Conspiracy Theories
00:38:56
Speaker
and i And I read a recent paper by the philosopher Martin Boudry on this, why we should be suspicious of conspiracy theories, a novel demarcation problem. And he really hones in on something we've already mentioned before, the idea that human agency leaves lots of traces.
00:39:13
Speaker
and Causes in general leave lots of traces. like Any cause doesn't just have a one effect. There's so many effects of of a cause. ah a baseball breaks a window, and that causes a bunch of shards of glass to scatter all over the place. There are effects that are all over the place. A cause here can just be like synonymous with an event. Yeah. yeah yeah And so, yeah, causes leave lots of effects, lots of of ah lots of traces.
00:39:40
Speaker
that's how historical so ah That's how historians do their work. we We can know quite a bit about ancient Rome, even though was over 2,000 years ago, based on the traces. And we can reconstruct what happened.
00:39:52
Speaker
ah So causes leave lots of traces. so And even the cover-ups will leave traces too. right So the conspiracy theorist wants to say, hold on, they're going to cover it up though. So those sorts of alleged traces will will be covered up.
00:40:06
Speaker
But presumably... Attempts at cover-ups are also going to leave traces. you're If you're going to cover all these things up, you need a further conspiracy to do the cover-up. And that sort of thing is also going to leave traces.
00:40:18
Speaker
So Boudry compares this to the idea of a perfect crime. It's really hard to commit the perfect crime. Just commit a crime and leave no traces. DNA, ah oversights on your part.
00:40:29
Speaker
So unless the people doing the conspiracies have a kind of supernatural intelligence that or ability, ah they're going to leave traces. Even if they try to do the cover-up, they're going to leave traces because we live in a world where causes produce a multiplicity of effects. And from those effects, you can infer the cause.
00:40:50
Speaker
um Yeah. Okay, so the idea we should be suspicious of conspiracy theories just because um we should be suspicious of any group's ability to disguise what they're doing so well. I guess i had to be a little more careful, like to the extent that time goes on and the conspiracy and there's no like evidence for the conspiracy, then that casts further doubt on it. And, you know, and this bears out because I always think about. So yeah another like conspiracy theory, you might say that actually happened was like, you know, CIA experiments on on people, you know, the MKUltra MKUltra. We love MKUltra. Yeah.
00:41:30
Speaker
It comes up a lot in my house. um ah but But that really happened, right? And that was a kind of like government conspiracy, sort of. and And notably, like there was evidence. There was a smoking gun. Right. There was a smoking gun in in the case of the assassination of Julius Caesar. Like they waved the the daggers in the air and said, we did it.
00:41:47
Speaker
Yeah, right. So this has all of this has come out. It's been out. he's This has been known for a long time. And the so so the conspiracy theories that people always look askance at or that, you know, where if if you believe them, you're you're kind of considered more fringe.
00:42:02
Speaker
Those are the ones that they happen, you know, kind of a while ago. And they're still not that good at evidence. Yeah, there's no there's no smoking gun yet. right There's no sort of thing where it's like, that's the thing that like is decisive evidence. Right. Yeah. We have evidence of Watergate. We have evidence of these. So, OK, so that makes sense. So as as time goes on and there isn't a smoking gun, you should become more and more skeptical. Yeah. I like the idea of of of applying the whole causes leave lots of effects, causes leave lots of traces to the idea of the cover up to you can't get out of it by saying there's a cover up because the cover up will leave traces, too.
00:42:38
Speaker
Yeah. Right. so And then if you try to cover up those traces, so on and so forth. And so on and so forth. right Unless, you know, they are just they unless you're basically saying they're like godlike. but Yeah. Right.
00:42:49
Speaker
Yeah. Actually, you talked about like the perfect crime. It's interesting that a lot of people who do like they do a murder and they don't get caught for decades ah in like a large percentage of those cases. That's just by chance. Yeah.
00:43:00
Speaker
A lot of people are like, oh, i figured you would have caught me a long time ago. It just sort of happens. You know, our clearance rate for murder in the United States, I looked this up once, it's not very good. i think it's on the order of like 50 to 60 percent. I think a lot of things just aren't really that invested. Yeah, they don't really investigate them that's that hard.
