← The Devil You Know with Sarah Marshall
The Devil You Know with Sarah Marshall
A second helping from Satan: SATANISM 101
00:33:03
<p>Dr. Justin Sledge (who you heard from in Episode 6) is a professor of philosophy and religion. in this bonus episode, we learn how his own experience as a teenager implicated in an alleged satanic plot led to an academic career studying esoterica and the occult. </p>
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- [00:00]
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- [00:17]
Dr. Justin Sledge
This is a CBC podcast.
- [00:27]
Sarah Marshall
Welcome to your bonus episode, this is the Devil youe Know. I'm Sarah Marshall and this time our guest producer Carolyn Kendrick is talking to Justin Slege, professor of philosophy and religion and host of the YouTube channel Esoterica. You also know Justin from the sixth episode of our show and here you're going to get to hear him dive deeper into the topics that have fascinated him and led him into the work he does today. And of course, as someone accused of being a teenage Satanist, he wanted to get to the bottom of who this Satan character really is. And so in this episode, he and Carolyn talk about his studies of Western esotericism and the origins of Satan himself. Once again, we're learning more about the moral panic which might seem irrelevant to our lives until suddenly we need to know what it is, how it works and how it preys on people.
- [01:33]
Dr. Justin Sledge
Yeah, My name is Dr. Justin Sledge. I am an expert in Western esotericism. So that includes things like magic and alchemy and historical witchcraft and the occult. But studied academically, I can't teach you how to do it. I'm not a Hogwarts or anything like that. But yeah, I'm an adjunct professor and also I run a pretty popular YouTube channel called Esoterica. And there I cover topics in esotericism. But from an academic point of view.
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Carolyn Kendrick
And for listeners who are unfamiliar, can you tell me why you make the distinction between studying esotericism academically versus non academically? I suppose so.
- [02:15]
Dr. Justin Sledge
I studied academically just because that's sort of the tool set that I have available to me. I'm an academic. I try to use evidence and reasoning and, and logic and history to try to figure out what's going on in these cases of magic or witchcraft or alchemy or Kabbalah or what have you. That's very different than someone who's a practitioner, for instance, that's speaking to spirits or has divine revelations or something like that. I luckily don't have those and so I have to go with what I have from the historical evidence. So it's a peer reviewed academic program that I engage with the material as opposed to a, a, I don't know, summoning a spirit and trying to get them to tell me Things. Trust me, if I could summon a spirit and get them to tell me where buried treasure was, I would certainly do that. You'd be surprised how so many magical manuscripts from the middle ages. Of all the things that they have in terms of spells, one of the most popular spells was to find buried treasure. Oh.
- [03:09]
Carolyn Kendrick
I mean, yeah. If I could figure out what the winning lotto numbers were, I would certainly go for it as well.
- [03:15]
Dr. Justin Sledge
Yeah. People sometimes say that, hey Sledge, secretly you must really be a practitioner behind the scenes. And how can you know all this stuff and have all these we weird books and. And not be up to something? I'm like, look, if I were up to something, I would not be a YouTuber. I would.
- [03:29]
Carolyn Kendrick
Right.
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Dr. Justin Sledge
I would be living in a castle in Romania or you know, some. Something I would not be in, you know, in a YouTuber in Detroit. So the proof of. The proof of the fact that I have no magical powers.
- [03:40]
Carolyn Kendrick
Yeah.
- [03:41]
Dr. Justin Sledge
Is the very, the very facts of my existence.
- [03:43]
Carolyn Kendrick
Okay. What is the difference between the occult versus paganism versus witchcraft versus Wicca versus Satanism?
