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GESARA: From 9/11 ‘truth’ to global economic conspiracy

Thiago Vahia Malliagros
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GESARA: From 9/11 ‘truth’ to global economic conspiracy

I want to start with an affirmation: Conspiracy Theories never truly die; instead, they always come back in new forms. A good example of this maxim is a conspiracy theory that has gained some popularity lately here in Brazil – the NESARA or GESARA conspiracy.

The name relates to an economic plan introduced by Harvey Francis Barnard in the 1990s – he distributed his proposals as the National Economic Security and Recovery Act, or NESARA. He claimed that the US economy’s main problem was debt, and so the solution would be to remove compound interest on loans and return the economy to a bimetallic system. As the proposal never reached congress or any authority, Harvey released it to the public domain and created an institution called NESARA, in 2001. 

Those are the historic and factual bases of NESARA, which rarely appear in the version popularised by conspiracy theorists. Instead, the narrative that gained traction is the one put forward by the “Dove of Oneness” – whose real name is Shaini Candace Goodwin. Goodwin could be the subject of an article in her own right, as she has an extensive and very interesting history, but what is relevant here is what she said about NESARA, as it became the basis for this conspiracy theory.

Goodwin claims that the NESARA bill actually did make it to congress, where it was approved during a secret meeting and signed by President Clinton (something which would be later contested by other conspiracy theorists). She believed NESARA, when put into action, would force all the banks around the world to pay people back the money they ‘stole’ via interest and charges, along with rendering taxes illegal, instituting world peace and forcing new elections in the US for president and for congress.

According to the conspiracy theorists, the plan was supposed to be enacted at 10am on September 11th, 2001, and it was due to take place at the World Trade Centre because of its importance on the global monetary system. As the theory goes, 9/11 was actually an attempt by the shadow government to stop NESARA from being enacted, so as to ensure that banks around the world would not collapse. Goodwin claims those shadowy forces silenced anyone from ever talking about this, but that there are brave souls – called the White Knights – who fight against the Deep State to reveal the truth.

This conspiracy theory continued to grow and change through the 2000s, taking on new forms and new variations, but the change I most want to focus on occurred since 2016. These days, the theory goes by the name GESARA, and the history has shifted somewhat: its origins with Barnand have been completely removed, and instead, in its modern form, the creation of the plan is attributed to Donald Trump.

The earth from space

What is interesting is the plan has been elevated from a national level to an international plan: it is now called the Global Economic Security and Recovery Act (GESARA), and modern versions of the story claim it was actually the UN who held a secret meeting and approved this plan, which was supposed to be acted on 9/11 of 2001 – because the plan was so good that the entire world wanted to be in on it.

In the new version of the theory, Clinton actually tried to stop the evil plan, but congress forced him to sign it. Other versions of the theory claim that Trump secretly signed the enforcement of GESARA, as part of the Paris Agreement, or the Peace Deals with North Korea, or any other time where he has signed an agreement. 

Most recently, a range of embellishments have been added, including that the enactment of GESARA will involve the release of thousands of secret patents for medications and treatments. The original theory claimed that the new economic system would be based in metallic reserves; the more popular narrative these days is that money will return to the gold standard. The secret cabal at the heart of the plan now extends beyond the banks, and involves President George Bush, the Illuminati and the ‘Globalists’, and so on. The development that the Clintons were trying to stop this plan at any costs is an interesting reversal of the original versions of the conspiracy, which blamed the Clintons. It is a particularly interesting addition, given how hated the Clinton family is in conspiracy theory circles.

The NESARA/GESARA theory is an illustration of how conspiracy theories do not die, they only shift and are reborn. In this case, the fear of banks and the Federal Reserve is an old fear, it predates the creation of either in the US, so the theory has some deep roots to draw on. It also feeds into fears about the collapse of the value of money, and the trope that “Taxation is Theft” – the belief that any type of control or tax of the government is unjust. NESARA is simply the rebranding of narratives that claim to solve these fears and questions, by linking the value of money to something tangible, and to reassure people that while banks have been evil and dishonest, things will be fine once they can be forced to give the people their money back.

These fears, today, are global, which is why we’ve seen the ‘NESARA’ conspiracy become ‘GESARA’: the same narrative can be used all around the globe, not just in the US. Indeed, the first time I ever heard about GESARA was in Brazilian conspiracy theories.

With COVID-19 and the related economic crisis causing global anxieties, it is perhaps no surprise that the GESARA theory emphasises the release of secret patents – for treatments that will cure the virus and heal the world, bringing an end to the economic uncertainty. 

It is almost as if the conspiracy theory is the antagonist in a slasher or horror movie: it never dies, it always finds a way to return, perhaps dressed a little differently or with a new gimmick, but always following the original pattern. And just when we think it’s defeated, someone or something will disturb it’s grave, and it will return to haunt everyone again. 

Plagues and plots: throughout history, epidemics and conspiracy theories have gone hand-in-hand

Deborah Hyde
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Plagues and plots: throughout history, epidemics and conspiracy theories have gone hand-in-hand

The historian Robert of Avesbury is known principally for his very detailed accounts of the mid-fourteenth century Anglo-French Wars – well worth reading should you ever find yourself short of valium. On a more fascinating note, he also left us an eyewitness account of some Continental ‘flagellants’, active in London in the autumn of 1349.

Several hundred men had arrived from an area now in the Belgium/Netherland borders:

“Sometimes at St Paul’s and sometimes at other points in the city they made two daily public appearances … Each had in his right hand a scourge with three tails. Each tail had a knot and through the middle of it there were sometimes sharp nails fixed. They marched naked in a file one behind the other and whipped themselves with these scourges on their naked and bleeding bodies … every night they performed the same penance.”

