Spencer and Jeff examine zealotry—how believers demand overwhelming evidence to doubt their own claims but accept flimsy, often manipulated, anecdotes or stats (e.g., anti-vaxxers inflating risks or misusing oil spill metrics). Groupthink amplifies dishonesty, like MLMs or memes weaponizing satire, while moral absolutism ("saving the children") masks irrationality. From QAnon’s baseless child trafficking claims to vegan dietary dogma, zealotry distorts reality, prioritizing tribal loyalty over truth, proving its universal harm. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host, and back again today with broadcasting from an undisclosed location, Jeff.
Hey, buddy, how's it going?
Pretty good.
So before we start at the start of the podcast, I'm going to try to remember to do this at the beginning rather than at the end, if I can.
If anyone has any questions, comments, concerns, you want to tell us that we got something wrong on the podcast, you can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And with that out of the way, we can move right into it.
Please tell Spencer he's wrong.
It's his favorite thing.
It is my favorite thing.
So I want to talk about a thing that I call the dishonesty of zealotry.
So I think before we get due into that, we have to talk about zealotry first, right off the bat, because I think this does kind of mean a couple different things depending on context and everything else.
Well, I think generally it has sort of premeditatedly religious overtones.
Often it is used to refer to people who follow religion in a very passionate fashion.
Yes.
But you're speaking of like a broader idea of zealotry.
I am.
Yeah.
I have an informal measure of zealotry, actually.
And it's mostly related to the amount of evidence it would take to change your mind about something.
And the other side of it would be how little evidence it would take to convince you of something.
So if you're extremely zealous, for example, about a religion, then the amount of evidence that it would take you to admit that some part of that religion is wrong is directly related to how zealous you are about that religion.
And how little evidence it would take you to convince that, say, a miracle happened in that religion would conversely also say something strongly about your level of zealotry concerning that religion.
And of course, I mentioned that I wanted to talk about this not just in the context of religion, but also just general zealotry, because we have now, well, especially now, a lot of different sets of beliefs that aren't religious in nature.
I mean, you'll find people who are extremely zealous about a flat earth, for example, or the nature of vaccines.
Veganism, very zealous about veganism.
Lots of people are super zealous about what they eat.
Yes.
And I should also point out, because I don't want to upset any vegans, that this isn't, you know, when you're zealous about something, it's not that you're always wrong about it.
That's not what I'm saying.
It's just that you're, it's, it's a measure of the thing you're going to be most biased toward, really, is more than anything else, which tells you something about how little evidence it would take you to convince that that thing is good and how much evidence it would take to convince you that that thing was maybe not as good as you thought it was.
So, but yeah, veganism, there's a lot of zealous vegans out there.
Absolutely.
So when we look at this zealotry, it's almost always seen as a negative thing, which, you know, maybe, right?
It's always a thing that can mislead you.
Well, it's usually, it's, it's usually like zealotry or zealousness is, it usually carries like a negative emotional context with it.
It's usually a label that's put on the other side.
Oh, yeah.
If, if you're looking at someone's zealotry in a positive light in, say, a religious context, you would call it faith.
Sure.
But we also use this word in some other contexts, right?
So like if we're going to describe, if you're going to describe the level of passion that a person who plays a sport might have for their sport, you might describe it as them having some level of zeal for that sport, right?
And we don't look down on that in any way, right?
But, and, you know, they're probably just as biased about their sport as any vegan is about veganism.
Certainly, there's a lot of hockey players in Canada that are extremely zealous about hockey and think it's the greatest thing ever.
Whether it is or not, that's not up to us to judge.
But certainly there are people who feel it is.
So, and like I say, this is just a fact of human existence that zealousness will exist.
And in that case, what I'm trying to say here is that everyone is zealous about something.
It's really a word.
It's a concept that helps to describe the thing that we're going to experience confirmation bias about.
And so for that, it's hitting center of the target for this podcast, right?