00:43:17
Speaker
You know, but we maybe shouldn't tell our listeners that it's really high, actually.
Modern Conspiracies and Public Signaling
00:43:24
Speaker
um So regarding leaving traces their activity, covering up what they're doing, some interesting features of the contemporary Illuminati conspiracy theories is that they're really not hiding it at all.
00:43:37
Speaker
In fact, they are putting it in prominent music videos. That's what the conspiracy theorists say, right? they they're telling They're basically telling us what they're up to. Yeah, like that's that's a feature of the conspiracy theory is that they're broadcasting to the world that they're in the Illuminati through their shoes, through their hand gestures and their music videos, through their song lyrics, through the names of their children or whatever.
00:44:00
Speaker
You know, they they they they're shouting it basically through all of these symbolic acts. And that's pretty interesting. Frank and I... We're curious about why people would think this, given that it seems like if you are trying to do a worldwide domination thing, yeah then you would want to cover it up.
00:44:22
Speaker
Right. You might as well says that. like Don't let them you got ended up influence. Make it seem like you don't. Right. So if you're wearing I'm in the Illuminati shoes, that's not really making it seem yeah like like like you're not in the Illuminati. It's making it seem like you are.
00:44:37
Speaker
So we were interested in this. And this is kind of also ah ah a feature of a lot of contemporary conspiracy theories, is even the ones that aren't related to the Illuminati. So those of you familiar with QAnon, probably if you if you're familiar enough with the QAnon conspiracy theory, you'll know that a big aspect of that conspiracy theory is numerology.
00:44:56
Speaker
They think that without getting into too many details of the conspiracy itself, the idea is that numbers it left as hidden clues in video clips or anonymous messages on message boards are our our codes for for even more secret messages that the that the the leaders of the conspiracy want you to know.
00:45:17
Speaker
Yeah. So these kinds of features are kind of common in contemporary conspiracy theories. and And we've always been curious, why why would... I'm scratching my head right now. Like, why why do they leave clues about what they're up to if they're up to bad stuff? Yeah.
00:45:34
Speaker
So we couldn't find too much on this. The only thing, in fact, we found was a Reddit post. Reddit? Yep. A Reddit post. Yeah, we turned to Reddit, as we sometimes do on this podcast. Recall we got a lot of mileage out of Reddit for our astrology episode.
00:45:51
Speaker
And so, too, we turned to Reddit here. And i we got some pretty good reasons. So so that the post was, why do large shadow organizations leave clues that could lead to their downfall? and there are some There were some reasons. So here's some pretty good ones.
00:46:05
Speaker
ah One, arrogance and mockery. Sure. and Yeah. You stupid idiots. You didn't see my Illuminati shoes. Signaling to other like sister organizations what you're up to. um So communication with other nefarious groups. um The clues themselves are important. Perhaps they're part of the mind control signal or the mystical spell. That that kind of came up in the Salon article you read, right? Beyonce's lyrics are supposed to they're supposed to affect us in some way and help control us, right? Some kind of, they they they themselves are a mind control device to to some extent. Yes.
00:46:38
Speaker
Or, you know, even the the moral degradation that they enact makes us more slavish or something. And finally, my favorite one, your favorite one, too. Oh, yeah, definitely.
00:46:49
Speaker
ah Quote, God cursed them to be unable to tell a lie. And thus they have to put the clues in so they're technically honest about who they are and can keep going without being smote in sick.
00:47:02
Speaker
Smote in. Sick by divine fire. Unquote. Yeah, so this one sounds kind of loony. We've got those Reddit posts in the bibliography so people know that we're not making it up. Yes, definitely.
00:47:14
Speaker
This sounds kind of loony, but we have witnessed this justification being given in real time. We have. In person. We have. Before. Yep. So... they had the the idea the I think it what we witnessed in real time was saying someone saying that they have to they have to give a warning.
