Why Smart People Believe Dumb Things

Seven Secrets about Adrenochrome that the Rich Pedophile Vampires Don't Want You to Know

Science is about the process of experimentation. You develop a hypothesis, you test the hypothesis, and then you see if you were right. Most of the time your hypothesis is wrong, and it’s back to the drawing board. But occasionally, one of your hypotheses pans out with results even better than you expected. When this happens, many social scientists often rush to get published, without even fact-checking their own work to make sure that it replicates. This is sloppy science, and frankly, it is this kind of eager-beaver mentality that has given the social sciences a reputation for failure and politicized nonsense. If you want to be an effective scientist, you need to see if your work passes the replication test: in other words, you need to run the experiment again in a more controlled environment. One unusually good experimental result can be attributed to coincidence or outside factors that you didn’t compensate for. But two unusually good experimental results start to form a pattern.

What I’m trying to explain here is why, after my apparent success in using conspiracy theories to help put Trump into office, I decided to try a second experiment. I didn’t feel like I had enough hard evidence to be able to say decisively that Trump’s win was the result of my memetics science. It may have looked from my perspective like we memed a president into office, but that could easily have been confirmation bias. People have a tendency to believe things that they want to believe, and I’m not arrogant enough to believe that I’m immune to this trait. Trump is a very skillful politician, and there were a lot of powerful interests working on his behalf. What were the odds that it was my untested science that was able to tip the balance of the election on his behalf?

That’s why, for my next experiment, I decided to create a religion. This may have seemed extraordinarily ambitious, but I figured that for my second experiment, I ought to aim a bit higher than I had done for the first experiment. If a few memes, nudges, and “bumps” on 4chan were enough to put a president into office, I wanted to see what was possible if I cranked the memetics dial all the way up to 11.

When starting your religion, the first step is to start with a thesis. This thesis is the underlying theme of your religion. The best themes are all about secret knowledge - which, when you think about it, is really the underlying theme of all religions. The reason faith is important to religions is because all religions are about knowing something that other people don’t know, or believing something that other people don’t believe. For example, some people might say that using alien powers to change the properties of matter is a crazy conspiracy theory, but Christians know that these people are simply uninformed about Jesus. Other people might say that the idea of aliens coming down to earth to harvest reincarnated souls is an even crazier conspiracy theory, but Scientologists know that this skepticism is just because of those people’s failure to read Dianetics. (I’m not too well informed about Scientology because they rejected me after only a single meeting for being too cynical, so my apologies to any Scientologists out there if I am misunderstanding the tenets of your religion.) In a way, it could be said that all religions start with a conspiracy theory. The more compelling your conspiracy theory is, the more rapidly your religion will spread.

In my younger days, I spent a lot of time LARPing in a game called Vampire: the Masquerade. The term “LARP” is short for “Live Action Role Play”: essentially a game like Dungeons & Dragons, but instead of getting around a table with a few friends, you would dress up as your character in elaborate costumes and meet with other people who were also dressed as their characters. In Vampire: the Masquerade, the premise of the game is that a bunch of powerful vampiric elites secretly control society, using wealth, connections, and mystical powers to maintain their position at the top of society while secretly preying on the blood of the innocent. This game is rife with occult terminology and machiavellian conspiracies, to the point where strangers who walk into a game by accident occasionally leave convinced that they have found a cult of actual vampires. When it comes to religious theses, I don’t believe in reinventing the wheel: why create a brand new conspiracy theory when there was this perfectly viable sourcebook that already had a lot of pre-existing lore to draw from? I decided that the secret truth that my followers would believe in - the thesis - would basically be similar to the central concept of Vampire: the Masquerade. Namely, that a bunch of evil elites existed in secret, conspiring together to use their wealth and power to conduct secret rituals and feed upon the bodily fluids of the innocent. I didn’t want to say that they were feeding on blood because then it would be too obvious which source material I was ripping off, so I decided to use “adrenochrome.” In canon, adrenochrome was supposed to be produced by the pituitary gland, but the lore of the religion may have changed over time because religious tenets often mutate as the religions spread from follower to follower by word of mouth (or in this case, by word of the internet).