It's mostly about different aspects of confirmation bias.
Spoiler alert.
I don't have an individual episode just about confirmation bias because I don't think I really need one.
It's in every episode.
So yeah.
And so when we're looking at this as a general thing, to me, it's part of our programming.
Like in a greater context of, I don't know, what might be called the human experience, but is really just the hardware, the collection of hardware and software that makes up our brain and our consciousness.
Zealousness is in there.
It's like Internet Explorer that just comes with your computer and it'll always be there, right?
You can use another thing instead, but it'll still be there.
I guess it's called EdgeNow, whatever.
I'm old school.
I think of it as Internet Explorer and it's not going away.
And you were born with it, I think.
It's just there and it's not going anywhere.
It's not going to get removed in the next generation or any future generation, I don't think.
It's likely that it comes with the other set of emotions we feel, love, hate, all the different varieties, the entire rainbow of human experience, right?
Zealousness is just right in there with them.
So moving on with this idea, now that we kind of have the shape of what we feel is zealotry here, whenever I'm arguing with someone online, I find that many of them become dishonest in a reliable way, dishonest about the thing that they feel passionate about.
They will exaggerate.
They will make things up.
Sometimes I've even caught them or noticed times where people will admit that they made a thing up.
And they're that conscious about the fact they've made it up that they're even willing to just admit it, oh, I just made that up.
And we've all seen now, many of us anyway, I've seen people who hold very strong opinions about the nature of vaccines.
They feel that vaccines are poisonous.
And many of us have heard people tell stories about the many, many people that they have seen drop dead or get sent to the hospital shortly after they got the vaccine.
And one of the jokes online that we often say is that it's the most dangerous situation you can be in is to be related to an anti-vaxxer because it seems like everyone around them dies.
Yeah, but like those, that's, that's sort of the personal anecdotal headcount.
Like anti-vaxing and this stuff around COVID isn't the first time you've seen that rear its head.
Like, and any time you hear those stories, like the pattern is inarguably the same.
It's, I don't personally know the people who died, but I heard from someone else who said they know people who personally died.
And I trust those people.
So I will subsume those as to my own facts to add veracity to it for the next person that I talk to.
And I will claim that the third party, this is why hearsay is not allowed in court.
Hearsay is used all the time to bolster these sorts of claims.
Oh, I heard about a guy that got an enlarged heart and died from it.
Yeah, he was a good friend.
And with the internet, it's easier to find that one case that you heard about, right?
Because that one is getting amplified.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
You can get, yeah, like, yeah, you can get confirmation instantly, but like, we don't need to go into the details of social media on this topic, I don't think.
Trying to keep it pinned to just the emotional state of zealotry.
That's our, that's our point tonight.
Right.
So like when your confirmation bias is being fed, I think it's funny as an aside that you're saying that you're not doing a confirmation bias episode, because I think this might actually wind up being your confirmation bias episode, because really that's what a lot of zealotry is about.
It's preaching and preach and repeat.
Yeah, exactly.
So your idea that when your level of zealotry is high, it becomes really easy for someone in a position of power in whatever ideology, organization, group your zealotry is built around to manipulate you through, you know, half-truths.
And this, this sort of like grapevine hearsay game of body counts that the anti-vaxxers use is an excellent anecdote, is an excellent supporting argument to that or example of that.
But lying with statistics is another really common one that gets used.
Right.
You are so much more prone to accept whatever numbers are thrown at you without any thought about fact checking them at all.
Did it come from my camp?
I believe those people.
Praise the Lord to 10% or whatever the numbers are that you toss out.
I saw one plugged into a Facebook page by like a pro-science one, Neil deGrasse Tyson weighs in on quite a bit.
And it was like breaking down spurious math that gets used and says, okay, so like, just so we all understand it, if someone says you have an 80% increased chance for a given outcome, that doesn't mean you now have an 80% chance of a given outcome.