00:47:31
Speaker
They're allowed to do evil stuff as long as they give a warning get about it. Because of some kind of black magic or some something super supernatural. Yeah. Yeah. That's a real interesting one. It is.
00:47:42
Speaker
It's sort of like a Satan's character in the book of Job. We're like, all right, you can do bad things to Job, but like only as far as I let you. You found it amusing when we talked about this before that that it's a curse, to be honest, that they're cursed to be honest.
00:47:57
Speaker
Oh, man. Unlike me, who can lie all she wants. They have to tell the truth. So Megan, you hinted at already that we we've written about this kind of stuff before, fake news, misinformation, conspiracy theories. I guess this is sort of the topic that we talked about when we were flirting at a Super Bowl party but but before we started dating. This is how flossy grad students flirt. They talk about paper ideas and conspiracy theories.
00:48:27
Speaker
So that's sort of where it began. that was you know eight years ago or something. So how do you feel about conspiracy theories and this topic and thinking about it and writing about it, given that we've written a few papers on it? do you so are you still interested in this topic?
00:48:42
Speaker
How do you feel? like Yeah, we got we were really kind of early on this topic. I mean, we were getting in right when it was taking off because this was 2017. Yeah. and I mean, to some extent, I think I'm slightly less interested in it just because so so many people have written on it now. i feel like so many of the questions have been explored almost to death.
00:49:07
Speaker
Is it always irrational to believe conspiracy theories or, you know, what what kinds of vices are people exhibiting when they believe these conspiracies instead of more normal explanations for things?
00:49:20
Speaker
Stuff like that. You know, there those are popular questions people ask about conspiracy theories, definitional stuff. You know, what does it mean for that like you like like like Boudry's paper? What does it mean to be a conspiracy theory or whatever?
00:49:35
Speaker
And don't know. So something strange has happened in the last few years, which is that at least in my experience, conspiracy theorizing has actually decreased the culture that I'm a part of anyway.
00:49:47
Speaker
You know, QAnon was this huge thing that kind of took over America for a lot of years and had a lot of like offshoot conspiracy theories associated with it.
Cultural Shift Away from Conspiracy Theories
00:50:00
Speaker
And that went away, ah which is interesting because Yeah, I wonder if that's because he had so many failed predictions. maybe I don't know. Although they did predict that Trump would get back in the White House, and he did.
00:50:14
Speaker
ah Not in the way they said he would, but... ah not a bold Not a bold prediction. like Not a very bold prediction, but but it did happen. Yeah, so i guess that's another reason that I find, guess maybe I just feel satisfied in the answers that we came up with in our work, which is just basically that there are some conditions under which you can rationally believe some conspiracy theories and some conditions under which you can't. Another thing we argue in some of our work is that like critical thinking education isn't really going to help. I think a lot of people get into the conspiracy theory, literature like academic stuff, because they want to make things better. i think
00:50:54
Speaker
ah They think that but rampant conspiracy theorizing is bad for our society or whatever, and if I just write the the right journal article, then I'll solve this problem.
00:51:06
Speaker
ah But we kind of came up with some dismal conclusions and in our our work. We think that good critical ah and critical thinking education won't really do much and won't get into the argument. It's pretty complicated. But yeah, we were really skeptical of that that's going to do um anything.
00:51:19
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, kind of related to this, a lot of people who are kind of famous for being intelligent. Oh, yeah. ah IQ record holders, you know, Jeopardy winners, a lot of them are conspiracy theorists. Yeah, there's there's a philosopher of science, I forget his name, who doesn't who's done like really, really hardcore technical work in like probability theory and stuff.
00:51:43
Speaker
And he is like a loony conspiracy theorist. But he does genuine, legitimate work in philosophy ph science. I mean, so many famous, you know, mathematicians um have...
00:51:53
Speaker
kind of gone off the deep end with respect to conspiracy. i mean, like Gödel and, you know... ah he was super paranoid, but He thought that everyone was trying to kill him. It global was trying to poison his food and starve himself, right.
00:52:04
Speaker
i think i think one thing I find interesting is like the empirical work on conspiracy theory, conspiracy theorizing, the they sorts of psychological and sociological correlates of those who believe in conspiracy theories.