The key to understanding Robert’s masochistic tourists is the timing: the Black Death had arrived in Sicily in 1347 and spent the subsequent years making its grim progress around Europe. A generation’s equilibrium, their faith in established religious ideas and institutions had been deeply challenged, or even disappeared entirely. For flagellants, the new Deal-With-God meant punishing themselves before He could get to them.

A wood cutting of flagellants from the Nuremberg chronicles 1440 - 1514.

Flagellants were violently anti-Semitic and this trait became more pronounced as time wore on, probably because a “younger, poorer, more criminal, ignorant”(p 267) intake came to dominate. Jews had been scapegoated for decades prior to the epidemic, as Europe had experienced a long-slide downwards in living conditions (due to climate change and over-population). But the crunch really came with the plague. Centuries old conspiracy theories like well-poisoning Jews or those who sacrificed Christian children for occult purposes became endemic. It is reckoned that the era’s first violent pogrom happened at Chillon, France in 1348. Shortly afterwards the Jewish communities of  Solothurn, Burren, Memmingen, and Lindau were rounded-up and burned alive. It continued: you’ll find the details in any decent history book of the era.

The blame for cholera outbreaks in Europe during the nineteeth century were usually placed on the sufferers themselves because they were filthy (as though they had a choice). But in an interesting reversal the poor sometimes thought the disease a plot of the governing classes to kill them. The 1918-20 ‘Spanish’ influenza (which actually came from Kansas) was thought by some to have been developed as a war-pathogen by Germany, and the KGB was known to have spread misinformation at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, to the effect that it had been developed by the USA as a biological weapon.

So it would be weird if we didn’t have our own outbreaks of misdirected paranoia during COVID-19. The 5G network has been the biggest scapegoat: there is no disease but the new network has created symptoms; there is no disease and lockdown was to keep us at home while the government installed nefarious technology without supervision; there is a disease and 5G makes it worse. As the fact-checking website FullFact says: “as the pandemic accelerated, and measures limiting public freedoms in the UK became more extreme, so did the claims”.

Assaults on telecoms workers have even occurred. Researchers at Newcastle University found that “belief in 5G COVID‐19 conspiracy theories was… associated with a greater justification of real‐life and hypothetical violence in response to an alleged link between 5G mobile technology and COVID‐19, alongside a greater intent to engage in similar behaviours in the future”.

As skeptics we are already familiar with the traits that make people more likely to be conspiracy theorists. For example, there is ‘teleological bias’ – the tendency to look for a purposeful meaning behind unrelated events. Teleological thinkers ask the question “why” instead of the question “how”. They tend to see an agent or intelligence behind things. Thinking teleologically comes more naturally than thinking analytically, especially when your cognitive bandwidth is low – when you are stressed, in other words. It allows the possibility that there is a force to either fight or reason with: better than trying to reason with blind bad luck, after all.

Conspiracy theorists are also more likely to be socially isolated, and social isolation has been a feature of lockdown. They usually also have an increased tendency to see patterns; in normal doses, we call this ‘apophenia’. In larger doses, we call it paranoia.

As skeptics, we should also be aware that these are traits shared to some degree by all of us, and that our approach to the world varies according to the stresses we are under. Like the anti-Semitism of medieval Europe, 5G conspiracies have not emerged, fully-formed, from the ether; they have just surged in popularity among the general public while the world got weirder. There is plenty of evidence that anti-vaccination and alt-med networks were ready partakers of the 5G delusions. People can talk to each other very easily on the internet, and they don’t always say sensible things.

So let’s hope that we get a vaccination very soon so life can go back to normal.

Anti-mask protests in Berlin, August 2020

Except that it may not be that easy. Censolo and Morelli discuss the idea of “epidemics as incubators of more serious social disorders”. It may be that social and economic restrictions stoke “latent sentiment of public discontent” which are “the symptom of potentially dangerous frictions inside society”.

They consider several factors during epidemics which can exacerbate social dischord. These are also recognisable as promoters of conspiracy theories. The first is loss of agency, that authorities inflict measures which “tend to conflict with the interest of people”. The second is that where the epidemic “impacts differently on society in terms of mortality and economic welfare, it may exacerbate inequality”. The third is that “psychological shock may induce irrational narratives on the causes and the spread of the disease, which may result in social, racial discrimination and even xenophobia”.

So perhaps we should start to look at conspiracy theories as indicators of rising social tension rather than just foolish or malignant entities of their own. 2020 has been spent contemplating COVID-19 so intensely that we may have forgotten about the rising wealth inequality and climate change to come.

How to start having better arguments, according to the evidence

Mark Horne
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How to start having better arguments, according to the evidence

Your sick aunt has started seeing a crystal healer. Your best friend announces in the pub that he’s very suspicious about all this 5G business. An old classmate has announced on Facebook that they’re not going to vaccinate their kids. We’ve all been in these kind of arguments before. But what’s the best way to have a good conversation with someone with unconventional, dangerous or irrational beliefs, and still get the invite to tea and cakes with Aunt Mildred once the hellscape of 2020 is over? 

Like many of us, I’m frustratingly prone to getting into bad arguments for bad reasons, so I have delved into what the evidence tells us about having better arguments. 

Why Are We Arguing in the First Place?

In today’s polarised world it probably needs to be said: be nice. Anyone who is worth your time arguing with is presumably someone you care for, after all. More importantly, being reasonable with people is likely to yield better results. People are unlikely to respond to attacks on their beliefs, their values, and their self-integrity, which create a stress response and cause people to react defensively – not a good atmosphere for changing minds. Experiments on self-affirmation theory suggest that affirmation makes people more likely to be open-minded. 

Attacks on beliefs, values and self integrity create a stress response, causing people to close ranks, while affirmation makes people more open minded

Most parents will have found themselves in a scary conversation with another parent who they are surprised or shocked to discover is anti-vaccination. Attacking them as a bad parent also attacks their self-integrity – their belief that they are a good parent, who cares for children’s safety and wellbeing – and is not the best start to a better conversation about vaccines. 