An 80% increased chance is just an increase to whatever your old chance was.
So if you had a 1% chance, you now have a 1.8% chance.
You don't now have an 80% chance.
Be wary of people who use this kind of language.
They're probably trying to sell you something.
Yeah, numbers have been rearranged in different ways to attempt to lie or inflate a thing quite often.
I think I saw some stats just a few years ago on Facebook.
Someone was floating around this stat.
I think the, it was before COVID.
So we were concerned about all kinds of other things then.
I think someone was concerned about the amount of food that was thrown away every day by supermarkets.
And the numbers were listed in tons of food.
And I asked them why it wasn't listed in percentage of the tons of food, why raw tonnage?
And they didn't have an answer because they weren't given that.
I mentioned that it's very likely that it's a very small percentage of the total amount of actual tonnage of food that's going through.
And that you just, it just seems like a lot because you have no idea how many tons of actual food go through a supermarket.
Like, right.
So we do have to be careful of this.
But I think in some ways, these things are done in a calculated way.
Like they're not lying about the amount of tons of food that are thrown away.
No, they're just arranging it in a manipulated fashion.
I think I mentioned it in one of your other podcasts, perhaps one about lying with numbers.
But I remember many years ago, when we were like college, university age, there was an oil spill that was reported in the news.
And this particular spill, the volume was reported in leaders.
Right.
And was rebroadcast among Greenpeace Sierra Club pro-environmental groups to magnify as much as possible the echoes of this harrowing spill of, I can't even remember the number, but there were a lot of zeros and it was in leaders.
And I made the observation.
I'm like, there's a lot of leaders in a barrel and we used to report oil spills in barrels.
Why have we decided to change it to leaders?
Bigger number.
And exactly.
That's exactly it.
That's the only reason.
It's just to make the news scarier.
Yeah.
Right.
And yeah, it was surprising how many people took umbrage to me drawing attention to that.
But again, that's the Zellotry you're talking about.
Like, why are you bothering picking that apart?
You should be outraged with me.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
And like, I'm not speaking in defense of, you know, leaking oil tankers, obviously.
It's just it was an interesting observation at an interesting observation I made about what I saw as like intentional subterfuge.
Yeah.
Well, Greenpeace, I mean, I, I do feel that I'm probably closer to an environmental perspective than I am a, I don't know what you'd call it, anti-climate perspective, but I admit I've seen Greenpeace be deceptive in some of the things they say to inflate or exaggerate their point or whatever.
And I think they, you know, they experience this as well.
What is really happening here?
Like when we see someone who is being deceptive in this way, like if this is a press release from Greenpeace or something, I feel like they're probably consciously deceptive.
But when I see an individual that's doing this, I often ask myself the question, I know that that number isn't real.
Are they just being misled by someone?
Or in the case of a thing where people say, oh, I absolutely know this person, this person, this person, this person who all died of the vaccine.
And that was all like within four days of it, you know.
And I'm like, well, okay.
But I asked myself the question, do they really believe it or do they know?
Like, are they consciously lying and they are doing it to save us somehow?
Right.
I think sometimes that absolutely does occur.
And it's justified by the thought of, well, I know this to be true.
So I'm doing my part as a good zealous soldier for the cause by spreading lies as facts, because I know this is true.
So I know these facts exist.
There are other people out there that suffered from this.
I just don't know them personally, but I will claim that I do.
Yeah.
To help lay weight to something that I personally believe really zealously to be true.
Yeah.
I mean, I wonder if part of this.
It's a white lie, right?
That's what I mean.
Right, right.
Like it part of this being like the end justifying the means.
Absolutely.
100%.
Like if we take this from the idea that, I mean, let's remove anti-vaxxers from it.
Maybe we've picked on them enough today, but we say that it's missionaries who are trying to save souls.
I mean, what's more important than a person's soul?
I mean, if you're going to believe in that, it's more important even than their life, right?