00:52:17
Speaker
And some of them are pretty surprising. So let me just go through a few few of these pretty briefly. i'll We'll link them in the bibliography. So apparently, and according to a recent study in 2023, a journal political behavior, in in no instance do we observe systematic evidence of political asymmetry. That is, controlling for various variables. on ah Republicans are no more likely to be conspiracy theorists than Democrats. So I think some people probably find that surprising.
00:52:45
Speaker
um What else? ah like They find that psychological traits like so the so-called dark triad, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and antisocial tendencies, those are strongly correlated with belief and conspiracy theories.
00:53:00
Speaker
ah What else? There's this kind of slogan that's made its way into the literature that, quote, conspiracy theories are for losers. That is to say, it's for those who feel like they are excluded from society or yeah feel like they lack control or they have lower status than they ought to. There's some evidence that those who support the party that loses the election are more likely to believe in a conspiracy theory. This is that going back to like 2014. The prominence of QAnon after the election of Joe Biden. yeah Yeah. So there's empirical evidence even before the QAnon thing supporting this.
00:53:39
Speaker
Interestingly, the single best predictor of whether someone's going to believe in a conspiracy theory is... whether they believe in a different conspiracy theory. like they there They tend to correlate with each other, even if they're wildly different conspiracies.
00:53:52
Speaker
And even if they're sometimes contradictory conspiracies, some strange results in some of these studies. You can get people you can prime people into believing that Princess Diana was murdered versus she staged her own death. You can get people to believe both things, apparently, according to this some studies.
00:54:08
Speaker
I mean, this just so listeners out there, just ask yourself, is there anyone, you know, who only believes one conspiracy theory? Truly, for me, the answer is no. Yeah. They either believe them like all or like a lot of them or like pretty much none. And this has led some psychologists to suppose that there's something deeper going on here. There's a kind of cognitive style or even a conspiracist worldview that some people subscribe to, which leads them to believe in many different kinds of conspiracies, even they're when they're wholly unrelated. Like, why would you believe Princess Diana, stage drone death, and that ah whole the FBI was behind the JFK assassination and the moon landing was fake? Why believe all of these things? They're all unrelated things. Right.
00:54:53
Speaker
um But there are people out there who do believe a wide variety of different conspiracies. And yeah, one idea is that there's a worldview that some people have, the conspiracist worldview, where just in general, they mistrust authority.
00:55:06
Speaker
um They think that nothing is quite what it seems, that deception's everywhere, that the world is full of agents that are trying to harm us. Or even like other a part of human nature to conspire. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. and then Yeah. wow yeah i I think we cite something like this in one of our papers, that there is evidence that, you know, the the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories might have been like evolutionarily adaptive or something, right? You know, if there's pri groups of primates out there that are trying to harm you, you should believe that there's a conspiracy against you that they're actually trying to harm you. Sure, that has survival value. Yeah. So, so yeah, this is this is the kind of stuff I find the most interesting. I don't really spend too much time thinking about this anymore. But the yeah the empirical work seems pretty interesting.
00:55:50
Speaker
In some cases, ah counterintuitive, some cases, surprising. So going back to the idea that critical thinking won't kind of free us from the maybe the tendency to conspiracy theorize is this is something that we were talking about earlier, Frank, but the i the suggestion that maybe a lot of conspiracy theories arise from an overuse of certain critical thinking techniques or tools.
00:56:18
Speaker
ah In particular, we talked about one tool called Occam's razor. Do not multiply entities beyond necessity. The idea is that simplicity is a mark of truth and that sort of thing.
00:56:29
Speaker
Right. um So, yeah, that that's one way of trying to explain like what's going on here, why someone might be disposed to believe in a wide variety of different conspiracies. Maybe they really put too much of a premium on simplicity. Right.
00:56:44
Speaker
The world seems like a really complex place, but it'd be better if there were like a simpler explanation rather than a multiplicity of causes, some which are economic, some which are environmental, to explain the French Revolution.
