We're Swimming In Conspiracy Theories - But Some Are True!

In the Book of Mormon, we hear of Secret Combinations and are warned against them. But what if some or many conspiracy theories are perpetuated by the Secret Combinations?

Dan Ellsworth and Greg discuss the current environment of conspiracy theories. What causes us to have a plethora of lies, and in a world already full of lies, how do we know which ones are true?

 Raw Transcript

have that kind of an explanation um it takes some courage actually to just trust God when things
happen that that don't really make sense because it's much more comforting to always have you know people you can
point to or or some explanation for things yeah i think I think that's part
of it the other part of it I would suggest is is having the the the
the nosis right it it's like okay I have a knowledge that is greater than most of
the world and and therefore because of that I am in an elite group that believes this
right and so you've got a little triangle I think and I'm trying to remember what was in it here i know I've got it but it was I think it was truth
is at the top of the of the pyramid and then at the bottom was validation is belonging and and validation and
validation yeah and so it's like okay I can find a group that validates my thoughts on this and I belong to this
group i I I have a sense of belonging to it that those kind of human
needs right which are intrinsic probably in all of us are are are
definitely tapped into it's kind of like when I talk about untethered empathy you
know there there there's a human need there and it it gets tapped but sometimes in a malevolent way right
right and and conspiracy theories and not all of them but but conspiracy theories or or our desire for
conspiracy seems to tap into those things as well yeah and conspiracy
theories often have a narrative of you becoming victorious in the end and and
something like that and and so sometimes they can kind of veer into flattery and
you know when we so I I did create this triangle with truth at the top and then down at the bottom you have the other
corners are validation and belonging and I'm going to read something to you to
illustrate our our desire for validation is a normal human thing we always want
to be validated right we always want things that we think to be validated so
listen to this quote and this was this is a this is from a politician from a
president of the United States he said "Our first challenge is to cherish our
children and strengthen America's families family is the foundation of American life if we have stronger
families we will have a stronger America to the media I say you should create
movies and television shows you'd want your own children and grandchildren to enjoy i say to those who are on welfare
and especially to those who have have been trapped on welfare for a long time
for too long our welfare system has undermined the values of family and work
instead of supporting them to strengthen the family we must do everything we can
to keep the teen pregnancy rate going down i am gratified as I'm sure all
Americans are that it has dropped for two years in a row but we all know it is still far too high and I challenge
America's families to work harder to stay together for families who stay together o not only do better
economically their children do better as well in particular I challenge the
fathers of this country to love and care for their children." End quote now who
do you think that president was and when did he make that statement i'm going to
guess it's an early president okay you think it's an early president
yes now that you're talking about statistics so when were those statistics actually when did they begin
so maybe not too early okay the the president who gave us that quote was
Bill Clinton okay this was his State of the Union address in
1996 okay think about what was going on with Bill Clinton in 1996
like those of us who can remember the scandals and all of those things it
might be shocking to know that he said this but you can see politicians often know what to say
to people to push that validation button right if you're a conservativeleaning
person this message feels validating right and so along comes a politician
who's not living this message in any way shape or form but he pushes it because
it's validating he's telling people what they want to hear right not what he actually believes personally he's
telling people what they want to hear and so I remember 1996 i was in college
at the time and I I remember all that went on and it was not a good time for
you know for messages around families and so this was a lie basically being
given to America i mean yeah there's truth to it and it and he's validating
true beliefs about family but it you can
see if if all you're after is validation you can kind of open yourself up to be
flattered like like we saw in that 1996 State of the Union
address and so that is something to be aware of right now I'm going to
reiterate and and a lot of people when I say be careful with conspiracy theories
a lot of people say "Well but the Book of Mormon talks about secret combinations." Absolutely it does and
there are legitimate conspiracies in the history of the world there are legitimate conspiracies going on right
now in in lots of places but be careful just be careful
don't turn off your critical thinking skills just because somebody offers you
this big vast explanation for something and it feels validating to you
right yeah i think I think there's a couple things also that kind of soften the underbelly of individuals on
conspiracy theories one of them is the media right the media certainly as as a
as a whole gives a certain narrative right in some cases they're lock step on
certain things and so there's the the messaging that we are used to getting now that's starting to fragment quite a
bit with social media and and YouTube etc but we're conditioned to hear a specific
a specific narrative in in the primary messaging
tools of society where it's not always true right and and and
secondly I think that we're we're conditioned as Latter-day Saints because we have been a minority
and been persecuted and and been in a position of
let's say the fringe or or or the
uh we we've had a a majority against us for a long time in many ways and still
do in many ways Right and so I think that you put those two things together and it's real easy to look at conspiracy
theories and and and attach yourself to them in a quicker manner and it seems to
me that I I like I like the way you open