You can let them die, but if you save their soul, that's more important.
So if you, I mean, this is a, this is a sort of a, if you want to look at it this way, this is a weird, twisted sort of trolley problem for a missionary, right?
Would you lie to save a person's soul?
And if you chose not to lie and you think lying could have saved their soul, is their soul, is the fate of their soul on your hands for not lying to save their soul, right?
Like, does that make sense?
And I wonder if people are able to convince themselves of this, that, okay, I know that I'm bending the truth right now, but I'm doing it for a good cause.
I'm trying to save lives or save souls or what have you.
Like, what do you think?
Is this?
Oh, 100%.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
I was guilty of it myself when I was spinning for the union.
You tell half-truths or spew rhetoric that you know is easily digestible as truth, just in the goal of bolstering morale and bringing more people around to the groupthink.
Because like that's, that's really the heart of what zealotry is.
Like, you know, you don't have the type of zealotry that we're discussing is only really successful when it's experienced by large groups of people.
It's always hinging on public opinion in some way.
It absolutely hinges on a large group of people all believing the same thing, right?
The things that we're talking about are related to a thing that we would generally call shared reality.
So, you know, like earlier, I was talking about the example of describing a hockey player as being zealous about the sport.
But generally speaking, the hockey player doesn't need other people to be zealous about the sport unless the zealousness of everyday people dropped to the point where it wasn't going to allow that hockey player to play anymore.
If interest in hockey in Canada, at least, were dropping to the point where hockey players were not going to be able to have games anymore, then they might want to preach the wonders of the game to everyone else to get them to come back to the stadium to watch the game.
You know what I mean?
But in the case of anti-vax or a missionary trying to save souls, this is directly related to shared reality.
What they believe only has meaning if other people also believe it.
And This is why we get this situation where they feel a great urge to change the minds of everyone around them because they're trying to engender and encourage this shared reality to be experienced by everyone else as well, right?
Like there's another word we haven't used to describe the noun that we've been bandying about all night, like fanaticism.
Again, this is another way of putting it, right?
Okay.
Yeah.
And I think a great deal of energy is spent sort of like you said, perpetuating the shared reality at all costs.
And like these, these sort of like lying with numbers or bullshit anecdotal evidence, the white lies are sort of like the beginning of it.
But like when you get them good and whipped up and you've got a group with that really significant bite on the lead of zealotry, you can do away with facts and then you can just start spewing rhetoric and, you know, feel good red meat to keep them whipped up and frothing.
And we don't even need to be concerned about facts anymore.
Right.
Yeah.
I was actually, I was watching once feelings take over.
Yeah.
I was, and like, you know, look at what happened with the attempted coup on the U.S. Capitol by Trump's zealous followers.
Like that's a shining example of what happens when that shit gets carried too far.
Yeah.
Zealotry like gets to an extreme frequently when the members of the group that are zealous are at the extreme margins of where the rest of society is at.
Right.
Like the tactics and the rhetoric get the most extreme for the groups that are like the most divorced from commonly perceived reality.
Right.
What the rest of us are doing.
I often mention another thing that goes right along with this.
And I might as well mention here because I don't think it's ever going to get its own episode.
But once a person is being dishonest in the pursuit of pushing their belief unreal or otherwise, they often fall prey to a thing that I call argument by exaggeration, whereby once you're unmoored from observable reality, once you're making the numbers up,
then literally every number has the same relationship to reality as every other number, which is none, because you're making them up.
And once they all have the same value as far as reality is concerned, you are then totally free to pick any number.
And this is why the highest number wins.
Yeah.
And they'll try to pick a number that's high, but still believable.
And they each have their own measure for this: high, but still believable.
And I call it argument by exaggeration because that's exactly what it is.
They're trying to win the argument by picking a higher number.
And they're able to do so because they're lying.
They're making it up.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A good example of that.
A bit of a stretch for the zealotry thing, but it was definitely there.