- [03:52]
Dr. Justin Sledge
So the occult just means the hidden. And so this could be any dimension of a religion. Obviously religions have what they do in terms of their front facing reality and also they have esoteric dimensions of what they do. So you're not going to go into a church the first day and get introduced to the mystical tradition. That's going to be something you're going to get on, you know, date 10 or something. It's a movement between what is hidden and what is revealed. What is secret and what is, what is public. What is public and what is private. So that's the occult. And so in Western spirituality there's an entire hidden tradition that tries to harness these hidden dimensions of reality and manipulate them to various kinds of ends. And that typically is sometimes referred to as magic in the Western tradition. Wicca is a relatively new movement, about 100 years old. It's a religion, nature based religion. It is a pagan religion, which is to say it believes in the existence of many gods and interacts with those gods. There's a lot of spectrum of beliefs from literally they exist to know their psychological aspects of ourselves. There's a range of how those beliefs go. Satanism is also a relatively modern religion. The version that exists now was founded by Anton Lavey in the 1960s. And it is actually an atheistic religion, that is to say it does not believe. Satanism does not believe in any gods. And it is a very humanistic religion all about focusing on oneself, not in A totally hedonistic way, but in some sense a very self facing religion. There are theistic versions of Satanism as well. They tend to be a minority movement where they do believe in a literal devil and they do worship that devil. This has always struck me as a little strange. Not that in my religion I'm Jewish, we don't have a devil figure, but it seems like to me betting on the losing horse, it's not the best strategy to my mind. But again, in Satanism the devil is thought of as a symbol of rebellion. And so what they're interested in is not worshiping the devil as an entity, but worshiping the idea of human freedom, of human rebellion against authority. And so that's the symbolic anchor that really illuminates the Satanic tradition coming out of leveean Satanism. So a huge range of religiosities, Wiccans and Satanists are not going to see eye to eye. Kabbalists and Wiccans are not going to see eye to eye some occult practitioners. There's huge disagreements in the occult community about what traditions are for the best or which ones are the most effective. So it's an enormously small community. And as you can imagine because of that very smallness, it is also a community that is heavily complicated by different streams of thought and practice.
- [06:33]
Carolyn Kendrick
So I have been doing some reading on origins of Satan. Can you speak to the role of Satan and if he shows up at all in the Hebrew Bible or anything pre New Testament?
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Dr. Justin Sledge
So there is a character in the Hebrew Bible named the Satan. There are almost always the Satan. The Satan, it's a title, not a name. It only becomes a name in the Christian tradition. And this being seems to have been primarily and most famously known from the book of Job. But he appears in other places as well. But he's a kind of prosecuting attorney inside the heavenly court. And their job basically is to accuse. That's what the word Satan means. It means the accuser. And their job is to accuse human beings of the various sins that they've done against God. So they're a servant of God in the Hebrew Bible. They're not an opponent of God, they're an opponent of us. But very early traditions in Judaism have the angels and human beings not really getting along very well. In fact, the angels argued vociferously for human beings not to be created at all. And so the Satan is a kind of tattletale who sees you doing something and goes off to God and complains about it in the heavenly court. So that's the way it functions there. And it's through the apocalyptic transformation in Judaism that the Satan becomes translated into a new kind of character. And that new kind of character is going to be the devil as he's taken up into Christianity.
- [08:03]
Carolyn Kendrick
And would you mind explaining a little bit about what apocalypticism is, especially within the Jewish tradition, and how it differentiates from apocalypticism that we would see in evangelical circles today?
