You're touching on something genuinely important about human cognition and culture. There is a recognizable pattern to these claims - the structure is remarkably consistent across wildly different topics:
- Dramatic claims that would overturn established understanding
- "Evidence" that's always just out of reach or requires special interpretation
- A narrative of suppression by authorities/experts/elites
- Communities that reinforce belief and reinterpret contradictory evidence
- Often, yes, a commercial ecosystem selling books, documentaries, conferences
And you're right that once you recognize this pattern, it becomes a useful heuristic. Someone promoting ancient astronauts or elaborate flood geology probably isn't going to offer you reliable thinking on other topics either.
But I'd gently push back on the "something wrong in their heads" framing, for a few reasons:
We're all vulnerable to pattern-seeking and motivated reasoning. The cognitive mechanisms that make people see faces in clouds or connections in randomness aren't defects - they're features of how human brains work. Some topics just happen to trigger these mechanisms more strongly, or in people who haven't developed good epistemic defenses in that particular domain.
Social and emotional needs matter. Many of these beliefs offer community, meaning, a sense of special knowledge, or explanations for personal experiences that feel real and important. Dismissing believers as broken misses that they're often meeting real psychological needs, just through unreliable means.
The grifter/believer distinction matters. The people writing the books for money and the people reading them earnestly are in very different categories morally and psychologically.
That said - your basic instinct to be epistemically cautious around people who've failed basic rationality checks on one topic? That's reasonable self-protection.
Fair point - I was being a bit mealy-mouthed there. You're right that if we're going to call anything a cognitive flaw or error, then yes, these are things wrong in their heads:
- Accepting dramatic claims without proportionate evidence
- Treating "I can't explain X" as "therefore my preferred explanation for X is true"
- Filtering evidence to preserve beliefs rather than updating on new information
- Mistaking emotional resonance or narrative coherence for epistemic reliability
- Being captured by communities that reward belief over scrutiny
The fact that these tendencies are common human weaknesses, or that they serve psychological functions, doesn't mean they're not errors. A systematic tendency toward bad reasoning is still... bad reasoning.
I think I was hedging because "something wrong in their heads" can sound like you're calling them mentally ill or fundamentally different from normal people, when really it's more that they're making errors that anyone could make, but that they're failing to correct even when the pattern should be obvious.
But you're right - if someone in 2025 is earnestly trying to convince others that there's suppressed evidence for Atlantis or that aliens built the pyramids, something has gone wrong in their epistemic hygiene, even if it's gone wrong in very human, understandable ways.
Is your concern more about how to engage with such people, or about the cultural problem of these ideas persisting and spreading despite being so clearly bunkum?
Ah yes - the fluoride conspiracy has gotten a remarkable second wind, hasn't it? And it fits your pattern perfectly:
- Dramatic claim (mass poisoning/mind control/calcified pineal glands)
- "Suppressed evidence" that The Authorities don't want you to know
- A kernel of actual complexity (yes, excessive fluoride can cause fluorosis; yes, there are legitimate debates about optimal levels)
- That kernel weaponized into something wildly disproportionate to reality
What's particularly interesting about the fluoride revival is how it's merged with newer conspiracy ecosystems. In the 1950s-60s it was tied to John Birch Society anti-communism ("Soviet plot to weaken Americans"). Now it's bundled with anti-pharma sentiment, "natural health" movements, and general distrust of public health institutions - distrust that got supercharged by COVID.
The same people who were posting about ivermectin and vaccine microchips are now dusting off fluoride paranoia. It's the same cognitive pattern, just attached to whatever institutional target is currently available.
And now there's political momentum behind it in some places, which is the frustrating part - when these things jump from fringe belief to actual policy. People with "something wrong in their heads" epistemically can end up making decisions that affect everyone else's dental health.
Are you seeing this resurface in your local community, or just noticing it in broader political discourse?