Like multi-level marketing.
Have you ever sat through a pyramid screen, a pyramid scheme pitch before?
Several times, yeah.
So my, I had a family member who got hoodwinked into peddling this vitamin supplement line.
And I was invited to join them at a rally that was being held in a local town.
And it was like watching like going to an evangelical church.
Like we're talking of vitamin and mineral supplement lines.
So like most of these people are like the zealots around what we put into our body and what we consume and my level of purity and what is higher than higher than your level of purity and what you eat.
And they're all being pitched on this line of friggin pills.
It's all it is.
So like, you know, job number one of the charlatans that are doing the peddling from the top of the pyramid is, you know, show them impressive numbers to show them how much purer and how much better our pills do for delivering all of these important vitamins and minerals than the competitors do.
So we see a bunch of charts and graphs of like, you know, vitamin A is X volume in these three leading lines, but we have Y volume over here.
And again, I'm not even going to bother quoting the numbers because I didn't remember any of them because I'm pretty certain most of them were bullshit.
But like the theme was, we have so much more of everything you need than these ones have.
But the kicker is these pills are crazy friggin expensive.
So naturally, logically, one of the well, if you're telling me I need to take more of all of these vitamins and minerals, why do I need your pill when I could just take two of those that you say you have twice more of the good stuff than they have, but you're 10 times more expensive.
So then the next set of charts was how other pills have toxic levels of these minerals.
And we have actually carry less and more safe levels of these things that you're not supposed to have too much of.
Right.
So like just again, bullshit numbers to convince the crowd that we're the only ones that got it just right.
Yeah.
And like I looked like my critical thinking spidey sense was just going off like a four alarm fire, man.
I'm looking around in a room and I just see people eating this stuff up left, right, and center.
And I was just, I was flabbergasted, like absolutely flabbergasted.
But that's exactly it, right?
Like like it's, it's like you say, we hocksters like to encourage zealotry in the group that they're pitching to, whatever it is that they're pitching.
Because if you can get a good fire going on that group think, if you can get that sort of raw, raw emotional reaction, you really don't have to mess much with facts to get what you need out of that group or to get them to do what you want them to do.
And you might even get them to be immune to the effect of real facts that attempt to interrupt what you're up to, right?
Yeah.
And like, it's, it's actually, it's, there's, you could probably almost devote an entire episode to this, but like there's a whole series of like or a whole theme of internet memes now that go out.
That's the sort of like the preaching to the choir stuff of the various ideologies.
I see them come up all the time in like trade union stuff because that's what I'm involved in.
And it's what I bullshit about on social media.
So it's what the social media algorithm throws back at me.
But like anti-vax climate environment, right-wing versus left-wing, whatever, whatever stomper or group of zealous camps facing off against each other you want to you want to talk about.
There's this theme of memes that is like, here we will put up a quote from the opposition camp.
And then we will pigeonhole that quote with usually an out of context counter argument that supposedly lays the opening quote bare as a shining example of the hypocrisy evident in the opposing camp.
Touche for us.
We all think the same.
We're so smart and they're so dumb is the theme of these memes.
But like there's an there's a new series of them coming out where it's actually satirical, where the punchline is bullshit and it's actually meant to be like turning the whole thing on its ass.
So like, you know, like if it's say it's a right to life meme that's making fun of pro-choice, then like there will be like pro-choice content creators who will create a satirical right to life meme about pro-choice to be funny.
But then this stuff is actually getting picked up by algorithms and dropped into the groups that they're being made fun of and getting shared because the people that are getting fun made of don't understand it's a joke against them and are sharing it as fact because their critical thought levels have degraded that friggin far.
Yeah.
It's it's it's hilarious.
But yeah, like zealotry is rarely something that it's good to engage in.
Like we all want to do it.
We all like that feeling of being excited together as a group.
But like, if you need that, go to a concert or something, if you need that fix, right?
