319. Steven Hassan — Combatting Cult Mind Control, Freedom of Mind, and The Cult of Trump
The Michael Shermer Show
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Are You a Democrat, Are You an Occult?
Hugo Mercier argues that mass persuasion is extremely difficult to pull off and most attempts of it at it fail miserably at large scale. This is because when scaled up from two person communication to large audiences, trust cues do not scale up accordingly. Most preachers, prophets and demagogues are lost to history, but because of the availability bias, we only remember the biggest names in the John year,. Such as Jesus and Hitler. But even these examples flounder upon further inspection. In his own time, Jesus was a disappointment at starting a new religion, which might not have been his mission in any case. And even the apostle Paul barely got Christianity rolling. It wasn't till
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