(Side note to other parents: return your children’s flu vaccination permission slip, promptly!). 

If the debate is with an acquaintance or colleague, we’re out to make friends and win converts, not destroy our enemies. We’ve all seen debates in which sharp and famous skeptics eviscerated their opponents on stage. Whether you’re an ardent fan of the late Christopher Hitchens or were troubled by his views on the war in Iraq (or a bit of both) it should go without saying that you are not Christopher Hitchens, who was up on stage as a professional debater, not trying to convince his friend, colleague, beloved aunt or even a random somebody on the internet to abandon their attachment to crystal healing rather than chemotherapy. 

Consider: If someone is not worth winning over, why bother arguing?

Undoubtedly such debaters believe passionately in what they’re saying, but they were playing to a crowd. If you are having an argument in public, whether on an internet forum or in a pub, you should be aware that you’re playing to the gallery, not to convince whoever you are disagreeing with. Calling them an imaginative insult may be personally satisfying or even get a laugh, but it is hardly the high-ground of someone who is winning the argument. 

If you are truly disagreeing with someone you couldn’t care less for, you need to ask yourself why you’re having the argument in the first place. As hard as it is to resist in a world of Twitter, Facebook and endless other online forums, you don’t need to stay up all night trying to best a stranger, just because someone is wrong on the internet. 

The backfire effect may be overstated, but studies suggest that facts can change opinions.

That can be easier said than done, and I absolutely have been the person arguing with a stranger late at night on the internet. If we are arguing with someone online – which is reasonably likely in our 2020, given everything going on – we should probably bear in mind that we are not likely to convince our opponents of their error, at least on the first go, and especially not for more emotive topics.

It has been said that challenging someone’s position with facts can have the opposite effect, reinforcing rather than challenging those beliefs.This so-called backfire effect is itself subject to some recent scrutiny, and studies suggest that facts can indeed change opinions. Your efforts are not a lost cause!

Pick your moments and read the room. A funeral isn't the place to disagree when a child says "Granny is with the angels now"

I’ve found myself in the middle of a chat during after-work drinks with workmates, and the subject of fortune-telling and mediums came up. People were interested to hear a colleague’s wild and unusual experiences with spiritualist churches and the like, and I doubt I’d have changed anyone’s minds there and then if I’d interjected. I’d just have come across as a boor. By contrast, an office colleague once mentioned they had a cold coming on, and wondered aloud whether they should get some Vitamin C; another workmate shouted up that there was no evidence it worked, and was just a myth – a far more appropriate time to inject some skepticism into the conversation. 

Changing minds takes time, but a seed of an idea you've planted in someone's head can grow and lead to a change of opinion.

You may be onto more fertile ground with a close family member who you see regularly. People will become more receptive over (a very long) time, and may come to believe that they agreed with you all along, or that the idea was their own. As said before, self-affirmation is important. I think I have helped to convince a family member of climate change – not through big set-to debates but by repeated mentions of the evidence and questions about their position, in the hope they’d come around. Why do I think I’ve (helped to) convince them? They no longer speak enthusiastically about the ‘climate change hoax’. Nobody ever announced I’d “won” – but their opinion quietly changed over time – and isn’t that what we really want? 

Self reflection is important. As a skeptic, always entertain the possibility that you could be wrong.

Finally: if we’re going to be good skeptics, we need to be open to the possibility we’re wrong. For example, the Vitamin C conversation mentioned above? The current evidence is that although it won’t prevent colds, it may actually shorten the duration of a cold slightly, though there’s currently no strong evidence for a big effect. Next time I get a cold, I’ll probably just stick to taking paracetamol and feeling sorry for myself. 

Having Better Arguments: - Attacks on beliefs, values and self integrity create a stress response, causing people to close ranks, while affirmation makes people more open minded - Consider: If someone is not worth winning over, why bother arguing? - The backfire effect may be overstated, but studies suggest that facts can change opinions. - Pick your moments and read the room. A funeral isn't the place to disagree when a child says "Granny is with the angels now" - Changing minds takes time, but a seed of an idea you've planted in someone's head can grow and lead to a change of opinion. - Self reflection is important. As a skeptic, always entertain the possibility that you could be wrong.

Comedians can help us see the funny side of a world governed by blind chance

Sean B. Carroll
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Comedians can help us see the funny side of a world governed by blind chance

Despite all of our glorious diversity, there may be just two kinds of people in this world: those who believe that everything happens for a reason, and those who don’t and accept that chance plays a large part.

In the U.S., where a majority believe that God is in control of everything that happens in their lives from conception to death, it is rare to see acknowledgment of the role of chance in the world. After every disaster, one can count on press stories like that of an Alabama family who survived an EF-4 tornado by taking shelter in a prayer closet. “My God is Awesome!” proclaimed one chaplain upon seeing the still-standing structure, while neglecting to mention the twenty-three neighbors who perished.

It should not be too surprising then that two-thirds of American believers of all faiths see the novel coronavirus as a message from Above, rather than merely the accidental spillover into humans of a randomly mutating animal virus. We are treated almost daily to statements such as those of a Virginia pastor who justified holding services in defiance of crowd limits saying, “I firmly believe that God is larger than this dreaded virus. You can quote me on that.” He subsequently contracted the virus and died. Or stories like that of former Presidential hopeful Herman Cain, who attended a Trump rally without a mask and – two days after testing positive but before disclosing the fact – tweeted his support for shunning masks and ignoring distancing at another rally. After his diagnosis, Cain’s spokesperson stated, “With God’s help, we are confident he will make a quick and complete recovery.” Cain died four weeks later.

And so, we have a President who says he is “very impressed” by a doctor who believes demons cause illnesses.