The second step in starting your religion is to get people very emotional about something. The reason why this is important is because the rational mind operates in direct opposition to the emotional mind. The more upset and angry people are about something, the harder it is to think rationally and analytically about the reality of the situation you are presenting them with. When you really want people to lose their minds over something, the best strategy is what I call the “Think of the Children” approach. Basically, you tell them that children are in danger and something very bad will happen to those kids unless they act right now. This is effective because human beings are biologically predisposed to be very protective towards their offspring. In fact, this trait is so hardwired into us that it doesn’t just impact human beings, but animals as well. If you don’t believe me, try giving a mama bear the impression that her cubs are in danger and watch how quickly she goes berserk. This is a direct result of the “Think of the Children” stimulus. Therefore, the corrupt vampiric elite that served as my religion’s thesis would also need to be pedophiles, since this would maximize people’s emotional reaction to overwhelm their analytical response, minimizing skepticism. One advantage of triggering people in this way is that if anybody tried to dismiss the conspiracy theory, the true believers would be likely to respond aggressively, either accusing the doubters of not caring about innocent children, or suspecting them of being actively in support of the wealthy vampiric pedophiles.

The third step in starting your religion is to build the conspiracy theory on top of a solid foundation of truth. The more factual truth that you integrate into your conspiracy theory, the more likely it is that people will buy into the non-truthful parts. For example, we know for a fact that Jeffrey Epstein ran a pedophile ring that involved some of the wealthiest and most prominent members of society. We also know for a fact that some Silicon Valley elites are very invested in analyzing the rejuvenating properties of blood (specifically, blood from young people). Those facts sound completely wild, but any significant amount of research will prove them to be completely true. Once you’ve proven the truthfulness of those two concepts, it really isn’t that much of a stretch at all to believe in the existence of a wealthy secret society of vampiric pedophiles. Honestly, I’d believe in it myself if I wasn’t aware that I had made it up. People have a limited tolerance for fact-checking. The first few times you make a wild claim, the skeptics will go out of their way to Google it trying to disprove you, but after you have made a dozen wild claims that all turned out to be entirely accurate, people generally aren’t going to waste time fact-checking that thirteenth claim. By that point, you’ve established enough credibility in their minds that they’re willing to give you the benefit of the doubt moving forwards. That’s why the best way to get falsehoods accepted as part of the public discourse is to sneak them in as part of a tasty truth sandwich.

The scary thing about our society is that a lot of real-life conspiracies - conspiracies that have been verified and proven beyond the shadow of a doubt - get swept out of the public eye because they simply aren’t dramatic enough to catch people’s awareness in an entertaining enough way to go viral. Men like Julian Assange or Edward Snowden had their lives destroyed trying to bring extremely dangerous truths to a public that was being kept in the dark, but because they lacked the showmanship and memetics knowledge to create a movement that could grow exponentially, most people today are not even aware of the secrets that these brave heroes risked their lives and reputations to expose.

For example, did you know that a lot of spy agencies use wealthy pedophiles such as Jeffrey Epstein to gather incriminating evidence on influential people within society, knowingly turning a blind eye to the existence of child slavery rings in order to obtain blackmail? And that it is very likely that Jeffrey Epstein was assassinated by either the CIA or Mossad so that he could not cut a plea bargain deal by bearing witness against them? This kind of information is very easy to deduce if you spend time analyzing the document drops posted on Wikileaks and other whistleblower websites. In fact, most rational people agree that it is extremely obvious that government agencies were involved with Epstein’s activities simply from the highly suspicious way in which he was murdered. However, because modern “journalism” is more obsessed with woke soundbites on Twitter or which celebrity is dating whom, a lot of these scandals go unnoticed. It is perhaps inaccurate to say that information like this is deliberately swept under the rug - rather, it simply goes unheard in the cacophony of irrelevant news that is constantly competing for our attention. In the constant need to feed our 24/7 news cycle, the ratio of signal to noise has gotten abysmally small. But people who are willing to do their research can easily uncover evidence of the real facts that polite society doesn’t want to talk about.

This is what I mean when I say that the most powerful conspiracy theories - and therefore the most viral religions - are built upon a strong foundation of truth. You don’t need to come up with some crazy lies in order to build a conspiracy theory strong enough to spark a religion. You just need to spot the significant facts and details which mainstream media journalism misses and then tie them together into a narrative that is more compelling to the public. If you can manage to create a narrative presentation of reality that is more coherent and accurate than the reality which mainstream media presents, then you barely even need to do any work in spreading your gospel - on the contrary, your disciples and followers will spread your message themselves. Who wouldn’t want to spread a significant truth, once they have been awakened to it? When you become aware that your understanding of society is a lie, it is perfectly natural to want to awaken the sleepwalkers around you: to point out the significant truths that you have noticed and ask them “Hey, did you see that? Am I crazy or is something very unusual going on here, something that we are deliberately being kept in the dark about?”

This is not an unusual impulse. In fact, I think that belief in an unacknowledged truth, along with the urge to spread that truth, is the fundamental building block of religion. In a way, religion is nothing more than a meme: the greatest and oldest meme of them all.