- [08:16]
Dr. Justin Sledge
Yeah. So apocalypticism is a difficult and complex religious movement that began sometime around the Babylonian exile, the Jewish Babylonian exile in the centuries after 586 BCE. And what you saw there was a shift in religiosity away from the temple because the temple had been destroyed and the Jewish population exiled to Babylon. And what you begin to see is a focus on revelation. And that's what the word apocalypsis means. It means to reveal. And what ends up getting revealed to these various Jewish apocalypticists is things like the nature and the origin of evil, the ultimate fate of the universe, the nature and structure of the universe, sort of what's going on behind the scenes in the universe, what's going on in different countries, and in some cases, what will go on in the future. Although apocalypticism, despite the way that the word is used now, is very rarely about the future. In fact, the apocalypses are typically very interested in the past. And they have a form of writing that we refer to as exeventu prophecy, where they will describe events going on now, but describe them as if they're going on in the future in very highly coded language. The most famous example, of course, would be The Revelation of St. John, which is describing the situation of the Christians around the year 100 with the persecution of Nero. The famous 666, the number of the beast is almost certainly referring to Nero. And so those are examples of apocalypticism. The Book of Enoch is an example. The Book of Daniel is an example. Dozens of these books, these apocalyptic books. But one of the things they're very interested in, as you can imagine being in exile and having suffered from the defeat by the Babylonians, is where does evil come from? Why is this happening to us? And one of the going theories that emerges is that evil emerges because of some demonic beings, rebel angels or angels who have fallen down to earth to mate with human women, as in the Book of Enoch. And so there are different competing theories about where evil comes from. But one of the theories that does emerge, especially in Christianity, is that there was a war in heaven and that that war was led by a rebellious angel. And that rebellious angel, well becomes the devil. And they sort of pitted against God from the very early days of creation until the very end of time. And that good versus evil sort of fight may have been taken over from the Zoroastrian religion, which was a type of dualist religion over in Persia. And so this becomes really core to Christianity in a way. Interestingly enough, it doesn't become core to. But in Islam and in Christianity, this idea of a rebellious angel becomes a key feature of those mythologies.
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Carolyn Kendrick
Would you mind speaking to the political context in which Satan is transformed from an accuser to a fallen angel, literal devil.
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Dr. Justin Sledge
So we see that process happening in the apocalyptic literature and what the political context is one of exile. So the destruction of Judea by the Babylonians and the eventual occupation of the by the Greeks, Antiochus Epiphanes being the most famous, the Hanukkah story. And then the Romans. We have a situation of occupation. And what you get is a social tension between the Jews and their occupiers and their neighbors. And in those kinds of political situations where you have a political other that is also going to take the form of spiritual others. And so not only are you fighting against, competing against the Romans, for instance, but also the Romans are just the implement of demonic forces, and you're also in struggle with demonic forces. This is most famously exemplified in one of the books recovered at Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, where we have a text called the War scroll, the War of the Sons of Light versus the Sons of Darkness, where the sons of light are the Essenes, the people that wrote the scroll. And the Sons of Darkness, led by a demon named Belial, is sort of a satanic figure. In Belial, Jesus mentions hymns as well. His name means worthless. But the Romans or the Kit Team are the soldiers of the Sons of Darkness. And this scroll basically outlines the kind of final battle between the sons of light and the sons of Darkness. And of course, the sons of light win. If things could only go so nicely in actual history, what really happened was the Essenes probably went to war with the Romans, thinking that God was going to intervene at the very end and save them. And God didn't show up and they were all massacred and their scrolls were left in those caves for 2000 years for us to find some time later. And so you sort of get this sort of us versus them, both politically and spiritually. And that's in the air in Judaism at the time. You can see it at the again at the community at Qumran, the Essenes. But clearly early on in Christianity it was developing there again because you have this tension with both the Romans, but also with the larger Jewish establishment. So it's a, it's a world of conflict. And there's no way that in a world of conflict your theology will not mirror that conflict.
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Carolyn Kendrick
How have Christians historically utilized Satan to demonize others?