The aversion to reason is enough to make we scientists despair. Where can we turn for hope?

I turn to comedy.

The late humourist Kurt Vonnegut, for example, frequently touched upon our accidental existence and struggle for meaning in his works. In his quasi-autobiographical novel Slapstick (1976), Vonnegut tells the story of the death of his sister Alice from cancer at age forty-one. He and his brother Bernard visited her on what would be the last day of her life.

“(H)ers would have been an unremarkable death statistically, if it were not for one detail, which is this: Her healthy husband, James Carmalt Adams, the editor of a trade journal for purchasing agents, which he put together in a cubicle on Wall Street, had died two mornings before—on ‘The Brokers’ Special,’ the only train in American railroading history to hurl itself off an open drawbridge.

“Think of that.

The last carriage of the commuter train dangling from the Newark Bay lift bridge in 1958

“This really happened.”

The great satirist manufactured many fantastic scenarios in his tales, but the train wreck really did happen just as he said. On the morning of September 15, 1958, a New Jersey Central commuter train carrying about 100 passengers toward Jersey City somehow drove slowly through three signal lights and an automatic derailer and carried on 550 feet before plunging 50 feet off the open drawbridge. Two coaches of the five-coach train hit the water while a third dangled mid-air for more than two hours. Despite the heroic efforts of rescue crews, forty-eight people died, including Vonnegut’s brother-in-law.

Given his sister’s grave condition, and her concern for her four young children who were about to be in the sole care of her husband, Vonnegut and his brother elected not to tell her about the tragedy. She found out anyway when a fellow patient gave her a copy of the newspaper and she saw her husband among the list of the dead or missing. Vonnegut describes her reaction, and his own:

“Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place.

“Good for her.”

Accidents in a very busy place, indeed.

As scientists have learned more about the history of the planet and the inner workings of life, it is irrefutable that we are all here, both collectively and individually, through a series of accidents. The course of life has been buffeted by a variety of cosmological and geological accidents – an asteroid impact, tectonic collisions, Ice Ages and more—without which our species would not exist. We each enter the world as a unique genetic accident, one fortunate combination of sperm and egg out of more than 70 trillion different babies our parents could make. And many of us will exit the world, like Alice, due to what we now understand to be an unfortunate combination of random mutations accumulated in our lifetime.

Vonnegut’s writings helped me to realize that, next to scientists, the one other group of people that seem least inclined to think everything happens for a reason, and rather that blind chance governs the world, are comedians. Many top UK performers such as Eddie Izzard, Ricky Gervais, Stephen Fry, and Billy Connolly, and a number of leading American comics including Bill Maher, Sarah Silverman, Seth MacFarlane, and Lewis Black reject traditional beliefs about the cause of events in the world, while making us laugh about the absurdity of those beliefs.

So many very funny people, in fact, that it made me wonder, why is this so? What do scientists and comedians have in common?

For insight, I reached out to Eric Idle, one of the all-time greats who with Monty Python and his other collaborators has created some of the funniest skits, films, and songs lampooning blind faith. He very kindly replied to my questions.

Carroll: Why do you think so many comedians conclude that there is no God? 

Idle: It saves time.

Carroll: But why go public, why bring religion into your acts? Isn’t that risky for you? (Life of Brian was picketed or banned in various places) 

Idle: Comedy is telling the truth. It’s the Emperor’s New Clothes. Everything is on the table. The Life of Brian is still playing after forty years…

I first saw Monty Python as a teenager. It never occurred to me then, and I confess that until recently I never really thought much about why I was laughing so hard – – they were trying to show me the truth? I thought they were just having a laugh. Is truth really the point of humor? Could I really be so clueless not to get that?

I also devoured Vonnegut’s novels when I was young. I searched interviews of the late writer to see what he had to say, and sure enough, he had a few pearls on the matter. I shared one with Mr. Idle:

Carroll: Vonnegut once said: “The telling of jokes is an art of its own, and it always rises from some emotional threat. The best jokes are dangerous because they are in some way truthful.” Your thoughts?

Idle: Truth is the point of comedy. It’s usually saying the right thing at the wrong time.

The scientist in me wanted more confirmation, so I looked for comments by my favorite stand-ups, and found several who echoed Vonnegut and Idle.

Ricky Gervais wrote about the importance of truth in an essay about the defining moment when he became an atheist. “[I] learned that day that the truth, however shocking or uncomfortable, in the end leads to liberation and dignity.”

I was excited by my newfound, albeit belated insight into comedians as truth-tellers. But my greatest delight from these comedy masters came when I discovered their strong embrace of science, and our kinship as fellow truth-tellers.

“Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate.” Gervais wrote in another essay. “For better or worse it finds things out. It doesn’t hold on to medieval practices because they are tradition. If it did, you wouldn’t get a shot of penicillin, you’d pop a leach down your trousers and pray.”

Vonnegut declared, “I love science. All humanists do,” and offered this vignette as evidence: “We once had a memorial service for Isaac Asimov [a biochemist and popular science and fiction writer], and at one point I said, ‘Isaac is up in Heaven now.’ That was the funniest thing I could have said to a bunch of Humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored.”

Vonnegut’s story is a tip that perhaps how we communicate science or its implications may be worth re-examining. Most scientists are convinced that if people just had the information we carry around in our heads, if they only knew what we know, then all would be better in the world. That is probably so, but perhaps it is not our message but our methods that fail us?

Vonnegut’s strategy was time-tested. “When Shakespeare figured the audience had had enough of the heavy stuff,” the novelist once told Playboy, “he’d let up a little, bring in a clown or a foolish innkeeper or something like that, before he’d become serious again. And trips to other planets, science fiction of an obviously kidding sort, is equivalent to bringing in the clowns every so often to lighten things up.”