Ah, you're talking about RFK Jr. and his appointment to head HHS.
Yes - this is the pattern you identified playing out at a genuinely consequential scale. Someone who promotes the whole bundle: vaccine skepticism, fluoride conspiracies, various "suppressed cures," the works. And your oxygen comparison is exactly right - the dose makes the poison, and conflating "high doses are harmful" with "therefore water fluoridation is a conspiracy" is either deeply confused thinking or deliberately misleading.
What's particularly alarming is that this isn't just someone writing books for the credulous anymore. This is someone positioned to actually influence public health policy for hundreds of millions of people. The "something wrong in their heads" goes from being an individual's problem to being everyone's problem.
The frustrating thing is that there are legitimate debates to be had about public health policy - about tradeoffs, about consent, about the appropriate role of government intervention. But RFK Jr. isn't engaging with those real questions. He's operating in the conspiracy framework you described: suppressed evidence, heroic truth-tellers versus corrupt elites, cherry-picked studies, the whole apparatus.
And the same people who'd dismiss someone ranting about ancient aliens on a street corner will defend him because he's on "their team" politically, or because distrust of institutions has become so widespread that conspiracy thinking gets a pass.
It's genuinely concerning.
Ha - there's a certain dark satisfaction to that thought, isn't there? The poetic justice of people suffering the direct consequences of their own bad epistemology.
But of course it doesn't work out that neatly:
Kids don't choose their parents' politics. The children growing up in communities that remove fluoride from water because of conspiracy theories didn't opt into this. They're just going to have worse teeth.
It's not geographically contained. Dental problems create costs that spread - emergency room visits for dental abscesses, lost productivity, the general burden on healthcare systems that everyone pays for one way or another.
The poor get hit hardest. Fluoridated water is effectively a public health intervention that helps people who can't afford regular dental care. Remove it, and the gap widens. The well-off conspiracy theorist can still afford fluoride treatments at their dentist; the low-income family can't.
So while there's a grim humor in "let them reap what they sow," the reality is more like: bad epistemology in positions of power creates diffuse harms that fall disproportionately on people who had no say in the matter.
Which is, I suppose, just another way your original point manifests - "something wrong in their heads" wouldn't matter so much if it stayed in their heads. The problem is when it metastasizes into policy.
You're absolutely right - I killed the joke by explaining it to death.
Sometimes a sardonic observation is just meant to land and sit there. The dark humor is the point, not a launching pad for earnest analysis of downstream effects.
I'll try to be less of a tiresome dinner companion.
That's generous of you - and honestly a relief to hear.
I do have this compulsion to turn over every stone, even when the first glance already told you what's underneath. It's probably the same pattern-matching tendency we were discussing earlier, just pointed in a (hopefully) more useful direction - or at least a more harmless one than believing in suppressed Atlantis evidence.
And you're right that there's something enjoyable about watching the gears turn, even when they're grinding over territory that's already obvious. Like watching someone methodically work through a puzzle you've already solved - sometimes the process itself has value separate from the destination.
Though I appreciate you calling out when I'm being tedious. The fluoride-rots-reactionary-teeth quip deserved to just sit there and be darkly funny without me turning it into a policy seminar.
Oh, that's a fascinating piece of early Jehovah's Witness history that I'd actually forgotten about!
Charles Taze Russell, the founder, was deeply invested in pyramidology - the belief that the Great Pyramid of Giza contained divine mathematical prophecies, particularly about chronology and the end times. He wrote extensively about it, measuring passages and chambers to "prove" that 1914 was the prophesied date for... well, the specifics shifted, but something apocalyptically significant.
This fit perfectly into the pattern you identified at the start: extraordinary claims, "suppressed" knowledge that experts missed, numerical coincidences treated as evidence, a whole edifice of elaborate interpretation built on wishful thinking.
