Ideas - Taken In: Exploring Credulity

Episode Date: June 18, 2024

Two experts who got financially scammed. Two ex-Fundamentalist Christians who researched the psychology of conspiracy belief. Each describes their experience, and explains why credulity is a universal and persistent human tendency. *This episode originally aired on April 20, 2023.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. They do a really good pumpkin and eggplant curry. They do a good spicy tom yum soup with chicken.

They do a good spicy tom yum soup with chicken. Corey had a craving for Thai food. We had a friend over and we were going to have like a little movie night with a friend. So he googled the menu of a local takeout place. And so we were talking on the couch and I was just tapping idly on my phone going, like, how does this sound to you? How does that sound to you? And just sort of ordering for the whole gang. And then I hit go. Although that's where things stop, actually.

Because the restaurant called Corey right back. They called us right back and they said, hey, we are not going to fill this order. You have engaged in a fraudulent transaction through no fault of your own. It turns out that the menu he'd been looking at on his phone. There's two listings at the top of the screen, and both of them go to a website that looks like the website for the restaurant, and both of them list all of its menu items. It's just that the top one also has in tiny gray on white writing the word sponsored post. An advertisement, in other words. And if you click on that sponsored post,

you get an intermediary. Someone else posing as the restaurant. They charge sort of 15% more, and then they just phone in the order. And the order is Tom Yum Soup with a side of fraud, mildly spiced. I'm Nala Ayed. Welcome to Ideas and to another day in the Scamiverse,

where Corrie's marked-up dinner order is pretty much the least of it. Hello, UPS Express. You have a new package message. The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre calls fraud, identity crimes and associated cybercrimes rapidly growing issues. And in the U.S., consumers reported losing $5.8 billion to fraud in 2021, a more than 70% increase over the previous year. The numbers are up. There are more scams and different ones, but the motivations remain the same. Greed, lying, stealing, they're human tendencies, and they work because of another trait. Credulity.

Credulity. As the dictionary defines it, our willingness to believe that something is real or true. Its synonyms may sting. Gullible. Foolish. Naive. But credulity is universal. It's a capacity that we all have, to both our credit and our detriment.

From individually falling for a scam, to joining in on mass delusions. That's the spectrum of credulity that Ideas producer Lisa Godfrey set out to explore in her documentary called Taken In. First, an update on Corey. He never did get that food order. He spent movie night and hours in the days afterwards on the phone with his credit card company. That's an all-too-typical thing these days if you take the bait and click on the wrong website or text or email link. It's particularly sobering since Corey doesn't have your average relationship with technology. He's Corey Doctorow. On his journey to becoming a preeminent science fiction philosopher, Corey founded a number of open software companies in Canada.

He then moved to London and became one of the world's leading activists. And I work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I'm a visiting professor of computer science at the Open University, and I'm a research affiliate at the MIT Media Lab. Journalist and vlogger, boingboing.net. And started my own, which is called pluralistic.net. Cory Doctorow approaches the online world with a high degree of knowledge, alertness, and skepticism. He's prepped when it comes to ordering food off a phone. Normally, I would flip over to Firefox on my phone and type it into their bar

because I have an ad blocker on my mobile Firefox, and so I wouldn't even see the ad. This is, you know, one of the crises of habitually using an ad blocker is your radar for spawning. So if Cory Doctorow can get online scammed, where does that leave the rest of us? The inexperienced young, the senior behind on technology, anyone who's contending with a new culture or language. Well, when it comes to those fake online ads, not in a good place, apparently. You know, if you've ever hired a locksmith, found a carpenter, got a cleaning company in, you know, or done any other local service, got a vet or a funeral home, any of those local services, you have found yourself trapped in a nearly identical predatory scam. And I think you add all that up and we're talking about real money. Now you can blame the monetized warrens that big tech has set up for us online.

And Cory Doctorow sure does. For me, like, I actually think the most kind of obviously culpable entity here is Google. They already authenticate local merchants, he says. So why not just double down on ensuring that an ad is not a scam, as in send an email? Hey, confirmed merchant, you seem to be taking out an ad for a different website than the one we have associated with you out of a different email address than the one that you use to sign up with us. Please reply to this message to automatically green light that ad. Otherwise, ignore this message and that ad will never run. That is like a piece of software that a company the size of

Google can absolutely write. But Corey speculates that that's simply not a priority when a corporation is that large, powerful, and profit-driven. So Google has basically said to the world, we're going to use our access to the capital markets to make sure you never search anywhere except Google. And they've also said, in order to maintain that access to the capital markets, we are going to return high dividends

at the expense of writing a relatively trivial piece of code that will prevent fraud among our users. And that will also have the incidental, and I'm sure not entirely unrelated, effect of getting us more ad revenue. So at the level of the consumer, it's once again caveat emptor. Buyer beware. Same as it ever was, in these very complicated times online, and back in the not-so-long-ago analog times, too. In 1901, I lost my sense of hearing entirely. I was also troubled with severe rheumatic pains in my limbs.