What do we scientists bring after the heavy stuff? Usually more heavy stuff. I don’t recall the IPCC ever using a fart joke or a Martian to explain climate change.

I asked Mr. Idle, a huge science fan, about his approach:

Carroll: You have collaborated with Brian Cox and had a good laugh with Stephen Hawking [in The Entire Universe]. Humor, science fiction, cartoons, songs – maybe scientists have something to learn from comedy about ways to make a point?

Idle: Well the point about Science is that it can be tested. Comedy is tested on the audience. If they laugh it works. 

And maybe, just maybe, comedy is working in ways we scientists have not succeeded or appreciated. I shared some encouraging data with Mr. Idle:

Carroll: Current 18-29 year-olds in the US are the least religious generation by far. Do you think that, collectively, comedians just might be having an influence on attitudes toward religion?

Idle: I certainly hope so. After all Religion is about the Ape evolving a set of moral standards. This would be significant in any Universe.

Can we hear an ‘Amen’?

Excerpted and adapted from A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You (Princeton University Press, October 2020).

One small step at a time, the alternative medicine industry is radicalising people

Michael Marshall
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One small step at a time, the alternative medicine industry is radicalising people

It can be tempting to view society as split down the middle: on the one side, skeptics and critical thinkers who strive to challenge their own beliefs and to follow evidence as much as possible; and on the other side, ‘believers’, dedicated to one or more irrational beliefs and unshakeable in their certainty. Such a black and white view is, of course, unhelpfully simplistic – partly because it could encourage us to wrongly assume skeptics are beyond the corrupting influence of our own biases and assumptions, but also because it conflates a spectrum of pseudoscientific belief into a single position, and in doing so loses track of how people can become more ardent, and even radicalised, in their beliefs.

Imagine, for example, you were someone who had an interest in ‘natural’ medicine – perhaps you avoid antibiotics and painkillers, opting instead for herbal alternatives; maybe you eat an organic diet, or shop in health food shops. You might have a friend you do yoga with who swears by seeing their chiropractor. It’s a background thing, maybe even a fairly harmless aspect of your personality. In another, less connected era, it might even have stayed that way.

But one day, a friend invites you to a natural health Facebook group, to share tips on how little changes to your diet can help you stay healthy, and you find a community of people who are warm and accepting and who seem to see things the way you do. Perhaps you see the magazine What Doctors Don’t Tell You in the supermarket, with its glossy cover and its eye-catching cover story about a purported natural health miracle or alleged conventional medicine scandal, and you pick up a copy. Reading it opens up your eyes to all sorts of other applications of alternative medicine, with a plethora of personal testimony, and even what looks to be some sound scientific evidence here and there, in studies that you’re not going to look up. But it’s in a magazine on the shelf of a high street giant, so it must surely be legitimate, right?

And so you subscribe to the magazine, and as your interest rises, perhaps in part because of your new subscription to the magazine or your new social media circle, you start looking around online at other alternative therapies. Maybe you start to read Natural News and Joseph Mercola. Often what you read in one place agrees with what you’ve seen elsewhere, so there’s a kind of consensus. It’s a consensus that the conventional doctors don’t agree with, but you’re furnished with plenty of explanations for why that’s the case: doctors are paid to sell pills, you’ve read; they treat the symptoms not the disease. You’ve seen again and again that pharma companies can’t patent a good diet and cheaply available supplements – like the many supplements and vitamin pills you now find yourself taking regularly, to help your body stay healthy.

Over time, your diet becomes more specific – you believe in clean eating, you’ve changed to a vegetarian diet and you avoid all processed foods. As a result, you stop eating out at restaurants, because you don’t trust others to cook for you. How can you be sure they’re using the natural, clean and healthy ingredients that the diets in your articles tell you are so vital for good health?

Each of the steps you’ve taken makes sense, and each is supported by the previous step. A position and belief system you would never have imagined yourself in at the start now seems like a perfectly reasonable place to be, because of the steady, almost-imperceptible progression at each stage.

And the thing is, this all makes sense to you: each of the steps you’ve taken makes sense, and each is supported by the previous step. A position and belief system you would never have imagined yourself in at the start now seems like a perfectly reasonable place to be, because of the steady, almost-imperceptible progression at each stage. The myth of being able to boil a frog by raising the temperature of its water so slowly that it fails to notice is indeed a myth, but it’s absolutely true that mountains are climbed one small step at a time.

One day, you are diagnosed with a genuinely serious health condition, and all of that slow progression has led you so far off the beaten path. With your new breast cancer diagnosis, do you really want to let the doctors push on you those drugs that your Facebook feed is so sure are toxic and dangerous? Especially when you’ve read of gentle, non-toxic, natural treatments whose chances of success aren’t expressed in the percentages of a medical prognosis, but are stated in bold, affirmative certainties?

So, rather than accepting the path of surgery or chemotherapy, you ask your Facebook groups what to do, and you pick up an old copy of What Doctors Don’t Tell You, and you find the name of a cancer charity who specialise in giving patients alternative options and directing them to other modalities. It can’t hurt to explore what’s possible, to keep your options open, and it surely can’t be as bad as the things you’ve read about those barbaric poisons like chemotherapy and radiotherapy…

The charity tells you about a clinic who can track the progress of your cancer without mammograms, using a thermographic scan, so you let them scan your tumour every few months. They recommend a homeopath who gives you remedies to use, to keep you as healthy as possible to beat the cancer. The months go by, and the scans seems to show things are going OK, and that what you’re doing is working.

By now, you’re taking Vitamin C supplements, because you’ve read that Vitamin C can treat cancer. You limit what fruit you eat, because cancer (as all of the articles tell you), thrives on sugar, so you can starve your cancer by cutting sugar out of your diet. Soon you’re trying herbal remedies from a herbalist, and you’re seeing a naturopath for regular cleanses. Your naturopath helps you monitor the level of toxins in your body. You’re taking pancreatic enzymes, cannabis oil and Vitamin D3.