this up in in in what you wrote because you say how conspiracy thinking is
prepping the world for the Antichrist it's
really it it's for those who are able to
adapt in a world that's probably going to get full more of more and more BS
more and more layers of lies it's it for those who choose it it is
fine-tuning your critical thinking skills yep and it's fine-tuning your ability to listen to
the spirit yep because you're going to have a very difficult time I I think as that fragmenting goes
on it's not just one source of possible conspiracy theories now we're getting
them all over the place right that is true and and a an important
consideration is there are it is very normal for
people to conspire you know if you've ever done anything with advertising you have conspired if you've ever been a
lawyer or worked with a lawyer on a court case you have conspired it's you
know you're you're working with somebody to create an outcome right and um now so
a lot of things that we sometimes call conspiracies are just people like trying
to minimize their their problems in the world or trying to maximize their
profits in the in the case of corporations right and so um these are
just kind of normal things that human beings and institutions do they conspire
all the time we're we are being conspired toward all the time with with all the advertising that we receive and
all all the messaging that we receive and I think of for example we a lot of
people were really shocked this last presidential election when Joe Biden bowed out of the race
because they had been told that he was mentally sharp he was ready to go he was
ready to run um he was doing fine and there are some people in our mainstream
media who made some very bold statements about how lucid and sharp Joe Biden
was and turned out to be they just turned out to be flatout wrong and they
were not part of a conspiracy they were just engaging in motivated reasoning they were like "Hey this is the guy I
want to win so I'm just going to say what I think will you know will help the
cause right?" And so it it's tempting sometimes to think that hey there might
have been strings being pulled to make these people say some of the things they said but a lot of this was just people
just really wanting reality to be something other than what it was and so
again we the the more that we can do to ground ourselves in reality and truth
the better because it is going to be harder in the future especially with AI
ai is is already presenting us video of public figures saying things that they
have never said but these these videos are generated via AI and if you're not
careful and you're not willing to slow down a little bit it's going to be very easy to be deceived ai is an interesting
example because I don't think it's just images and videos right i I you can look at writing
and and what is it going to pull from and what are the algorithms that have put in place already uh because I I get
some very interesting things pull up sometimes on certain questions and it's like no this is not true this is not
right right right especially when you're talking about things that are honestly
sometimes religious things and and it's grabbing everything from
the internet so even without a conspiracy of a an algorithm it it is pulling
from the internet and if there is more and more content that is flooding the
internet against a certain idea that you hold true and sacred AI is going to pull from that
content and give you an answer that might be different might have a a discrepancy on on what you believe is
really true what you know is true right and when it comes Go ahead no go ahead
when it comes to questions of faith it's really important to understand that
conspira most of most of the critical narratives
against the gospel rely on conspiracy theories going back to just the basic
question of whether Jesus Christ actually resurrected from the dead or not if you go against what the
scriptures say the scriptural witness that he had a b a bodily
resurrection which a lot of atheist Bible scholars do right they reject
that they have to come up with a conspiracy theory that the early church
fabricated this narrative because and and they engage in motivated reasoning
to support their conspiracy theory same goes for the Book of Mormon if you reject the idea that Joseph Smith
actually had plates and visited with angels and and you know received this
revelatory book if you reject all that then you have to formulate a conspiracy
theory which critics of the church do so another reason to be careful is if you
are swimming in conspiracy thinking right you might be able to do okay in terms of
questions of faith but if you're passing conspiracy thinking on to your kids as
kind of their default way of thinking their default way of approaching ambiguity and things you might be
priming them for some of these critical arguments you know a somebody who's
hostile to the gospel can come along and hey here's a conspiracy theory and if
that's kind of what they're mentally primed to accept because they've that's
what they've seen their whole lives it's going to be hard to pull them away from it so so all of this is to just say be
careful we're not saying that conspiracy theories don't that conspiracies don't exist
we are not saying that they do exist but just be careful because you have to pick
the right ones yeah there are people who want to exploit your appetite for con
conspiracy thinking there are bad people who want to exploit that you know it's interesting because as you go back and
you I think about the conspiracy theories and what brings the rise of this well you know one of the most
pervasive uh philosophies that has come in to our
civilization into the West is is is postmodernism and and postmodernism goes
in and it goes to the core of an objective truth and it and it just deconstructs it is their word right it
deconstructs that core truth and then fragments it yeah and and then it's just
like you know different people are going to hang on to their own lived experience or their own uh view or world view and
and then it's my view against your view and my facts against your facts and and
so what you're going to end up with it seems to me if we pursue this and and go down the track of
of deconstruction of of objective truth is that you're going to have several
different conspiracy theories and and a conspiracy theory is going to be framed as a conspiracy theory by the opposition
always right and so it's so you may believe in a conspiracy theory that