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Dr. Justin Sledge
The Catholic Church has long held that they are the unique purveyors of salvation. Which is to say that the, the famous way of putting it is there is no salvation outside the church. Well, if there is no salvation outside the church, then. Well, if there's only two teams, there's the God team and there's the other team. And if you're not on the God team, well, you're on the other team. Whether it's Jews or Muslims or other so called pagans or idolaters. The idea was, hey, there's two teams and you're on one or the other. Everything else that's just not Christianity and not specifically Catholic Christianity becomes associated with the devil. And again, that process begins as early as the New Testament where you have this phrase of the synagogue of Satan. Well that's saying that there's a synagogue, a good one, the one of Jesus, the church, the ecclesia, and then there's the other synagogue and that's the one of Satan, that's the one the Jews belong to. And so early on, at the very beginning of Christianity, that logic is beginning to function. And so you can see that dualism, soft dualism beginning to emerge and Jews and other Christians that the official church did not like, increasingly begin to be associated with the devil. This would include so called gnostic Christians, Christians that are not orthodox Christians, those also begin to be associated with the devil. Now what's interesting about that process, lots of things that are interesting about it, but one of which is interesting is that many of the very things that become linked with Satanism, that is to say doing satanic things, eating babies or fornicating or incest, and all the kind of things that you see often associated with, with Satanism by the church is the exact things that early Christians were accused of by the Romans. And so they repackage, you know, what is this phrase? Hurt people, hurt people. That you have a, you have a traumatized people, early Christians who did legitimately face horrifying persecution, though not nearly at the levels that often we think of as in being slaughtered by the thousands in the Coliseum or something. But they did undergo centuries of persecution and that kind of persecution. I think the trauma response in it was to basically accuse anyone who wasn't them of the exact same kinds of things they had been accused of. So we're going to see this get recycled over and over. And first it will be Christians accusing other Christians and Jews of this, and then it will be Christians accusing Jews of this. And then eventually it will become that sort of anti Judaism rumors will become linked up with Satanism and those. That myth, that structural myth persists all the way down into this day with the satanic panic and even with QAnon and stuff like that.
- [16:08]
Nicole Ernest Pate
Nicole Ernest Pate was 21 years old when a predator assaulted her in her own home.
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Dr. Justin Sledge
Kind of the boogeyman in the night.
- [16:15]
Nicole Ernest Pate
She went straight to the cops.
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Carolyn Kendrick
She said this sounds like some sort of movie plot.
- [16:20]
Nicole Ernest Pate
But no one believed her until Detective Paul Holz helped figure out this serial predator's pattern. This is a serious offender from Sony Music Entertainment and perfect cadence. This is Hunting the boogeyman, available now on the binge listen wherever you get your podcasts.
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Carolyn Kendrick
The huge theme that we just keep running into over and over and over again is the function of projection within, and not just individual projection, but societal projection. And to be able to envision that somebody is going to subject you to horrors, or to be able to envision that other people are capable of doing horrors, you have to have that lexicon and you have to have that sense memory within your own self to be able to imagine that. Would you mind speaking to the connection between the blood libel cases and the satanic panic?
- [17:12]
Dr. Justin Sledge
Yeah. So as part of the package of anti Judaism that would eventually become anti Semitism in the Christian Middle ages was a persistent bundle of anti Jewish myths, one of which was poisoning wells, which was common during the plague. But another one that developed was the kidnapping of children and using the blood of children to make ritual bread, matzah that's used during Passover. It's a kind of mockery of Jesus, his passion. And often you see this, the child is being crucified in mockery of Jesus and the blood's being extracted or something like that. There's these really fantastically horrible depictions of this that would be put up in medieval towns and led to a lot of bloodshed. But the blood libel was the idea that Jews were secretly and covertly all over Europe kidnapping and torturing children in order to extract blood to make matzah. There's a similar version of this, of them actually taking the. The consecrated host and then taking the consecrated host and like stabbing it or doing all kinds of dreadful things with it to this day, Catholic churches still lock the host, the consecrated hosts in a special box to prevent them from being stolen. This is still a kind of at least ritual anxiety on the part of the