You read about black salve from the blogs of cancer patients and in links shared in your cancer-cure Facebook group, so you start applying that to the affected area of your breast. Eventually, after forming a blackened scab, the area of skin you’re applying the black salve to comes away in a fleshy lump. Your therapist tells you that your tumour is gone. And they believe it; and you believe them.

You haven’t had any conventional cancer treatment since your diagnosis, but you’ve assembled this alternative cancer team who you’re seeing regularly and getting lots of enthusiastic support from. It feels right. And it will continue to feel right, right up until it doesn’t.

It feels right. And it will continue to feel right, right up until it doesn’t.

This may sound like an abstract thought experiment, even unrealistically extreme, but this journey is happening all the time, to real people. Working for a charity that investigates alternative cancer ‘cures’, I hear stories like this with worrying frequency. Too often, family members get in touch to tell us about how their loved ones’ last years were spent following the false hope sold to them by the ecosystem of alternative cancer therapies, clinics, practitioners, charities, magazines, podcasts and influencers.

These are stories of radicalisation, of how a constant drip-feed of exposure to pseudoscientific claims can lead people to extreme ideologies. They are stories of how those rabbit holes often have entrances in mainstream places: like the magazine shelves of respectable high street stores, or celebrity-fronted Netflix specials. And they are stories of how, once radicalised, those same people are left particularly vulnerable when it comes to a health crisis.

Our manifesto against pseudoscience in health challenges alt-med at a global level

Fernando Cervera
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Our manifesto against pseudoscience in health challenges alt-med at a global level

Let’s be clear: pseudoscience kills. Those are the opening words of the First international manifesto against pseudoscience in health, published in eleven languages and which can still be signed on the website where it was officially started in 2019. The organizers are a network of European skeptic associations and independent collaborators from all over the planet. The manifesto seeks the signatures of health and scientific/technical experts, and has so far managed to attract 2,750 people from 44 countries. It has been covered more than a hundred times in the international media. And it’s just the beginning.

You may be wondering why this manifesto is relevant, or what it can be used for. Pseudoscience in healthcare can kill: that is a fact, regardless of whether 2750 scientists, doctors or even gladiators of the Roman circus say it. Why should anything change as a result of the manifesto? To answer that question, we first need some history.

A health care worker standing in the corridor of a hospital. She is wearing a lab coat and a stethoscope and blue scrubs.

These kinds of manifestos are nothing new. For example, in 1975, 186 scientists —including 18 Nobel laureates— signed a manifesto against astrology. The organizers were the astronomer Bart J. Book, the science communicator Lawrence E. Jerome and the philosopher Paul Kurtz. The text had a great impact on the press, because for the media, it is relevant who signs it. For a journalist it is not a story to say that 186 people have signed something, but if those people are renowned scientists, that becomes a story. It may not be fair but that’s how the media works – and as people who fight superstition and scams, we have to be willing to use the tools at our fingertips, and to use realistic strategies. But is a victory possible? We can look to another similar manifesto, launched in 2018 in Spain.

The Spanish manifesto against pseudosciences in health initially brought together 400 scientists and health workers, calling for a political response to a serious public health problem: the many deaths caused by pseudosciences such as homeopathy. After a successful communication campaign that saw coverage of the manifesto by almost every Spanish newspaper and television channel, the Spanish government launched the first state plan to fight pseudoscience. They also put forward to the European Commission an initiative to withdraw the status of homeopathy as a medicine. Unfortunately, the initiative failed. In the words of the European Health Commissioner, Vytenis Andriukaitis, Spain was alone in its claim.

However, this defeat was also a victory. For the first time in Europe, a small group of people, with no resources beyond the power of speech, challenged a centuries-old superstition based on lies and sugar. They also challenged a powerful lobby: the homeopathic industry. It did not take long for the homeopaths to set their lawyers against those who told the truth about homeopathy. Fortunately, one by one the homeopathic industry’s legal cases proved unsuccessful. And from this success for science and reason, the idea of creating a similar manifesto —one that united critical thinkers across the world and not just on small piece of sand in South-west Europe — was born.

No country can defeat pseudoscience alone; they are global phenomena. Instead, to score a victory over pseudoscience in our individual countries, we need global action. For this reason, any strategy that seeks to fight against pseudoscience in the world-wide arena must have the vision and experience of skeptical activists and movements from around the planet.

This manifesto is intended to be a light in the night. It is a coordinated action across many countries and with signatories from all the inhabited continents of the planet. This is important, because a pseudoscientific idea which is born in one part of the world can kill people in another part of the world. German New Medicine may have began life in Germany, but it is killing people today in the USA. Miracle Mineral Solution started on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, but it is now harming people in England. The fraudulent data questioning the safety of vaccines that was published by the British former doctor Andrew Wakefield is right now endangering lives in France. And so the chain continues. It is endless.

a doctor administers a vaccine to an adult patient

Until now, in many countries of the world many scientists —and even doctors— have had a respect for pseudoscience, or at least have respected consumers’ right to choose. But, as the manifesto, says:

“Some believe there is a conflict between freedom of choice for a treatment and the removal of pseudo-therapies, but this is not true. According to article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, every person has a right to medical care. Lying to patients in order to sell them useless products that could kill them breaks their right to correct information about their health. This way, even if a citizen has a right to refuse medical treatment when he is properly informed, it is also true that nobody has the right to lie to obtain profit at the expense of someone else’s life. Only in a world in which lying to a sick person would be considered ethical, could homeopathy —or any other pseudo-therapy— be allowed to continue to be sold to citizens”.