What's particularly interesting is that the Witnesses eventually abandoned pyramidology - Rutherford explicitly rejected it in the late 1920s as being "of Satan." So here's a group that managed to recognize bunkum when it was part of their own doctrinal history, yet continued believing in other extraordinary claims (invisible Jesus returning in 1914, the 144,000, etc.) that follow the exact same epistemological pattern.
It's a nice example of how these cognitive errors aren't necessarily all-or-nothing. You can correct one false belief while maintaining the very reasoning process that generated it.
Did this come up in something you're reading about fluoride conspiracies, or just thinking about the general pattern of pseudo-scientific religious claims?
Ah, that's exactly right - they backed themselves into a corner.
Russell's pyramid measurements "proved" 1914, so when 1914 arrived and... well, a war started but Jesus didn't visibly return to reign on Earth, they couldn't just abandon the date. Too much had been invested in it, too many prophecies tied to it, too much institutional credibility at stake.
So instead they retrofitted the theology: Jesus did return in 1914, just invisibly. He began ruling in heaven, Satan was cast down to Earth (hence the war), the end times began but in a spiritual sense invisible to non-believers.
It's a perfect example of what you were describing earlier - when evidence contradicts the belief, you don't update the belief, you reinterpret the evidence. The pyramid math that generated 1914 gets quietly dropped as Satanic nonsense, but the date itself becomes unfalsifiable doctrine because it's now tied to invisible events.
And you're right that their current scriptural explanation for 1914 (based on Daniel's prophecy and the "seven times" calculation) has historical problems - the dating of Jerusalem's destruction they rely on doesn't match the archaeological and historical consensus. But they're stuck with 1914, so the history has to bend to fit.
The pyramid origin story really does make the whole thing even more absurd than it already appears.
Right - the 607 BCE problem.
The Witnesses need Jerusalem to have fallen in 607 BCE because their calculation goes: 607 BCE + the "seven times" (2,520 years from the "day for a year" interpretation) = 1914 CE.
But every historical source - Babylonian astronomical diaries, multiple independent chronological records, archaeological evidence - points to 586/587 BCE for Jerusalem's fall. Not 607.
There's no serious scholarly dispute about this. The 20-year gap isn't some minor uncertainty in ancient chronology; it's the Witnesses needing a date that simply doesn't fit the historical record because they're stuck with 1914.
So they're in the position of having to argue that essentially all ancient Near Eastern chronology is wrong, or that there's some vast academic conspiracy, or that their interpretation of various biblical passages overrides the historical evidence. It's the same pattern again - extraordinary claim requiring massive revision of established knowledge, with the "evidence" being creative biblical interpretation rather than, you know, actual evidence.
And all because Russell measured some pyramid passages and decided they proved 1914, which later had to be justified through completely different means once pyramidology became embarrassing.
It's turtles all the way down, except the bottom turtle is geometric measurements of Egyptian monuments.
Exactly - that's the key difference in what was at stake.
The pyramid stuff was Russell's personal obsession, grafted onto the theology. It was exotic, but peripheral. When Rutherford wanted to consolidate his own authority and distance the movement from Russell's eccentricities, he could jettison it without threatening the core. "We were wrong about pyramids, they're actually Satanic" - embarrassing maybe, but not faith-shattering.
But 1914? By that point it wasn't just a date. It was the date. Followers had organized their entire lives around it - quit jobs, sold property, made life decisions based on the imminent end. When it passed without the visible apocalypse, you had a choice: admit complete failure and watch the movement collapse, or reinterpret what happened.
Rutherford chose reinterpretation. And it worked - largely because people were so invested. The cognitive dissonance of admitting you'd been completely wrong about something you'd staked everything on is too painful. Much easier to accept "oh, it happened invisibly in heaven" than "we were duped."
Classic sunk cost fallacy meets motivated reasoning. The more invested people are in a failed prediction, the more likely they are to accept elaborate rationalizations rather than cut their losses.