might be right or you might believe in a conspiracy theory that might be wrong but again to look
at secret combinations they may
be numerous yeah in the in the sense of you know framing it in in in Book of
Mormon language they may be numerous on even a single issue right right that
where they're coming from different different angles on on this because we've fallen away and it's easy to do
we're falling away as a culture from this objective truth that that we could we have a consensus on that that that we
can agree upon and then you that just is going to perpetuate itself what
what if everything is a conspiracy theory then which we we you can kind of
sense it's moving toward that to some degree i mean the left has their conspiracy theories the right has their
conspiracy theories that may fragment into a lot more right then
then how do how do you really prep yourself to know what truth is how do
you really prep yourself to to understand that and it just seems to me like it's it's to me it's the scriptures
but you better hone your critical skills just your critical thinking skills i a
good idea is to slow down just slow down if you have received an avalanche of a
conspiracy narrative it might be true or it might not be true um if you've been
blitzed with a conspiracy narrative online or or from a loved one slow down
take your time don't jump all into it you know right away take your time
research investigate if it's something that's that's really important to you but just understand that there are
people who make money off of conspiracy theories there are people who derive
power from conspiracy theories sometimes and I and I said this in the
article sometimes the secret combination to be aware of is the conspiracy
theorist who's making money off of you and and getting you whipped up into this
like frenzy of thinking i It is possible to process conspiracy
narratives in a healthy way it really is there are a lot of people who have kind of a healthy understanding that yeah
some of these things really are you know there's there's some truth to them but I have also seen people who have gone down
some of these rabbit holes and you cannot reach them anymore with like common sense you you can't give them
common sense anymore because they they've lost their appetite for it and that is what we need to be aware of
yeah and and so if you look at it that way you you could if you put a framework
if you put the framing in again to the Book of Mormon language you could say that the
uh and maybe this is the way that you said it yeah okay you did say it this way right the secret combinations could
be the conspiracy theory theorists themselves yeah so so you're being approached you're you're in the mindset
of okay if I grab onto this conspiracy theory I am going against the secret
combinations right but you may actually be adopting them at the same time right yep so just
beware there are people who want to flatter you people who want to make money off of you and people who want to
use you for their quest for power and if they can manipulate you because they
know that there's a button they can push in your brain that you like to be pushed you know this conspiracy thinking
they're going to push that button and so be careful that's the message
well in the last days right even the very elect will be deceived so it's it's
it I think conspiracy theories is a very good way to to frame that phrase in what
we're looking at here you talk about something in psychology called attribution theory why don't you go over that for us attribution theory is it
it's one of these things that when I first heard of it I thought man that's
kind of a stupid academic theory that all it's doing is telling us common
sense and I kind of laughed it off but the more I live the more I see validity
to it an attribution theory is just the idea that we
attribute things in particular ways so the example that I give is if gas prices
are low then you'll see people on social media and other places saying oh our
president is doing a good job of keeping gas prices low right and whereas when
gas prices are high well but I I'll say this people who voted for the other guy
will have a different narrative they'll say "Well last time we were in power we
made some choices that are now bearing fruit and that's why gas prices are low." It's not because of something that
the current president did and so we have this tendency to want to attribute every
good thing to our team and every bad thing to the other team right and and so
we will in politics this is this is where it's most commonly manifest every good
thing gets attributed to the person I voted for every bad thing gets
attributed to the person who we just voted out of office right and uh so attribution theory is an
attribution is another thing that somebody like the antichrist can exploit
if we're not serious about like really understanding what is true that creates
an opening for this individual to come in and mess with our minds so we need to
be careful about that now a society can end up in a place
where lying is the norm yeah right and and and you give an example of the
Soviet Union what is the peril of that and how is it that people actually adopt that and and and as you say it gets down
or that you quote someone that says it gets down into their very tissue that their their relationship for example in
this case with the state Yeah is simply a lie right so this happened under
Marxism in the in the Soviet Union and there were we've talked before about
how you know Marxism promises this series of events uh of events to happen
and uh you know the the people will become so disillusioned with their with the way
things are that they will rise up and overthrow um the government and then you'll arrive
at this classless communist utopia right and yet it never actually works out that
way so in the Soviet Union how how did people manage this
like this i this how did they confront this fact that wow communism has not
lived up up to its promises and there's just so much suffering and horrible
things that have come with this well one way to deal with that is just
to lie about it and have the state just lie and say "No it's not bad things are
not bad no there a million people didn't just starve you're misreading the
reports right and that's what they did so and it also happened under Mao and
China people would lie and lie and lie and after a while it just becomes so
natural and so culturally you know the thing to do that it messes with people
to a degree where it just affects their soul in in such a deep way that it's