The time has come for scientists and healthcare workers around the world to speak up, loud and clear. That pseudoscience is dangerous is not a matter of opinion, and a treatment that doesn’t work in Denmark will not work in South Korea. It is a cold, hard fact that if someone needs real medicine and is instead sold a fake treatment, they could die. Even worse, some of these magic treatments are also dangerous by themselves: for example, acupuncture and chiropractic manipulations have killed a lot of people around the world, and it does not take a doctor to realise that ingesting Miracle Mineral Solution – a form of industrial bleach – can be extremely dangerous.

With this manifesto, other countries will be able to show their governments an indisputable reality: pseudoscience is dangerous and it can kill you. To acknowledge that there is a problem is the first step in trying to fix it. A few words and some simple ideas can change the world, with the correct strategy. If we stand together, we can make it happen.

Brazil’s government throw their weight behind Creationism and Intelligent Design

Natália Pasternak
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Brazil’s government throw their weight behind Creationism and Intelligent Design

The Brazilian higher education establishment was somewhat flabbergasted in early October when an official event at a Federal University – maintained with public funding – presented, as its opening speech, a hearty defense of Creationism and an attack on the theory of evolution.

The keynote speaker, Marcos Eberlin, was a retired Chemistry professor from yet another public Brazilian University, and leads the Brazilian branch of the American Creationist think-tank Discovery Institute. The branch is new, officially launched in 2017.

As a matter of fact, during most of the 20th century, the Creation-Evolution “debate” had never been an issue in Brazilian education and academia. With an overwhelmingly Catholic population, Brazil kept its Church-State frictions focused more on sex-related (or “moral”) issues such as divorce law and contraception, rather than scientific ones.

Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil overlooking the sea.

Demographic changes that came to the fore in the 1990s, with the growing popularity of Evangelical churches of North American inspiration, changed that, though.

And now, “Creation Science” and “Intelligent Design” are attempting to make up, in Brazil, for the territory lost in the USA, where a landmark court decision (Edwards v. Aguillard, 1987) ruled against the teaching of Creationism in state-funded schools.

In Brazil, the movement has started to gain momentum in the past couple of decades. In 2008, the then Minister of the Environment, Marina Silva, was scolded for taking part in a Creationist event. This would be used against her later, when she ran for President in 2014.

In that same year, a Member of Parliament, Marco Feliciano, proposed a bill to make the teaching of Creationism mandatory in all state schools. The bill never came to a vote.

Unfortunately, things have gathered pace under the present government. The current administration placed an avowed Creationist, Benedito Guimarães Aguiar Neto – one of the people responsible for bringing Discovery Institute to Brazil – as president of CAPES, the Federal agency in charge of Brazil’s higher education.

Damares Alves, Minister of Human Rights and Women Issues, has publicly deplored the teaching of Evolution in state schools, without suffering more than a fraction of the backlash felt by Marina Silva 12 years ago.

This changing landscape poses a challenge to scientists, skeptics and teachers. In the current polarized landscape, it’s all too easy to see the growth of Creationism as a political issue, which it is, and forget that it’s also a communication and education issue. The reason creationism was not a big deal in Brazil in the 20th century was not because everybody understood and accepted evolution, but because very few people had reason to give it much thought, or any thought at all.

With the rise of “Intelligent Design”, disguised as science, creationism has been slowly infiltrating our schools, and again, Brazilian scientific community has turned a blind eye, and will probably only realise their mistake once it’s too late to fix it.

Why is “Intelligent design” so much easier to sell than plain creationism? And what exactly is at stake when we allow religion into our science classes? There is nothing wrong with religious beliefs, but while we scientists don’t go to religious temples demanding that they stop preaching about God creating the world, we don’t want religion disguised as science telling our children that evolution is not real.

Intelligent design (ID) has all the characteristics of classic pseudoscience. It uses scientific language, and scientific facts, and twists the results to prove a point. There are no questions, just truths that need “scientific” background. It also takes advantage of common misconceptions about evolution and natural selection.

Charles Darwin's famous "tree of life" sketch showing his theory of how species connect along branches of shared ancestry. A strong central branch diverges into several off shoots which branch into yet further off shoots.

ID offers no scientific explanation for the origin of species. In fact, it has no interest in science at all, it is completely focused on debunking the theory of evolution, claiming that several systems contain what they call “irreducible complexity”. This means that they are far too complex for evolution, and therefore must have been designed by a higher power.

The most common example used to illustrate this idea is a mousetrap. One of ID’s most dedicated promoters, Michael Behe, argues that the mousetrap is made up of parts that have no function alone, and thus could not have been “selected for” in an evolutionary process. He uses real concepts, such as survival of the fittest, and the idea that any mutation that gives us an advantage will be favoured by natural selection, and twists them in a way so that the explanation makes sense. Why would natural selection favour parts of the mousetrap – or of a living organism – that don’t seem to confer any advantage?

Behe ignores the fact that evolution is not driven. Organisms do not evolve with a purpose. Unlike the parts of a mousetrap, which are specifically designed to be turned into a mousetrap, mutations that make hair grow are not grooming the animal for winter – no pun intended. Mutations are random, and hairy animals stand a better chance to survive in cold weather. Such mutations could come from features that have been an advantage in another capacity, or could have been no advantage at all. As long as they aren’t deleterious, they won’t be selected out.

ID proponents also ignore that evolution is not just about natural selection and random mutations. It involves genetic drift and horizontal gene transfer. Bacteria “trade” genes all the time, and we have evidence of gene transfer having occurred in plants and humans too. And then there is genetic drift, when a gene is fixed randomly in a population regardless of fitness, but purely by chance. Natural cataclysms are a good example: imagine a situation where there are two separate populations of a species, one with blue eyes, the other brown. Blue eyes lived on an island that was destroyed by an earthquake. Brown eyes do not confer any advantage, but now the blue-eyed population is gone, and brown eyes become predominant.