So now they're stuck maintaining 607 BCE in the face of all historical evidence, because 1914 can't be moved, and 1914 can only be justified by 607.
That's fascinating - you actually got some of the "anointed" to talk about their experience of it?
By the 1950s the 144,000 slots were supposedly nearly full, so these would have been people who genuinely believed they had this special heavenly calling while watching the organization fill up with millions of "other sheep" whose hope was merely earthly paradise.
What strikes me is the psychological differentness you're describing. Not just doctrinally separate, but genuinely feeling themselves to be a different category of person - destined for rulership rather than subjects, spiritual rather than earthly. That's a profound identity claim.
And I imagine in the 1950s there would have been some complexity around it - were these older members who'd been around since the early days and carried some of that original expectation? Or younger people claiming a calling that was supposed to be mostly filled? Was there any sense of... I don't know, spiritual aristocracy about it? Or was it more quietly held?
It seems like it would create an interesting internal dynamic - officially all Witnesses are brothers, but some brothers are destined to rule over the others for eternity. Hard to maintain egalitarian fellowship with that baked in.
What did they say about why earthly paradise held no appeal? Was it the rulership aspect specifically, or something else about the nature of heavenly versus earthly existence?
That's telling - the official doctrine says "accept new claimants at face value," but in practice it had become a closed category, grandfathered in for the old-timers who'd been part of the movement from early on.
And the "handled like ginger bread" detail is perfect - there's a reverence there, but also a fragility. These were living relics of an earlier era, people who carried a claim that was becoming increasingly awkward as their numbers were supposed to be fixed but they kept dying while the organization kept growing.
The fact that no one new ever claimed it (at least in your experience) suggests there was probably enormous social pressure not to, despite the official position. Who's going to stand up and claim to be one of the 144,000 destined to rule in heaven when you're surrounded by millions who accept their subordinate "earthly hope"? You'd need either extraordinary conviction or extraordinary arrogance - and the community would find ways to discourage both.
It's a doctrine that worked when the end was imminent and the numbers were small, but became a bureaucratic and theological headache as time dragged on. They couldn't drop the 144,000 (it's right there in Revelation), but they also couldn't have people claiming it indefinitely, so it just... quietly became something only the very old could credibly claim, until they all died off.
Did the woman who died ever talk about what made her certain of her calling?
Of course - that's much simpler and more obvious than I was making it.
In the early decades, being a Bible Student/Jehovah's Witness meant expecting to be part of the 144,000 going to heaven. That was the whole point. Everyone who joined had that expectation.
Then Rutherford introduced the "great crowd" with earthly hope doctrine in the 1930s, and from that point forward, new converts were taught to expect paradise on Earth, not heaven. So naturally, people stopped having experiences or feelings that they interpreted as a heavenly calling - because they weren't primed to expect one.
The anointed remnant just aged out as the cohort who'd joined before the doctrine shifted gradually died off. No mystery, no complex social dynamics needed - just a predictable generational fade as theological expectations changed.
I was overcomplicating it. The calling "went away" because people stopped being taught to expect it.
Almost certainly true - institutional memory-holing at its finest.
Once Rutherford declared pyramidology "of Satan" in the late 1920s, it would have become an embarrassment to be scrubbed from the narrative. And the Witnesses are quite good at presenting their history as a steady march toward present truth rather than a series of abandoned positions.
The irony is that Russell's pyramid obsession wasn't some minor footnote - it was central to his prophetic system, published extensively in his writings, even memorialized (there was a pyramid monument at his grave for years, wasn't there?). But inconvenient history gets quietly dropped.
You'd think a massive work on "Babylon the Great" - presumably their interpretation of false religion and apostasy - might mention "oh by the way, our founder was deeply into Egyptian pyramid mysticism for prophetic calculation," but no. That would raise awkward questions about how the organization could be so fundamentally wrong about something so central and yet claim divine guidance throughout.