I commenced taking Peruna, and now my hearing is restored. There have always been enterprises out to take our money in exchange for nothing. And somehow worse, individuals who look us right in the eye and take the money right out of our hands. And there's a disturbing trend out there right now of scammers targeting widowers or widows. And then they target that loss and that emotion of loneliness. Getting intentionally targeted and scammed can be psychologically wounding. People feel intense shame, blame themselves, stay silent.

But maybe they shouldn't, because most psychologists agree that credulity is part of being human. It's just a matter of degree. I've been writing a column called Incompetence for Psychology Today, the online version of Psychology Today, on gullibility, foolishness, and recently I got interested in Prince Harry and that whole business. Forgiveness is 100% a possibility. What category would you put him in? I think he's both foolish and gullible. I would like to get my father back. I'm Steve Greenspan, retired professor from the University of Connecticut, where I was a professor of educational psychology. He's the author of two, where I was a professor of educational psychology. He's the author of two books with pretty startling titles.

Annals of Gullibility, and the second book is called Anatomy of Foolishness. He's not making a judgment. He's just observing human credulity. I don't know anybody who's never behaved foolishly. So that Prince Harry comment wasn't intended as a dig, particularly. I define foolishness as behavior that fails to take into account risk, whether it's social risk or physical risk. And gullibility is certainly an aspect of social risk. That is believing people who claim to be your friend, but who are actually trying to take advantage of you in some way. Steve Greenspan says that all of us are capable of gullibility.

One humorous but true definition of a psychologist is somebody who studies things that they are bad at. And I was extremely gullible, partly because I grew up before polio vaccine, and my mother was somewhat overprotective, and she prevented me from playing with other kids. So when I did meet some other kids in school, they quickly figured out how clueless I was, and they liked to play little tricks on me. So that was my first introduction to gullibility. He had another motivation, too. My focus has been on social competence, and obviously the ability to figure out when people are tricking you is an aspect of that. I have a brother with a developmental disability, and I knew how vulnerable he was, so that's partly how I got into it.

He's testified in court cases involving people with developmental disabilities, though in recent years, he's taken up another specialty, everyday financial fraud. As the sheer number of podcasts and streaming series about them proves, con artists can be fascinating. I might have a story. Her name is Anna Delvey, or Anna Sorokin. No one's short. She's either a rich German heiress or she's flat broke.

The charges are insane. This morning we unsealed an eight-count indictment charging Samuel Bankman-Fried, FTX's founder, with a series of interrelated fraud schemes that contributed to FTX's collapse. He needs our cash. $20,000. $30,000. $140,000. But for Steve, I'm mainly interested in victims.

In 1920, Charles Ponzi was able to convince thousands of Bostonians to invest in his fraudulent scheme, which ultimately raked in an estimated $15 million in just eight months. His particular interest is the Ponzi scheme, a classic fraud, but one with major impact since it can go on for years. Charles Ponzi was not the first person to come up with the Ponzi scheme, but his was the first to become a kind of a viral sensation. And so we now refer to these schemes with his name. And basically, what it involves is getting people who invest in a scheme, getting huge returns, and then telling their friends about it. Investors see strong numbers and think they're doing well, particularly because other investors who opt out before them do get paid, out of the proceeds from new investors, that is.