00:56:56
Speaker
Isn't it just simpler to think the Illuminati did it? Okay. so So, yeah. So it's simpler to say this one shadow organization is responsible for it. one cause, right? Yeah. Yeah. Instead of like a whole host of different factors.
00:57:09
Speaker
So, yeah, I mean, this is, I think this an interesting idea. And in fact, one critic of Nesta Webster, who we mentioned at the beginning, right? So recall, she was the one that linked the Illuminati to the Russian Revolution and combined it with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and all of that.
00:57:26
Speaker
um So this writer, Hilaire Belloc, a French-born English author, in a letter, he he he mentions this book by Webster, which, again, as I said at the outset, was like fairly popular, even though it's you know conspiracy theory stuff. yeah um So he says, quote,
00:57:44
Speaker
in my opinion it is a lunatic book She is one of those people who have got one cause on the brain. It is the good old Jewish revolutionary bogey. But there is a type of unstable mind which cannot rest without morbid imaginings.
00:57:59
Speaker
And the conception of a single cause simplifies thought. With this good woman, it is the Jews. With some people, it is the Jesuits. With others, Freemasons and so on. The world is more complex than that.
00:58:10
Speaker
Many of the facts quoted are true enough, but the inferences drawn are exaggerated." unquote I thought that was a really good kind of, you know, a way of thinking about this. It applies the more broadly than just to Webster's book. I mean, there's a there's like a a saying that kind of captures this, right? Like to to to the person who's got a hammer, everything's a nail. Yeah.
00:58:33
Speaker
yeah If you've got one cause that feels like really explanatory, really true, then maybe you're tempted to use it to explain everything it can possibly explain.
00:58:43
Speaker
But we us remember right that simplicity is only one explanatory virtue among many. So simplicity matters, but it's not the only thing that matters. And it's possible to be too fond of Occam's razor. This probably is a problem elsewhere as well.
00:58:57
Speaker
Yeah. So with some people, it's the Jews or the Jesuits or the Freemasons or the deep state or the Illuminati or the I don't know what other groups are.
00:59:09
Speaker
You know, let's say sometimes we'll just say the corporations. right Come on. That's a little lazy. Sometimes people just say they. They. yeah they that's Yeah. That's what they want you to think. Yeah. Whatever shadowy entity is out there.
00:59:20
Speaker
They're doing everything. So, Frank, if you had been back there in 18th century Bavaria. Yeah. And you got the invitation. do you think you would have joined or tried to join the Illuminati?
00:59:34
Speaker
Yeah, probably. Yeah, really? You would, too. Oh, wait, you're a woman. You couldn't. i You could have disguised yourself, though. As an. Oh, that would have been a great story. Kind of like the Mulan of.
00:59:46
Speaker
Yeah, or the the Joan of Arc of the Illuminati. I could. Yeah. But then I would have just I would have been trying to bring it down. don't I wouldn't have I wouldn't have liked the Illuminati. So remember, at the lowest levels, it sounded pretty good. Right. Like you you don't you don't get the and like the destruction of civilization until you get to the top.
01:00:02
Speaker
OK, good point. good Yeah. At the lower level, it's just like, let's be better people. Right. Let's inculcate the virtues in ourselves and others. Okay, so maybe I would have joined and then I would have i would have pieced out. Actually, can you leave? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can leave? Yeah.
01:00:17
Speaker
Okay. I probably would have i would have joined and then left then, I guess. But yeah, I'm a woman, so I couldn't have done any of that. And I like my stuff, so I'm not going to. Yeah. I don't want to journal that much.
01:00:28
Speaker
so much homework. i know I said that so much, but I really found that the most, one of the most surprising things about like the 10 hour philosophy lecture and the homework, so much homework.
01:00:39
Speaker
I guess it makes sense. He was a professor really a drag, but anyway, that's all the stuff we have um is a lot of stuff, but alas, like the lecture of the people being inducted into the Illuminati, it has finally come to an end.
01:00:54
Speaker
So we hope ah you got a kick out of it, at least in some points. And ah join us for our next episode.