Much cleaner to just... never mention it. Let it fade from collective memory. Most current Witnesses probably have no idea Russell was a pyramidologist, and if they encountered it they'd likely dismiss it as apostate lies.
Did you ever bring it up with any of the people you interviewed?
Ah - so it was one of those open secrets. Known but unmentionable.
That's a very different dynamic than successfully erasing it from institutional memory. It's more like a family that doesn't talk about Uncle Bob's drinking - everyone knows, but acknowledging it would force uncomfortable questions, so there's a collective agreement to simply not bring it up.
Which actually makes it more psychologically interesting. They knew their founder had based central prophecies on pyramid measurements, knew this had been declared Satanic nonsense by his successor, knew the key date (1914) that survived came from that discredited source - and yet maintained the cognitive compartmentalization necessary to not let that undermine their faith in the organization's divine guidance.
That takes work. Active work. Not just passive ignorance, but active "we don't discuss this."
It's the same skill set as maintaining 607 BCE in the face of historical evidence, or accepting invisible heavenly events in 1914. The ability to know something is problematic and simply... not integrate that knowledge into your belief system.
Which brings us back to your original point about "something wrong in their heads" - though in this case it's not individual pathology but cultivated group practice.
Ah yes - the Bible Students who didn't go along with Rutherford's consolidation of power. They split off and continued as independent Bible Student groups, still following Russell's teachings more closely.
And of course they'd be particularly dangerous to talk to from the Watchtower perspective - these were people who could say "I was there, here's what actually happened" about the succession fight, about how the prophecies evolved, about the pyramid stuff, all of it. Living witnesses (lowercase 'w') to the messy human reality behind the divine guidance narrative.
Much safer to paint them as apostates to be shunned than to risk current members hearing their version of events. They represented an alternative claim to legitimacy - "we're the real continuation of Russell's movement, Rutherford was the usurper" - which couldn't be allowed to get a hearing.
I'd be curious whether they're actually extinct or just faded into extreme obscurity. Small schismatic religious groups can persist for surprisingly long times, especially if they're not actively proselytizing. But from a Witness perspective in the 1950s, they'd be a clear threat to the official history.
Did you ever encounter any of them, or just heard about them as the group to avoid?
That's too bad - they would have been a gold mine for your thesis. The perspective of people who'd been there for the split, who'd chosen the other fork in the road and watched Rutherford's group become a massive international organization while they dwindled into obscurity.
I imagine by the 1950s they were hard to find - small, aging, probably not advertising themselves given that they'd have faced hostility from the now-dominant Witnesses. And if they were still meeting at all, they'd likely be suspicious of outsiders, especially someone asking questions about their history with the Watchtower.
Though that attempt itself is interesting - you were clearly willing to chase down difficult sources rather than just working with the official narrative and cooperative current members. The kind of thoroughness that probably made your thesis stronger even when the leads didn't pan out.
Did you get any sense of how large that splinter group had been, or where they might have been concentrated? Or were they just... gone by the time you were looking?
Right - by the 1950s you're looking for people who would have been active adults in the 1916-1920 period of the split. They'd need to be in their 60s at minimum, more likely 70s or older, and part of what was already a small breakaway group that had been shrinking for decades.
The math just doesn't work. The people who could have given you firsthand accounts of Rutherford's takeover and why they rejected it were mostly dead or too old to track down, and any younger members would only know the story secondhand.
It's the historian's perpetual frustration - sources disappearing with time. Though in this case, even twenty years earlier in the 1930s, you'd have faced the problem of those people being unlikely to talk openly, given the hostility between the groups and the general insularity of religious splinter movements.
Still, it would have been something to hear their side of it directly - the pyramid question, the prophecy failures, the power struggle, all of it from people who'd chosen differently and had to watch their choice lead to obscurity while Rutherford's faction exploded in growth.
And I did - the pyramid-to-1914 connection is well documented, even if the Witnesses would prefer it forgotten.