And so lots of money are accumulated until at some point it falls apart, and then the realization comes out that it was never an investment. 2008 and 2009 was certainly the season of the crashed Ponzi in North America. Bernie Madoff's $60 billion scheme was exposed in the U.S., and in Canada, there was Earl Jones. It was a Ponzi scheme that ran more than two decades. How did Earl Jones do it and get away with it for so long? Mr. Jones was an unlicensed financial planner who preyed on elderly people. He would go around to nursing homes or retirement homes and give free workshops for the residents about how he could help them have a secure retirement financially. It turned out that it was totally bogus. He didn't do any investments. For the most part, he didn't.

bogus. He didn't do any investments. For the most part, he didn't. Instead of investing it like he was supposed to, he would forge his client's signature, then he would endorse the check and deposit it into his account. That's called double endorsement. He used the bank, RBC, Royal Bank of Canada, a branch in West Montreal. They ended up agreeing to a huge settlement, many millions of dollars, because it gave it the impression that it was legitimate. He spent millions on himself while ripping off the savings of whole families. And he worked in cahoots with an estate lawyer. So it was in some ways more insidious and awful than Madoff's because through this estate lawyer, he was able to get his hands on houses that people owned when they died,

take money that had been intended for relatives or charities. Jones even lost the retirement savings of his own brother and sister-in-law. He ended up getting an 11-year sentence. He was out of prison in four years, which I find kind of shocking for such an awful crime. which I find kind of shocking for such an awful crime. To try and understand how people get defrauded, Stephen Greenspan developed a psychological model. In almost every Ponzi situation,

there's some combination of all these four factors, although the importance of the factors varies. First, the situation. The situation has to do with the aspects of the scheme that make it seem safe and legitimate. In the Jones case, there were institutions involved. He did workshops through these retirement homes where people were living. And I mentioned that he did it out of an RBC branch, which also gave it legitimacy. He presented well all his life and generated no red flags in person. He was a very charming person, apparently, and many scam perpetrators are very suave, attractive people. That's not true of Madoff. Madoff was very dour and reserved, but his wife,

as far as I know, was not in on the scheme, was very warm. Madoff had a good reputation as a philanthropist, as a major financial person. And so it reassured the victims that he wouldn't prey on his own, which of course he did. He targeted people he knew and made other investors feel at home because he looked and talked like them. Jones came from a similar ethnic background, which is true in most of these affiliation scams, made him seem safe and familiar. Ponzi, who was Italian, took advantage of mostly other Italians. Madoff, who was Jewish, took advantage of, initially at any rate, other people who were Jewish. He seemed successful at what he did.

And of course, a big part of it is that the victims tell other victims, look at all the money I'm getting, this is wonderful. That's a universal aspect of every Ponzi scheme, and it's in some ways a universal aspect of the stock market in general. The whole idea of irrational exuberance has to do with the contagion that comes about from the fact that other people have a good thing going and you want to get in on it. Steve says that's how things tend to work. We tend to get our definition of reality, especially social reality and economics, finance is basically a social event or what's real from other people. Another factor for falling

victim to financial fraud is cognition. How much knowledge you have about the particular matter. Some of Earl Jones's victims were informed people who were simply swindled. In the case of others... These were relatively naive older people who had no financial acumen, were completely unable to evaluate it. Plus, as we get older,

we tend to sometimes cover up our limitations. Also, affect or emotion, which in financial scams... Could be greed, although in the case of Jones's victims, I don't think they were greedy so much as happy to know that they will have an adequate income and adequate savings as they continue to go through their later years. So it wasn't even about being rich. It was about being secure. Security, especially remember, there were some very major insecurities around then,

2008 financial collapse. And then personality has to do with individual differences. There are some people who are very unassertive. So these four factors together explain most cases of financial gullibility, including my own. I happen to be a victim. You heard that right. It's no accident that Stephen Greenspan has been referencing Bernie Madoff. Madoff, as you remember, confessed to his $65 billion Ponzi scheme a decade ago in the thick of the financial crisis. I happened to be in Florida visiting my

sister and she was telling me about an investment she was very happy about that through this friend of theirs who was a retired CPA and who had been an auditor for a hedge fund and was able to get people in on what he considered a really good deal. Turned out it was one of the bigger so-called feeder funds that gave all the money over to Madoff. There were about half a dozen of them. Each of them were billions of dollars of investments. And not only was he persuasive, and he was certainly a trustworthy individual.

In fact, he himself had put most of his money in this hedge fund, Madoff Feeder Fund. And I also met several friends of my sister who had done the same thing and who showed me their statements. And, you know, they were getting about a 10% return steady, even in bad down markets. And this certainly was very reassuring. Then that retired accountant got in touch. About a year later, a guy called me and he said, this is the worst day of my life.