institutional church. I've seen the box at the local, at the local cathedral. But the idea was that the Jews, and it's the Jews, it's very important to think of this as kind of Europeans thinking of this as a pan Jewish phenomena happening everywhere from France to Russia. But the idea was that the Jews are doing this, they're kidnapping children and doing these dreadful things to them, which is a horrifying idea to Jews because Jewish people aren't allowed to eat blood. And so the idea of using human blood in matzah is just abhorrent at every possible register. But that idea, and the same idea was hosted upon Christians early on as well. The Romans accused them of killing and eating babies and things like this. So this idea gets, a very dreadful idea, gets attached in the cultural memory of just underground evil stuff. And when you have the rise of the witch cult, the witch hunts, in the early modern period, one of the earliest things these so called witches are accused of is killing children and doing various things with their body parts, using their oil, the oil of their, the fat of their body to make flying ointment and stuff like that. When that lexicon gets advanced and when the Satanic panic arrives largely in the late 70s and early 80s, well, you lean on the historical myth structures of secret predation. And what do those look like? They look like kidnapping and hurting children. And so the very kind of things you see people being accused of during the days of the Satanic panic have a very strong genetic link to the kinds of things that witches were traditionally accused of, which is again genetically connected to what Jews were accused of. And that goes all the way back to these accusations the Romans were making against early Christians early on. So what we have is a 2000 year old cycle of myths about underground people doing dreadful things to children or other kinds of nefarious behavior like witchcraft and magic and cursing people and things like this. But they get recycled over and over and over again. And what's interesting is that often in the cases of the witch trials, and often in the cases of the Satanic panic, and in other cases as well, people would go back to traditional documents like the Apostolic Fathers, the church Fathers, and say, look, this has been going on the whole time. This was just a long satanic conspiracy going back for generations. And so the very evidence that often would underwrite a lot of these claims was produced in sort of a feedback loop. And so you had all the evidence you needed because someone else in the past believed it too. And so it becomes an echo chamber. And there is something downright horrifying about the moment in the 1980s where some of these so called occult experts that were consulting for police departments, frankly, they were quoting books like Malleus Maleficarum, a witch hunting manual first published in 1486, which is a textbook for how not to do law enforcement. It is a horrifying, misogynistic screed about basically how to torture confessions out of people and then ultimately kill them for it. And this is the kinds of documents that so called occult experts were using as evidence that they were devil worshipers. Because this, I mean, frankly, insane man. I mean, 15, 1486, the guy that wrote the Malaeus was actually ejected from his local area by the bishop for being crazy. And so like you, you gotta be kind of out there to get ejected in 1486. And the idea this could be recycled as evidence in 1986, that's a unique. That's a unique horror all its own.
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Carolyn Kendrick
Yeah. Just the idea of.
- [22:17]
Dr. Justin Sledge
Yeah.
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Carolyn Kendrick
How, how nuts you have to be in the 15th century. Yeah. Anyway, sorry, it's not funny. It's just, I can't. You just kind of have to laugh.
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Dr. Justin Sledge
You have to laugh. I mean, it's just, you know, when you actually get to the history of this stuff, you know, you look at some of these documents and you think this is insane. You look at people at the time, they're like, yeah, we had told you it was insane.
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Carolyn Kendrick
Right.
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Dr. Justin Sledge
Like we didn't want this guy either.
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Carolyn Kendrick
Yeah.
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Dr. Justin Sledge
But he was able to convince the right people and ultimately this book ended up. Malleus Maleficarum is probably responsible for the deaths of thousands of women.
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Carolyn Kendrick
Yeah. So my, as I've been trying to understand how Satan developed as a figure within early, you know, early gospels, my understanding is that he, Satan is used as sort of like a, like a literary tool in the sense to justify the early Christian movement in the sense that like if you are Jewish among that, like in that time, and then you have this new Messiah. But most of the Jewish population does not recognize that Messiah. You need to have some kind of framing to be like, no, really, this is, this is really happening. Like, would you mind explaining that to me a little bit better? Because I don't know if I totally understand that.