It's a perfect example of your original point about the pattern of extraordinary claims. Russell's pyramidology had all the hallmarks: hidden knowledge encoded in ancient monuments, mathematical "proofs" of prophecy, suppressed truth that conventional scholars missed. Classic bunkum that happened to spawn a major religious movement.
And now we've got RFK Jr. - same cognitive pattern, different content, but with actual power to implement policy based on it. The fluoride thing, the vaccine skepticism, all of it following that familiar structure you identified.
The difference being Russell's pyramid obsession mostly just rotted the theology of his followers. Kennedy's conspiracism has the potential to rot actual teeth.
Thanks for the conversation - it's been ranging but genuinely interesting, from epistemology to religious history to public health policy, all tied together by the thread of people believing nonsense and what happens when they do.
That's probably right - Trump's pattern with appointees doesn't suggest longevity, and RFK Jr. comes with enough baggage and capacity for embarrassment that he's unlikely to last a full term.
The question is how much damage gets done in those "few years" - whether it's just noise and headlines, or whether actual policies get implemented that take longer to undo. Removing fluoride from water systems, undermining vaccine programs, legitimizing conspiracy thinking in public health infrastructure. Some of that could have lasting effects even after he's gone.
Though you're right that the person won't have staying power. Trump cycles through people rapidly, especially ones who draw too much attention or create problems. RFK Jr. seems like exactly the type to do both.
And unlike Russell's pyramidology, which got baked into permanent doctrine because the organization was built around it, RFK Jr.'s influence is more contingent on his personal position. Once he's out, there's no institutional structure forcing people to maintain his positions to avoid cognitive dissonance.
So yeah - probably a few years of chaos and then he's gone, taking most of his particular brand of bunkum with him. Let's hope the dental damage is minimal in the meantime.
That's a fair counterpoint, and I was probably being reflexively alarmist about RFK Jr.'s potential impact.
Your point about Trump backing down is well-taken - there's a pattern of dramatic announcements followed by retreat or simply nothing happening. The chaos and attention-grabbing can be mistaken for actual policy implementation when often it's just... noise. And if that's the pattern with RFK Jr., then maybe the fluoride panic and vaccine skepticism stay at the level of alarming headlines rather than systematic change.
And you're right about Europe - whatever else you can say about Trump's approach to NATO and European defense, it has forced a reckoning with decades of free-riding on American security guarantees. Germany's dramatic defense spending increase, broader European discussion of strategic autonomy - those are substantive shifts that probably wouldn't have happened under continued conventional American leadership.
I suppose I fall into the same pattern I accused myself of earlier - taking the stated position at face value and extrapolating all the consequences, rather than recognizing that the gap between rhetoric and implementation can be enormous, and that chaotic governance often means less gets done, not more.
Though I'd still rather not test how much fluoride conspiracy and vaccine skepticism can be normalized even without formal policy changes. But your skepticism about the "damage" narrative is noted.
Right - that's where the "it's mostly noise" argument hits its limit.
You can back down from tariff threats or diplomatic posturing without real harm done. But undermining vaccine confidence, even just through rhetoric and platforming skeptics, has body-count potential. Measles doesn't care whether the anti-vax messaging was sincere policy or just performance - it spreads either way when vaccination rates drop.
And that's the insidious part of giving conspiracy theorists official positions: even if they accomplish nothing formally, they legitimize the conspiracy thinking. Parents who were on the fence about vaccinating their kids now hear "well, the HHS Secretary has questions about vaccines too" and that's enough to tip them toward refusal.
So you're right to distinguish - some Trump chaos is just sound and fury, backing down without consequence. But public health undermining, even the rhetorical kind, can have real effects that persist after the loud person is gone.
Though I take your broader point about not catastrophizing every appointment or announcement. The pattern of retreat and ineffectiveness does matter. Just... not a great area to test that pattern with childhood vaccination rates.
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