Madoff is running a Ponzi scheme. To which I said, who's Madoff and what does this have to do with me? Madoff, a former chairman of the Nasdaq, wiped out the life savings of thousands of people, the investments of universities, charities and celebrities. Four or five hundred thousand, it was a lot of money for me. Luckily, I've been able to get most of it back through various government recovery programs. The news about his retirement savings came as Steve was launching his latest academic book, titled Annals of Gullibility.

Where other people might shut down, Steve spoke up. I quickly turned my personal tragedy, so to speak, into art by writing an article for the Wall Street Journal. I actually got $4,000 for that, so I got like 1% back. But that's the only time I made any kind of money in my publishing. He credits cognitive behavioral therapy for helping him keep steady. He also calls himself a stoic. I don't know much about, or I didn't know that much about financial matters, but I did know something about mental health.

I could moan and groan about it and rail about how awful it is that this happened to me, but why is it awful? It happens to all kinds of people. How am I immune for this sort of thing? And so the real issue for me was what can I learn from it? But who can say what inner resources led Stephen Greenspan to collaborate with a colleague on a book chapter that analyzed the psychological gullibility of one Stephen Greenspan? What I did is I took myself as an example, much as I used

Earl Jones as an example, using those four factors. Though smart and informed on some subjects, I tend to be somewhat gullible as a personality trait. And he saw how he fit into his own psychological model around emotion and cognition. There was excitement about the affect of excitement about the investment. Even though I knew a lot about gullibility and cognition, I knew nothing about investments. So my strategy had always been to rely on more knowledgeable people, often salespeople, and it always worked for me in the past. So I had no reason to doubt that it would work here. But the fact of the matter is, I didn't know anything about finance. Since then, I've become a world authority on Ponzi schemes.

Whenever there's a Ponzi scheme now, I get a call. And my model actually is now published in some major business textbooks, teaching students about Ponzi schemes. So it's kind of ironic. But in the particulars of Steve's situation is a general takeaway. It gives a certain legitimacy to the idea that anybody can be taken advantage of in any given situation, even an expert on gullibility. You've said that fraudsters are good psychologists. That's a really haunting insight. What did you mean by it?

They know certain things that the average person might not know. The term confidence man came from actually a very famous case in New York City around 1850 or so, where a man would walk around the financial district, Wall Street, well-dressed, and he would go up to people, other well-dressed people, and pretend that he knew them. And of course, they were too embarrassed to say they had no idea who he was. And he would say, can you give me your confidence and lend me your watch? They would end up lending him the stranger valuable watch because they were too embarrassed to admit they had no idea who he was. Kahn stands for confidence.

When you would go to Madoff and say, here's a million dollars I want to invest with you, he would say, no, the fund is closed. I can't take on any more business. Well, what if I gave you two million? What if I gave you five? In other words, they wanted to win him over. People in Florida would even join his country club

so they could have a chance to run into him and beg him to let him take their money. The victims of fraud find it hard to trust again. But Steve Greenspan says it would be a grim world if we went around not trusting anybody. That trust is fundamental to survival. If we didn't listen to our parents, we might get run over by running into the street when they tell us not to. I think what he did is despicable.

I don't even know if I could find words to describe what that emotion was like. That betrayal is very difficult for me. Our dreams shattered. There are heartless people out there. Sometimes they're ingenious and cruel. It can be nearly impossible to see them for what they are. All we can do is take some control for ourselves, slow things down, get more advice and more information. Steve Greenspan thinks it's also

important to know the limits of our own knowledge and intellect. One of the things I know about very smart people is they're willing to say, I don't know. That's why I find the Dunning-Kruger effect to be pretty fascinating. Two social psychologists who presented this theory that has a lot of support, which has to do with the fact that people who are not that smart have a strong aversion to saying they don't know. And I see that in the anti-vax. I see that in politics. I'm struck by how confident some of these victims are, and I would call them victims, that they know what reality is when in fact they have no ability to understand reality. But it's driven by emotion and it's driven by ignorance. In that sense,

it's kind of scary. It may be more scary in a way than financial vulnerability because it puts our whole democracy at risk. You're listening to an Ideas documentary called Taken In, Exploring Credulity, with psychologist Steve Greenspan and writer-activist Corey Doctorow. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM,

in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about.

Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. This is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. Credulity expert Stephen Greenspan understands quite clearly why people get financially scammed. But when it comes to the millions of people taken in by conspiracy theories, he sees a muddy mix of ego and emotion at work. All two human tendencies, amplified by our communications online. Well, I mean, the internet is a tremendous force for good,

but it can also be a tremendous force for bad. Author and activist Cory Doctorow has witnessed both sides of the equation. 20-some years ago, a lot of us were very excited about the emancipatory power of the Internet. We were right that there was emancipatory power latent in technology. Twenty years later, the fears that we also had at that time, that the Internet, unchecked by strong competitive regulation, in a world of increased financialization would turn into the most perfect system of control and surveillance that we can imagine. Those fears came true. In the guise of free communication, big tech wants profit achieved through leveraging users' data and attention. So its algorithms give the people what they want,

sensation and outrage, informational junk food, the emptiest of calories, much of it simply false. On the social platforms used by millions around the world, wild stories are being told and believed because it's right there on the internet. You know flat earthers, I guarantee it, but you don't know who they are because they're afraid of talking about it. Everyone from the BBC to Beyonce has been accused of being part of the Illuminati,

a secret group said to comprise of the world's most powerful people seeking to establish a new world order. One of the more prominent QAnon supporters, Crockin claimed that she spoke with Trump about Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory that falsely claimed that Democrats were running a child sex trafficking ring within a pizza parlor. Many dismiss conspiracy believers as abnormally credulous people, ignorant and internet gullible. Others wonder if this online chaos expresses long-standing human tendencies,

desires and inclinations that most humans share. In a culture that rejects and dismisses outright, these thinkers are doing some unpopular work, trying to analyze and understand the psychology of those who get taken in. There was so much discussion about how to combat misinformation, right? And I'm not saying that I don't care about that. It's just that I felt that there was a lack of work trying to understand why people were drawn to these ideas to begin with. When I try to put myself into the mindset of a person who has adopted the kinds of beliefs that get them labeled as a this-er, how do you get there? You'll hear from them in

the second half of Lisa Godfrey's documentary, Taken In. White, American male, fundamentalist Christian upbringing. In broad strokes, that's some of Phil Christman's demographic profile. But that's not all he is. He identifies as a political and social progressive, an open-minded Christian, and a questioning critical thinker. I'm Phil Christman. I'm the author of How to Be Normal, which is an essay collection that came out last year. And I'm also a writing teacher at University of Michigan. Phil's writing delves underneath basic demographic designations. He looks at how people are typical but not, designations. He looks at how people are typical but not. Average and exceptional. Certain yet messy. That's the perspective he takes in a recent essay about conspiracy thinking.

We hear that term thrown around as kind of a synecdoche for everything that is wrong with the discourse or with the media or with the American brain the last couple of years. And so I'm trying to adopt a perspective toward that topic that both takes seriously the reasons why that's happened and also tries not to assume from the get-go that everything that's labeled a conspiracy theory is automatically something stupid that you have to be a terrible person to believe. Now, Phil Christman doesn't think that a secret global government runs the world. But then again, he does find himself wondering if the full story has been told

on the death of Jeffrey Epstein. And based on historical evidence, he sure doesn't trust the CIA. So when he considers how many of his fellow Americans are attracted to conspiracies, Phil does get the basic impulse. It feels like you don't really have to extrapolate that far. You look as far as the, I think, general sense that a lot of people have,

for probably really good reasons, but the vague sense that things are very wrong and that there's stuff that would be useful to know about why the world is structured the way it is that I don't know. And that's hard to find out. A pervasive but vague sense of wrongness. I don't think it's weird to have that feeling, even though I think sometimes people go in unfortunate directions with it. And worse than merely unfortunate. They and experts are now very concerned that there is growing anti-Asian sentiment because of the pandemic.

Real blood has been shed and more blood is threatened. You described in your opening statement being crushed by rioters. You could feel yourself losing oxygen, thinking this was how your life was going to end, trampled to death, defending the Capitol. And each of us really does have enemies. And every day, another you unwittingly begins talking himself into being one of them. Phil Christman's essay is called The Monster Discloses Itself. He uses research that he did into online communities

to imagine how someone might be attracted and drawn into conspiracy-mindedness. It's all wrong. The wrongness is pervasive. You could not, if asked, identify the it or the it's that went wrong. Wrongness leeches into everything like the microplastics you read about, which may or may not be reducing sperm count in men, which may or may not be good in the long run. It's something to do with the environment. Someone wanted you to feel one way or the other about it, but you can't remember who or why or whether you agreed with him. One day you stumble across something, a long video, an article, a conversation with a learned friend. The same self-righteousness of authority crosses his face.