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Dr. Justin Sledge
Sure. This is Elaine Pagels argument or a version of it at least. So Pagels argues, and I'm quoting This from memory. So I could be wrong. But basically what's happening is that the early Jesus movement, this is before institutional Christianity, is facing resistance from the larger Jewish population who doesn't accept that they're Messiah is. Is. Well, is Messiah, much less a God. Part of what has to happen in that process is, is that. And in, in like any identity formation, identity formation is almost done, almost always done through negation. You. You rebel against your parents as one of the first markers of your own identity. You don't do what they do, you don't believe what they did, or you don't listen to their music. Well, one of the only things there the Jesus movement did in forming its own identity was to break at some level with the larger Jewish community. And that break means that if the larger Jewish population and its authorities are not accepting your claims about Jesus being the Messiah or Jesus being God, well, then it's easy to put them into a box. And that box, of course, is, well, if our team worships the correct Messiah and worships God, the other team must worship the devil. And they become associated with the devil. The Jews become associated with the devil pretty early on. So the way that it works is through identity formation, they have to forge an identity. How to do it. They do it through negation. And who's the real negative force? It's the Jews. And as you see in the development of Christianity is that Christianity becomes oddly cozy with the Romans, who ironically enough, of course, did kill Jesus. And part of what will happen is that Pontius Pilate even will get whitewashed. There are churches for which Pontius Pilate is a saint. The very murderer of Jesus becomes a saint. And what ends up happening is that Christianity begins to drift increasingly in the direction of being cozy with the Roman Empire, despite the fact of the imperial persecutions, but never drifts back in the direction of being cozy with the Jews. And the idea. There are two big things that happen in the Gospels that are going to make this nail the coffin shut is one of them is the idea of the Jews as Christ killers. The idea that the Jews are responsible for the execution of Jesus as opposed to Pontius Pilate in the Roman Empire, which is simply not true. The Jews could not have killed Jesus and certainly could not have killed him through crucifixion, which was a Roman punishment. And the second thing that's going to matter in all this is there's a scene where the Jewish crowd is arguing with Pontius Pilate and no, the crowd says, no, we want Jesus crucified. Crucify him. Crucify him. Pontius Pilate washes his hands of it. And then Pontius Pilate says, well, this month this man's blood is going to be on you. And the crowd famously says, let his blood be upon our hands and upon the hands of our children. You have the idea of the Jews becoming responsible for the execution and the murder of Jesus. And that sets up the idea of corporate responsibility, at least in the Western European imagination. And that sets the grounds for widespread antisemitism.
- [26:44]
Carolyn Kendrick
And would you say that there is a connection between antisemitism and QAnon?
- [26:50]
Dr. Justin Sledge
Yeah, I mean, it's a huge question. I would say. Not directly, but yes. And in the sense that a lot of the Myth cycles that QAnon maintains, for instance, the so called elites kidnapping children and subjecting them to all kinds of dreadful tortures to extract adrenochrome from them, that's just an extension and development of the blood libel. It's the same myth ultimately, but with a new spin. I mean, the myths are never just repeated whole hog. They're always changed and developed. But for a person who studies this stuff, it's hard not to look at the past and go, yeah, so 300 years ago it was Jews kidnapping children to get their blood to make bread. Now it's the elites, which is almost always sort of a anti Semitic dog whistle, you know, and this obsession with Epstein's island and all this stuff. There's. Yeah, there's a lot of this where the overlap between the Qanon mythology and the classic, classic anti Semitic mythology, it's too much of an overlap to be an accident.
- [27:54]
Carolyn Kendrick
Yeah, I mean, the perpetual question for us is if we know, you know, Debbie Nathan, the journalist, she often speaks of moral panic. And the Satanic panic is like mycelium, right? It's like it's something that exists and it pops up when the right conditions are right and the temperature and et cetera. Personally, I think I've come to conclude that, you know, as long as people have the capacity to otherize and as long as people have the capacity to demonize in some way, shape or form, that moral panic will continue to crop up. But I'm curious, other than looking to academic research and being able to find yourself within history, do you have any tactics that you use personally while trying to navigate knowing that moral panic is going to happen in the future?