hard to like develop any muscles of of attention to the truth anymore right and
so Russia still struggles with this and well it's independent thought you know
because obviously the lying goes backward into the mind you know
eventually and and and is going to it's going to stifle independent thought yeah it will it will stifle independent
thought it will mess with your ability to exercise agency on a very basic level
because what is agency it's it's seeing options and being able to consciously
choose options right if everybody's lying and you are lying and that is just
kind of your normal constantly you know um then that is going to mess with your
ability to really exercise agency that is a a big part of the evil of communist
societies is the implementation of lying uh to a degree that that is unimaginable
right i mean these societies have never recovered from what happened to them and
how they were taught to lie yeah i heard something recently that I had not
thought of before and that is that uh one of the reasons you have the
flood is because there was no agency and you say "Well wait a minute why what do you mean there was no agency?" No the
world was so wicked that there was not even a view of
righteousness that you could choose between this as compared to this because
you're brought up into it the generation is brought up into it then the next generation is even more brought into
that iniquity and and so you get in a position where the world does not have the agency to choose good that it's just
not even there it's not available it may not even be a thought that that enters your mind and so you
have to reset in that situation yeah i it's it's hard there um it it
definitely does compromise agency and Elder Boyd K
packer talked about how you know you can create it's possible to create a moral
environment where agency becomes compromised if lying is just part of
your social fabric and everybody does it and you do it and you just accept that
that's the way it is how much agency can you
really embrace and and adopt and and exercise right how much can you if
everybody's lying and and you're not you don't even have the ability to see your choices
clearly so again this is something you never
want to allow your society to get comfortable with lying like the Soviet
Union did like Mao Mauist China did like all of these communist societies did um
and and I'll say also having lived in the Middle East there are a lot of Arab cultures where lying is just so freely
done and you know I I lived in Iraq for a year during the war and I came back and
and I was studying Arabic with a a guy from Morocco and I and we talked about
Arab culture and I and I said it was really hard sometimes when I
was in Iraq because I did not know what to say i I knew somebody was lying to me
and they knew they were lying and I knew they were lying and I I'm just not used to that
and he said and he actually got really sad and he he just said,"Wh do we do
this?" And he was lamenting like "Ara culture this is kind of common in Arab
cultures." And he was kind of shocked and embarrassed and and sad for Arab
cultures and so you just never want to get get to that point as a society
because it will be exploited by somebody like the Antichrist yeah and again I
think you've just got to hone those critical skills but you know how do you think this all ties to the words of
President Nelson when he says in the last days you will not make it if you
cannot have a spirit right right i mean because because as much as our you know
this is the where we where the enlightenment is is void of of a full
answer right of truth yeah and that is that our reasoning at some point is not
enough right right and and and that you you've got to be able to you can if even
the elect are are deceived right your the reasoning
and and your IQ and everything else is not enough if you are not tied to the
spirit which I think is very much grounded in prayer and
scripture yeah yeah and a relationship with Christ y because if again if the
lies are just piling on left and right what do I believe where where do I go which which way do I go i guess I got to
pick one of these right you know it's it's it's even Joseph Smith you know as a boy you know I guess I'm going to go
with the Methodists on this and it's like no no there there's an option you're not looking at yet here so right
yeah i And I believe I mean just think of Think of the culture of the gospel and
how it invites us to slow down be more patient you know do your devotional
habits of prayer and scripture study and your mind will actually slow down a little bit and be more careful than if
you're avoiding those things you will ha you'll have a better
uh you know your your intellect will be sharper and better and more capable so do the gospel basics and slow
down keep your eye on you know the leadership of the church and just be
careful because there are people out there who are wanting to exploit all of these things yeah and I think you know
my final word on this is you I I again I like the pyramid you got
the triangle there i you you have to be able to rise above your need for
belonging and your need for validation yep and for some people that's really
hard right because that there there's there there are issues there and they they they want that that and some people
that's the most important thing to them right and and so but if you can rise above that that need for belonging and
that need for for uh validation then then truth is
going to be there when I you know I'll give you an example just even look at political parties if you can't distinguish yourself from
the political party you are so engaged with a political party that you're going
to buy hook line and sinker everything that's on the platform or everything that spews out of their mouths right you
there there's a problem i don't care which side of the spectrum you're on you know you you've got to be able to
get be beyond the collective and and beyond the belonging and the sense of
well I'm a conservative and this is what a conservative believes or I'm a liberal and this is what a liberal believes and
Right you've got to be able to step above that yeah and ask what is true yep
exactly dan thanks so much for your time um conspiracy theories you're going to
get I think all of us are going to get bombarded with these more and more some
of them are true and that just perpetuates the bad ones over and over
again but uh appreciate what you wrote and appreciate your words and uh we'll have you back on soon very good thank
you