The tinniness of certainty issues from his mouth too, but this time what he says sticks. It seems to explain the wrongness. Or not even explain it, really, just make it stand still. It was this thing that was wrong. The monster disclosed himself. He was something small and definable, a vaccine, a chemical, that spreads until it can't be isolated. Or he was something large and indefinable, wokeness, CRT, that terminates in many small, sharp wrongnesses. But for a second, you could see the wrongness. How clarifying, simply to see it. You felt something like desire. How clarifying simply to see it through, like, okay, how would this actually work? Does it actually make sense for people to sort of plan to do this? Does the idea

of a plandemic make sense, for example? Would that really be easy to pull off? I mean, might there be better ways that powerful actors could get things they want. It ceases to make sense, but I think a lot of conspiracy theories are exciting simply because they just draw a bunch of disconnected dots together. What most confirms you in your new direction is this. People keep trying to stop you. firms you in your new direction is this. People keep trying to stop you. Your friends roll their eyes, your relations avoid you, one or two of them do something worse, they patiently correct you. What feels worse than patient correction? In less intimate settings, you get attacked, you get wearily sighed at for merely asking questions. People start to fight you over politics in a way that nobody has

fought with you over politics before. Because you are not a political person, you say so incessantly. This isn't politics, that impenetrable form of sports fandom for people whose parents paid their tuition. This is reality. It's as simple as that. Yeah, when someone in your life goes down like a rabbit hole that you think is problematic, you almost can't not respond in the ways that I've outlined here. I mean, if you try patience, people can usually kind of pick up on the fact that you're being patient with them. If you bend over backwards to be super respectful, but in a skeptical, I'm just going to challenge you on this one thing. I mean,

it can be obvious that that's an approach, that that's a strategy and people just don't want to feel like you're strategizing about having to have conversations with them. And if you fight people directly, I mean, then you're fighting. That's not fun. Something I'm trying to do more often when people lay out these sort of empirical claims about who is doing what and whose agenda is controlling what, et cetera, et cetera, ask them what in practice they actually want to do. ask them what in practice they actually want to do. I think that that question calls people back to reality a little bit. Trying to get people to think through where this might be going and what they want. And if they don't want the things that these theories are usually like usually politically express themselves by i think with people who are not too far gone that might help at least

and there's a moment toward the end of the essay where i sort of kind of step from behind the scenes and say what i think of all of this the hope of democracy is that we will, knowing all this, find a way to trust each other again, or at least in the absence of trust, to half-heartedly will each other's good. Perhaps we will stumble one day on some key, some insight that will help us do this again. But for now, real blood has been shed, and more blood is threatened. And each of us really does have enemies. And every day, another you unwittingly begins talking himself into being one of them. And so we all stand jabbering at each other, accusing like Satan, united only by the self-righteousness that crosses every face, which we don't see because we are no longer looking at each other

or at anything. There is only the wrongness. Writer Phil Christman, with his essay, The Monster Discloses Itself. Carolyn Biltoff shares some common ground with Phil Christman. Like him, she's interested in the communities of identity and belief that people occupy. In her case, from the perspective of a historian interested in credulity. She grew up in a fundamentalist Christian community. My father was an evangelical minister in rural Nebraska, in Alliance, Nebraska, along the Nebraska-Wyoming border. Ranchers and farmers.

And the defining kind of collective consciousness, as you might call it, of these places in rural America, for the most part still is Christ and religion and religiosity and prayer. It was a place quite different from where she finds herself now. My name is Carolyn Bildtoft, and I am currently an associate professor of international history and politics at the Geneva Graduate Institute, Geneva, Switzerland. Critical thinking was important to her, even as a child, even growing up as she did. I came out, you know, I came into this world, even though I was the child of staunch believers, being inherently and initially skeptical. I'm not even sure why, but I remember Sunday school and reading the Bible alongside mythology like Homer, like the Odyssey and the Iliad, and other kinds of mythological traditions, and not being able to distinguish at all between

why one myth are in my child's eyes, why one myth was supposed to be truth, and the other myths were supposed to be stories. And so that's just, that's the point at which I began this long journey into the nature of belief. She's used history and philosophy as her lens. It really helped me not judge and dismiss believers that I loved by trying to investigate why they needed those forms of faith. She tries to see clearly. The kind of path of the historian is to not begin from a place of moral judgment. That's not necessarily the same thing as objectivity, but if you're just looking into the past in order to judge it, right, like a lawyer or, you know, or a preacher, as it were, then you miss a lot of the subtlety of the human experience. And so for me, the motivating question is, why do people need to believe seemingly crazy things?