Go to a show, right?
Well, we often associate zealotry with this social connection thing, but it's not necessarily true.
They do often, I mean, that those two spots in the Venn diagram overlap strongly, but not entirely.
I mean, a person could be zealous about a band and they might be the only person in their friend group that's excited about that band, but they're still really excited about it, right?
That's, I mean, you and I have both seen people like that where they, some niche, oh, yeah, and no one else works at all.
We're not talking about those kinds of zealots because this is a podcast about critical thinking skills.
So we're talking about zealots who exist in large groups who fall prey to people who prey on people with poor critical thinking skills.
True.
So those are the zealots that we're discussing this evening.
I understand there are zealots that are super fans for bands, but like that particular.
Yeah, but not just that they're super fans for bands, but that they might be the only one and they're not getting any social connection or anything from that.
It's not about social connection, their zealousness in that point.
It's just that they, you know, are zealous about this one thing.
Right, right.
So it's, it's a removal of the social connection factor just to show that they're not a full overlap.
There is a strong overlap.
It's just not completely the same factor.
But one thing I want to point out is that when I see people who are doing this consciously, who are being dishonest and they know they're being dishonest, I think that another, I suspect that perhaps another layer of tactics or strategies being employed by them because there's a large number of these people who, I mean, when you have an anti-vax belief,
you pretty much have to also believe along with it that a large number of people are lying to you.
So pretty much every doctor is lying to you.
And, you know, all the people at the CDC are lying.
And, you know, like there's, you know, huge, vast swath of the planet that has to lie to you.
And if you really believe, once you really believe that they're lying to you and you have to do that in order to support the idea of an entire world that doesn't agree with you, you might be tempted to lie yourself because it's like an escalation of force.
It's like an escalation of rhetorical force.
If you believe that, you know, the enemy always gets to lie in order to get what they want, you might be tempted to lie yourself, right?
Because it's like, who would want to go to a fight with lesser weaponry?
Right.
So it's like lying would be like chemical weapons and the other side's going to have chemical weapons.
Well, you know, I mean, it's distasteful, but they're going to do it.
So we should do it too.
What do you think of this idea that some people might be consciously lying because they already believe that the other side is lying?
Well, I mean, vilification of the opponent is one of the basic building blocks of any good zealous cult.
Right.
So people on the outside are the enemy.
The enemy are not people.
They are infidels or heretics or capitalists or fascists or hippies.
Degrade them, give them whatever name you can that makes us think of them as less than human.
And of course, the enemy is all participating in grossly immoral tactics, which absolutely justifies us doing the same.
Well, zealotry is about raising the stakes of an issue to life or death so that you can justify not behaving logically or honorably.
Yeah.
And this brings me to my last point, which is that almost all of these beliefs, and again, Flat Earth is not among them.
It's all on its own off to one side on the Venn diagram.
It's weird compared to all the others, but almost all the others have a particular sort of morality test that is meant to tug at heartstrings.
And also, as you and I mentioned in an episode that we talked about about limited time decisions, it's meant to force people into a decision very, very quickly, which is saving the children.
Almost all of these obscene beliefs include some portion of needing to save the children from terrible harm.
QAnon believes that, you know, the huge child.
That they're eating children.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anti-vax is the biggest pull in anti-vax is to save your children from these terrible vaccines.
Yeah.
This is pervasive now, right?
That you're meant to save the children.
And if you won't save the children, what kind of a monster are you, right?
So who wouldn't lie to save children, Jeff?
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Just a lot.
What moral roadblock would you allow to get in the way of saving children?
The goddamn children.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
That's what I mean.
It's about just raise the stakes high enough to justify any amoral behavior you need to participate in.
Yeah.
And on that note, I think we're wrap it up here.
Yeah.
I guess conclusion, zealotry equals bad.
Yeah, it clouds your judgment and it directly interferes with critical thinking that you will need.