- [28:49]
Dr. Justin Sledge
There's a great book on the Satanic panic by Jeffrey Victor. And at the end of the book he actually has sort of a kit for what to do if a panic begins to break out. And when I begin to see that kind of thing around me, I guess my go to always is very boring, but I think very powerful. It's just asking for evidence of things that if someone's going to make a claim about Jews secretly killing children or QAnon or even UAPs and all this stuff, I'm surrounded often by people making very extraordinary claims. But the quickest antidote to that kind of stuff is just asking for evidence, asking for sources, asking for a citation. And critical thinking is just never going to be popular. No one's ever going to praise the guy who stands up in the middle of a bunch of people with their pitchforks in there and their torches and says, hey, can we think about this for a minute? But I want to be that guy. I want to be the guy in the crowd that says, do we have any real reason to believe any of this? And often I find that the moment you ask for evidence is a moment that people, they basically give up or they engage in. What about ism? Now, my favorite part about that is that if I. If I ask for enough evidence and get about, you know, get about it enough, I almost always become part of the conspiracy, which is my favorite part of that, you know, about. You know, I argue with people about whatever, and they're like, oh, you're part of it. Like you're actually a. An agent of whatever thing that they conspiracy, you know, their conspiracies about. But be the unpopular person who demands evidence. The boring reality is critical thinking is a great and maybe the only antidote to these kinds of panics.
- [30:30]
Carolyn Kendrick
Yeah. It's also just occurring to me that there's truly no downside to just waiting for evidence, too. Because if, Even if you wait for evidence and you accumulate evidence and then the evidence affirms you, then at least you have found evidence. But that's obviously not. That's not what this is about.
- [30:49]
Dr. Justin Sledge
But I would. I'm even worried about collecting evidence because you can find evidence of anything. For me, the question is, what evidence do we have to the contrary? Like, what is more reasonable than this explanation? And in the case of. In our case, when the shooting that happened at my school and the eventual satanic panic that followed, what was insane, we found out later, was that Luke Woodham himself, the boy who'd done the killing, actually recorded a confession saying there's no satanic conspiracy. He told them, he's like, these. These guys didn't have anything to do with this.
- [31:19]
Carolyn Kendrick
Yeah.
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Dr. Justin Sledge
And the prosecution actually sat on that evidence for a year, eventually turning it over. So you're in a situation where you're, you're thinking they did they just make an error at the first few days of this and then they had to double down on it.
- [31:35]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah.
- [31:36]
Dr. Justin Sledge
And then they had to go look for evidence and of this satanic conspiracy despite the fact that there was exculpatory evidence on the other side. So for me the question is when I hear, I hear the first bangs of a panic, my question is always, what is more reasonable than this? Which is more likely that there's a satanic conspiracy or that trans people are all out there together grooming children? Or is it more likely that there's just sort of like some other explanation that that's in the Zeitgeist or in the cultural. And access to. Access to us culturally.
- [32:08]
Carolyn Kendrick
It also would require just so much organization that I just don't think we were inherently very good at to be able to pull these conspiracies off.
- [32:16]
Dr. Justin Sledge
They did a great study where they tried to figure out how many people would have to be in on it for Kennedy to be assassinated or 9, 11 to be. And it was tens of thousands of people. Yeah, the conspiracies only work. And that's like. There's not conspiracies. There certainly are conspiracies. MK Ultra really happened. There certainly are conspiracies. But the, the more extravagant the conspiracy, the more people requires to it for it to work. And you know, human beings are, like you said, not great at organizing. And we're also not great at keeping secrets.
- [33:03]
Sarah Marshall
Thank you for listening to the W Know. Our producer is Mary Stephanhagen. Fact checking by Katherine Barner. Production assistants by Nicole Ortiz. I've been your host. Sarah Marshall, our sound designer is Evan Kelly. Roorkhni Nair is our coordinating producer. Our senior producer is Jeff Turner. Executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. Tanya Springer is manager of growth for CBC Podcasts. Arif Nurani is director of CBC Podcasts.
- [33:44]
Dr. Justin Sledge
For more cbc podcasts go to cbc ca podcasts.