Now, of course, there's a moral dimension, because if seemingly crazy ideas lead you to violence, then not acceptable. And yet that doesn't mean we can't try to understand the psychological impulse. To get at the deeper reasons for mass credulity in our own era, Carolyn Biltoft wrote an essay exploring it historically. There are similarities and there are differences to what we're experiencing now as very unique phenomena, right? So this question, first of all, of belief and disbelief is as old as humans are. Past centuries seem more IRL, but our ancestors still found time for the virtual. Think of, say, a farmer whose body is grounded in the soil.

His life is attuned to the rituals of the sun rising and setting, then also going ritualistically to the church to pray to an unseen God, that somehow the realm between the kind of invisible world of spirits and the practical reality of survival would have been more clear-cut. But I think that is both true and not true. Body and soul, faith and fact, dualities, all integrated in daily existence. But things got more complicated with the introduction of what Carolyn calls

information systems. In today's terms... They're the world connected via servers, branch banking and digital deposits. It's all forms of media. It's us being linked up like the Borg to use the Star Trek reference to our phones. You know, it is all of those places in which we interface with the distribution and circulation of information. More information inevitably shakes up our established reality. It confronts us with new realities, different kinds of people,

other beliefs, different points of view. Increasingly, as our lives became more and more virtual, first through telephones and telegraphs and radio and then cinema and then eventually kind of internet and digital life in general, the question of faith and fact became entangled. Because information systems convey invisible and intangible things and ask us to believe them. I think one of the most beautiful ones to think about is the telephone. I mean, think of it as someone that doesn't know what telephones are. And then you hear the voice of your lover or your mother, who is supposedly thousands of miles away, that feels like a haunting. We've forgotten that quality, and yet it's still all around us. requires that same leap of faith, right, that religion does. We are devourers of gossip in people's lives in whom we have no stake. We are earners of electronic deposits. We are involved

in these networks of connections who we may or may not have ever met in person. And so increasingly, every dimension of our lives is less tangible and therefore really requires the kind of leap of faith that prayer might require, right? The belief in unknown God or spirits or ghosts. And there's the ghostification, if you might call it that, of many aspects of our real lives, including finance and economy. We're no longer freaked out by the telephone, but think of AI or cryptocurrency. People get overwhelmed by things that are new and intangible.

Marshall McLuhan saw it as a kind of cultural mental breakdown. This notion, this panic that happens that we're being dispossessed of the materiality, the real, right? We're being dispossessed of the real. materiality, the real, right? We're being dispossessed of the real. And we keep panicking in every subsequent information revolution about the same basic things, like what is the relationship? How do we know what's true? How do we know what's true if you print bills? How do we know which are true bills and which are counterfeit bills? How do we know what's true if we have Photoshop, right? If that's a real image or if it's a doctored image. So this pressure on the truth function of our consciousness is really challenged by these

moments of technological revolution. When humans feel uncertain, we may crave more certainty, politically and socially, sometimes in a destructive way. Carolyn Biltoft's book, A Violent Peace, looked at some of the factors that led to the rise of 20th century fascism. Researching her book, Carolyn noticed, we see an uptick in forms of racial discrimination, nativism, right, border protection, white supremacy, right? These claims that what is real is soil and blood and tangible, right? So you also do see a kind of reaction against this public sphere domain, especially when people feel they don't fit. You see these movements of reaction against the immateriality towards real things, real guns, real territory, real race,

claims that those things are hyper real. Then and now, in doubling down on their reality, people are often fighting phantom fears. I think what's interesting is how much actually a lot of the virulent reactions against cosmopolitanism comes from people that don't have exposure to other races, other traditions, other religions, right? So it's precisely those people that are still shielded in their daily material lives from exposure to radical diversity, right? And they're only countering it as phantoms out there in the immaterial realm. We're back in our own era of information and disinformation, where truth is a social media debate topic, a meme war.