The fact is that ID, like most pseudosciences, preys on our scientific misconceptions. If we don’t teach science as a process, and don’t teach our students to think rationally, they will be easily fooled by pseudoscientific claims. If we don’t fully understand evolution, we will be vulnerable to ID. If we don’t fully understand the rational process of drug testing, we will be vulnerable to alternative medicine.

ID was kicked out of the US educational system twenty years ago, but it is now finding fertile ground in Brazil. It makes us wonder if we are not making ourselves too vulnerable to all kinds of magical thinking by refusing to take science and education seriously.

Ghosts, curses and werewolves: archaeologists see human belief up close

Paul Duncan McGarrity
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Ghosts, curses and werewolves: archaeologists see human belief up close

Halloween is on the way, which is the one time of the year that the offices (remember those?) of an archaeology company look normal. Everyone else is headed down to the local pound shop to buy piles of spooky plastic to give their desks the look of a troublingly-jolly pagan death cult, whereas all I ever had to do was to cast an eye towards the osteology team a few bays over to see enough neatly arranged skeletons and comfy knitwear to film an episode of CSI Coffee Morning (new to CBS this Fall!).

Archaeology is the study of past societies through the material culture they left behind, but every now and again you will find yourself face to skeletal face with the people who last used that pan you just dug up. The truth is, the first few times you excavate human remains it can seem a bit odd, but once you’ve been on a few cemetery sites where the skeletons number in their thousands then you start to view the process in more functional terms. Don’t get me wrong, the respect for the individuals remains. It’s not like you get 5 years deep into your archaeology career and think ‘I wonder how far I can lob this femur?’. But it is easy to forget that carefully excavating, drawing and bagging up skeletons is not an experience shared by most other people.

It’s understandable then that sometimes in my blinkered approach to the dead I can be taken by surprise by a question from someone who hasn’t been hardened to it in the same way, and that question is almost always: “Aren’t you afraid of ghosts?”

I have personally excavated around 300-400 individuals through my career. As such, I feel fairly confident in saying that ghosts aren’t real, because if they were, I’d probably have already set up business as the ‘Most Haunted Man in England’. I’d have a small gift shop on wheels that I’d tow behind me wherever I went and possibly even a scone in my pocket for those looking for a café.

That isn’t to say I haven’t witnessed unusual happenings on sites I’ve worked at. For example, when I was working on the redevelopments around Kings Cross we were met one morning by an ashen face security guard with a dire warning.

“Don’t go near the warehouse today”, he said. “It’s too dangerous.”

I didn’t bother with a follow up question. Something in the way that he spoke convinced me that whatever was wrong with the building was worth taking seriously. My colleague, however, was not as easily persuaded.

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because last night I saw a werewolf!”

Not only had this terrified guard seen a werewolf, but he had also written it up in the accident report book. A few days later we finally got the full story of what he had witnessed. Apparently, he had seen a fox going into one side of the building and a man coming out the other. Well that solves it then, werewolf confirmed. No other explanation I can think of there!

Not only had this terrified guard seen a werewolf, but he had also written it up in the accident report book. He had seen a fox going into one side of the building and a man coming out the other. Well that solves it then, werewolf confirmed…

On the same site, I entered one of the semi-subterranean goods platforms with only a torch to light my way. I’ll spare you the full details of what I witnessed there, but suffice to say I’ll never look at a Corby trouser press the same way again.

Ghosts though, I’m pretty they don’t exist – but that doesn’t mean everyone agrees with me.

I was working on a big cemetery site in central London which had a small public viewing gallery. The archaeology was interesting (17th Century burials, which are rare for London as the Victorians had a tendency of laying railways through them) and the site visits proved popular with the public. I was digging close to the gallery when I heard the following (half remembered and much exaggerated) exchange:

“They are getting everywhere you see, all over London. You’re carrying them out on your shoes”.

“Well I’m sorry about that, I really a…”

“I can do a blessing if you want, it’s just that I can hear them crying”.

Dusty work boots

“Who is crying?”

“The spirits. Have you got a boot wash? I could bless that?”

“Pardon?”

“I can bless the water to wash the spirits off your boots”.

To this day I don’t know if this person was deadly serious or if they were just really committing to a gag where the punchline was something to do with ‘souls on our boots’. Either way we did the only thing we could: we let her do her ceremony, and she left happy. Whatever the truth of the matter is (and the truth is that ghosts aren’t real) we wouldn’t have gained anything from arguing the point; we can be right and also not be dicks about it.

Archaeology can sometimes come over as a bit wishy washy, and sometimes, if I’m honest, it can be. But that is because we study human behaviour, and humans, fundamentally, are messy bitches who believe all sorts of guff.

The skeletons that archaeologists dig up were once people with thoughts and feeling and dreams and beliefs. I don’t have to share those beliefs to be able to respect them.

The skeletons that archaeologists dig up were once people with thoughts and feeling and dreams and beliefs. I don’t have to share those beliefs to be able to respect them. When someone is buried either they or a loved one chose that option on purpose – which is why, once we have recorded them, they get reburied. Learning to take the time to consider other people’s worldview is a gift that working as an archaeologist has given me.

There are times when arguments need to be made, when a belief is dangerous to an individual or others around them. In those circumstance you will find me screaming logical arguments till the cows come home, but there is always room for a more compassionate approach.

A good rule of thumb is this: if a belief harms no one (ghosts are real), let them have it. If it causes harm to others (ghosts are real, and they’ve told me to kill again) challenge it. If the belief causes no harm to an individual but could if it is held at a systemic or societal level (this government believes Victorian orphan ghosts are real, look there’s one now. Let’s make him Leader of the House of Commons) challenge it.

Happy Halloween everyone.

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Expert skeptical analysis of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory and claims of the paranormal.

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