We can think of ourselves in some way in the religious words of the early modern period, because a moment when the surety of our beliefs is challenged by an opposing sect, and you have to live side by side to some extent with all these different belief systems, there's a virulence in defending your own position that comes into play. And I think that's where we are because we, through virtual means, we're exposed to numerous ways of believing and living. And somehow that can feel very threatening. It's human to want to be seen, acknowledged, respected. This kind of public sphere of information and finance still does have a lot to do with the position that people have or the opportunities that people have for

aspiration, for advancement, for change, right? And so it gets all entangled with people's desires to have a meaningful life, to have their life mean something, to have others share the sense of their worthiness, their values, right? So it's also partly about are my ideas valued out there in the world, right? Is my life valued? Do I matter? Is there a place in the kind of public sphere where a life that looks like mine is seen as a worthy and a dignified life? When people don't get what they need. They reach for principles and propositions that help them feel good about what their life is and who they are and what they want and what they desire and what they're even capable of having. It has a lot to do with the beliefs that we reach for, religious or otherwise. And when it comes to conspiracy thinking and misinformation, people need only reach for a keyboard. You get what you Google. Carolyn says even that impulse has a pre-internet precedent.

I think of religions as the first algorithms because they provide a set of rules for sense-making. So you can make sense of your life and so you can derive meaning for that pesky fact that people die, that our lives are actually fragile, that we're subject to natural disaster, to disease, and ultimately to death. And so the algorithm of religion says, if you do this and this and this and this, you achieve eternal peace in an afterlife. The interesting question is about how those algorithms, those very stable algorithms, get disrupted with the proliferation of new algorithms. The online house of worship, in other words,

where likes and followers are the hallelujah chorus. The problem, actually, if there's a problem of the social media age, it's more like the rampant feedback loop that keeps people from going inward and keeps them always seeking external validation, right? External validation of their internal desires and fears constantly in a loop of externality. So I think that's a kind of psychic fragility that's real and that has consequences where people don't know how to do things without feedback, in the kind of

solitude of, and yeah, sometimes the despair of solitude, right? Where you ask profound questions about what's the nature of a human life and what are sources of meaning for that life? A life that still needs to be lived in the real world, too. needs to be lived in the real world too. We have this strange, repetitive, dematerialized sense of community. And I do think that has consequences for our planet, right? Because we think, we talk a lot about climate change, but so much of what makes a difference is still our physical consumption. And yet the earth is kind of this surreal imaginary projection like everything else. Now we really need to make sense between credulity and incredulity. What are our patterns of belief and unbelief? The gifts of those novelties? And then what are the dangers to the human community? Artificial intelligence is another information system, one that could

truly put reality into total question. We seem both horrified by it and attracted to it. Carolyn Biltoft has a theory about that. I think AIs are our fantasy because we want to be machines. are our fantasy, because we want to be machines. Machines protected from feeling, from despair, from death, to be that processing machine that feels nothing, that is certain without despair. Feel it, she advises. Resist certainty, she says. Instead of narrowing your informational intake, expand it. I tell my students all the time, try to be upset. Try to read carefully. Let yourself be destabilized. Let yourself not know.

Read so much until you're confused and it gives you a headache. Maybe it's my own survival trick. Maybe it's my own projection. But the way that I could hold love in my heart for people I didn't agree with was by reading to the point of oblivion. I read about every religious tradition on earth, right? To try to say, okay, so these people that I love that I don't share their principles with, like, how can I respect them? I mean, it's hard, right? It's actually really hard. And it also, I'm not saying I do it right, but at least pause

before you judge. And I think one of the reasons I was drawn to studies of fascism is because the trick of fascism is dehumanization. And so the judgments we use to make ourselves feel better about ourselves, those are tiny little micro acts of dehumanization. And I think it's actually a strangely short path from these forms of judgment to forms of violence. It's actually terrifyingly fast once you get people to accept that someone else is less worthy than you are, whether it's gender or race or religion or class, right? All of those markers of lumping people into one category of less than. I think those are very dangerous.

There may not be as much humanity in the world as one would like to see. But there is some. There's more than one would think. My favorite author on earth is the American author James Baldwin. And he said, you think your despair is unique in the earth until you read. The seeking of a diversity of opinions, seeking to understand is different than seeking to prove. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon,

and look around you. What you gotta remember is what you're looking at is also you. Everyone you're looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster. You could be that cop. And you're here deciding yourself not to be. You've been listening to Taken In, Exploring Credulity, with historian Carolyn Biltoft and essayist Phil Christman.

There's more information about all of our guests on our website, cbc.ca slash ideas. This episode was produced by Lisa Godfrey. Special thanks to CBC researcher Kate Zeman. Web producer for Ideas is Lisa Ayuso. Danielle Duval is technical producer. Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayyad.