MOSF 20.11: “False” by Dr. Joe Pierre: A Vital Exploration of Our Vulnerability to Misinformation and Conspiracy Theories

Memoirs of a Superfan, Vol. 20.11: “False” by Dr. Joe Pierre: A Vital Exploration of Our Vulnerability to Misinformation and Conspiracy Theories

by Ravi Chandra
September 15, 2025

Adobe stock image by Rajko, licensed by Ravi Chandra

 Note: I am experimenting with cross-posting on Substack and East Wind eZine. Let me know what you think!)

The most important points of Dr. Joe Pierre’s recently published False: How Mistrust, Disinformation, and Motivated Reasoning Make Us Believe Things That Aren’t True, is that we are all vulnerable, and that there are “apex predators” who exploit our vulnerability for financial and political gain. Legitimate leaders are interested in your well-being, not simply theirs, and don’t gain stature from demonstrably false beliefs, as Trump and his crew do from the “Big Lie.” 

The 3M Model of False Belief | Joe Pierre (Center for Inquiry, May 16, 2025)

To me, beliefs, true and false, are ultimately about power. As Dr. Wade Nobles elegantly put it, “power is the ability to define reality and to have others respond to that definition as if it was their own.” Social psychologists define power as the ability to influence others. Others would define power as the ability to get what you need and want in life. Thus “apex predators” and influencers are highly successful at influencing others to get what they want: typically money, political power, and the total defeat of their perceived opponents. Hegemony in some social ecosystem, or the culture as a whole, which they define as “winning” in their zero-sum game. 

Apparently I’m not attractive enough to be ready for my prime time hegemony. Stay tuned, lol!

Americans seem culturally prone to grandiosity, and have a grandiosity fetish. We feel enlarged by a grandiose person, celebrity, emotion, or idea. We can be riled into mob mania. Attaching ourselves to a celebrity quiets our uncertainties and insecurities, excites us, and even blinds us, just as they attempt to quiet their fears by attaching to some overvalued idea (like White Supremacy, Christian Nationalism, or American greatness). Having a grandiosity fetish attracts many to those with God Complexes, people who believe their own snuff and are not humble or ethical about wanting us to follow them. The most successful must attach to, or stand in, for pre-existing “cultural Gods.”

We are rubes for a convincing megalomaniac who taps into our cultural or factional fears and ambitions. We are rubes for those with dangerous charisma, particularly those who amplify the culture’s core fears and prejudices, and return “us” to the glory of which “we’ve” been robbed.

Adobe stock image by freshidea, licensed by Ravi Chandra

Hence my adage: “don’t trust anyone over 30,000 followers.” Or at least limit your trust and kick the tires. We all rely on others for guidance. But it’s possible to be misguided and exploited, manipulated to feel that other people are our enemies, misdirected from ameliorating the true causes of physical, mental, emotional, and cultural suffering. 

Adobe stock image by Skórzewiak, licensed by Ravi Chandra

I mean, I trust Atul Gawande on quite a lot (and he had 355,000 followers on Twitter/X, before exiting), but I wouldn’t fully trust him on, say, foreign policy. Well, at least I’d expect him to be well-read on the subject before opining. Compare this to Trump, who thinks he “knows better than the generals” on military issues, and whom Republicans trusted as much as their doctors on health care decisions during the pandemic. Wow. Talk about a fatal blind spot, and a perfect example of what Pierre calls “suicide by false belief” (see references). Trump has been manufacturing this idealized media image for decades, in collusion with the likes of Fox News and the producers of The Apprentice. It’s understandably hard for some to view him with everyday skepticism when he has been inflated like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon and hoisted aloft by millions. He’s hard for many to resist.

Pierre’s work wisely deconstructs the cognitive pitfalls of brain-and-society’s belief-conjuring systems, and offers some important remedies. However, Mrs. O’Leary’s cow is out of the barn, and Chicago may literally burn (to mix metaphors and reference a debunked false belief). We are going to need massive course-corrections to get us back to reality. In addition to the educational programs and insights Pierre offers, I would suggest that we must take down (not just out-compete) the apex predators. We must ban those who support Trump’s Big Lie from office as insurrectionists. We must get money out of political campaigns. We must reform the media environment so that it adheres to reality.

The party of Lincoln has become the party of lies. The GOP has become the Grandiosely Organized Psychopathy and the Genocidally Oriented Party.

Prove me wrong.

We are all susceptible to false beliefs. But I’m more worried about our susceptibility to “false leaders.” Hence the founders’ brilliant provisions for “checks and balances.” They knew the dangers of power. They had their King George III moment, and tried their best to contain the tyranny of grandiose leadership.

Even the Bible warned about false messiahs. Even the ancients knew about the danger of following an attractive but wrong-headed, delusional, or even malicious actor.

(I wrote these words a day before Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Of course I do not condone political violence. But Kirk is an example of the “apex predator” Pierre describes, a man who trafficked in conspiracy theories, including the “Great Replacement Theory” and the “Big Lie,” in addition to trying to get professors cancelled through his “professor watchlist.” So much for his supposed “free speech” credentials. I believe people like Kirk were and are greasing the path towards genocide. They inure us to hate speech and devalue empathy, breaking our brains and creating a malignant normality in which our lives are at stake. I’m sure there are other apex predators who will try to fill in the gap – but we are long overdue for a conversation about the rhetoric of devaluation. The right wing has a Neo Nazi problem that MSM seems unwilling to broach much less challenge.

But why are we vulnerable to false messiahs?

Our fragility, vulnerability, and needs for narrative (even heroic narrative), identity, and some form of belonging make us all very interested in stories about power, survival, danger, success, cohesion, and “winning,” sometimes at all costs. The false messiah who taps into those needs can lead many astray.

Adobe stock image by Flash Vector, licensed by Ravi Chandra

I have said Americans in particular have a grandiosity fetish that makes us often go all too gaga for those who are full of themselves and have a bridge they’d like to sell us. People who want power over others find ways to get it, goosed by their privilege or position. It would be nice if ethics grew in proportion to power, but “absolute power corrupts absolutely,”

All of us ask these questions, on some level, at some point or continuously in our lives:

“What is going on? How am I going to make it? How are we going to make it? Who or what is a danger? Who or what do I need to fight?”

It’s not hard to imagine someone worried, aggravated, or in distress being conned by a fraudster intent on lining their pockets rather than actually dealing with the fundamental and specific sufferings of being human in the modern world. Quick and easy “answers” for a quick buck. Caveat emptor.

Adobe stock image by Frd69, licensed by Ravi Chandra

Hence the typical apex predators pit “us” against “them,” and we fall into the OS (the Operating System) of Othering and Splitting. They push to militarize our minds, make us their minions, and send us to battle. We are pumped up to believe in the grandiose glory of “us,” injured, threatened, and deprived by “them,” groups which are targeted for fear, blame, scapegoating, and dehumanization. We become thin-skinned, unable to tolerate critique, unable to face accountability because it shames us instead of connecting us, and defiantly unwilling to grow, change, or let go of our self-centered biases to become part of a bigger whole, or deal with suffering and change rationally and compassionately.

To restore lost glory, we must “Make America Great Again” with a total war against “them” – those who look, think, and act differently, those who are aware of the man behind the green curtain. “We” must make “them” wicked again. As mentioned, the extreme danger of the currently invoked xenophobia is of course genocide, a pathway being greased by right-wing influencers like Charlie Kirk, who are busy denying the evil of Hitler, the reality of the Holocaust, and the moral repugnance of antisemitism and Islamophobia, to promote the “Great Replacement Theory.” 

Trump’s “Big Lie” about the 2020 election and anti-vaxx and anti-science lies further a climate of partisan mistrust about areas once considered above partisanship.

If only we could disagree without dehumanizing. If only we could approach suffering with reason, compassion, and relationship. If only we could listen with curiosity and empathy, with the aim of understanding and reconciling, rather than listening for the triggers that will fortify our own threatened grandiosity, thus splitting us from devalued, “othered” voices. If only we could love, instead of hate, fear, and resent. Instead, the right-wing’s belief systems are aimed at driving us apart and generating mistrust in expertise.

Conspiracy theories should be called “Conspiracy Cons” – but can sometimes be at least somewhat right

The basis of all conspiracy is mistrust of shadowy power. “You are the little guy who is threatened by THEM! You are the warrior who must fight for US!” As Pierre writes,

“Conspiracy theories reject authoritative accounts of reality in favor of some plot involving a group of people with malevolent intent that’s deliberately kept secret from the public.”

Pierre makes the point that most people have at least some level of belief in conspiracy “as high as 72% in Japan; 77% in France; 79% in Great Britain; 80% in the United States, Australia, and Canada; 85% in Spain; and 91% in Mexico.” 

Even I believe in a “conspiracy,” one which is not readily and openly acknowledged because it has been engineered by a powerful faction of wealthy White Republicans in collusion with Christian and White Nationalists, and which in fact benefits wealth beyond party labels. As Carol Tavris puts it in her Times Literary Supplement review of False, 

“[I]n American politics, that familiar [political] polarization has morphed into something uglier and more dangerous, thanks to the rise of an uncompromising Republican strategy that began with Richard Nixon in the early 1970s and was explicitly expanded by Newt Gingrich in the 1980s. This strategy was actually called “positive polarization”: the more divided the country, its proponents believed, the better for their party, because “it stoked the anger they needed to get their voters to turn out”. In the past decade, of course, political polarization has become even more extremely entrenched, thanks to the ubiquity of social media.”

We can also point to the drives channeled by Lewis Powell’s famously influential memo of 1971, urging “corporations to flood politics and media with money, to rig the game in their favor,” as Robert Reich describes in his just-published memoir.

Indeed. As Noam Chomsky puts it after 9/11,

“[T]he U.S. government is now trying to exploit the opportunity to ram through its own agenda: militarization, including “missile defense,” code words for the militarization of space; undermining social democratic programs; also undermining concerns over the harsh effects of corporate “globalization,” or environmental issues, or health insurance, and so on; instituting measures that will intensify the transfer of wealth to the very few (for example, eliminating corporate taxes); and regimenting the society, so as to eliminate public debate and protest.”

Sound familiar? The drive for total, hegemonic victory of the wealthy White right which had been somewhat hidden has now become quite open in Project 2025 and Trump 2, down to recent headlines of President Shrimp belching out his war footing with the city of Chicago, summoning the ghost of the American War in Vietnam in an attempt to “trans” the American right into repetition, final victory, and recovery of lost glory. 

And tellingly, all of these conspiracy theories dadaistically rhyme with each other and reflect reality. Note the New York Times’ recent exposé about how the nation’s top bankers turned a knowing blind eye to Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal activity in order to line their pockets, enjoy his excesses, and possibly indulge in sex with underage girls themselves. The “secret cabal of elite pedophiles” turns out to be, uh, on the money. 

As Bridgette Carr, a law professor and human-trafficking expert whom the U.S. Virgin Islands hired after Epstein’s death to analyze JPMorgan’s role concludes, 

“I am deeply worried here that the ultimate message to other financial institutions is that they can keep serving traffickers,” she told us. “It’s still profitable to do that, given the lack of substantial consequences.”

Wealthy elites have indeed covered up corruption. Why don’t we follow the money not just for sex scandals but for the rape of American democracy?

Abusive power is always up to no good, and part of their “no good” is amplifying poor reasoning capacity, so that they can throw our would-be-righteous, corruption-seeking minds, off their scent.

Adobe stock image by Argus, licensed by Ravi Chandra

“It’s not US – it’s THEM!”

Abusive power always needs an enemy, a scapegoat, a villain – to throw us off the trail of its own villainy and corruption. The true villains are qualities of mind (hatred, greed, self-centeredness, factionalism), and the delusional but concrete systems they create, not people per se. But in a quest to avoid accountability and responsible relationship, the right manufactures self and non-self, idealizes its leaders to invulnerable “heaven,” and sends the non-self to the “hell” of their reflexive, biased judgments and contempt. Their belief systems are an authoritarian, cultish form of social and mind control, a misleading gaslight, which does not brook dissent or fact-check.

The apex predators and their media channels hack our minds at their most vulnerable and foggy core: our fundamental insecurity and uncertainty, and how we think about others, our connections, communications, and interdependencies. If we are vulnerable and uncertain, we must know who or what threatens us. For 60 years, the right has successfully demonized liberals and minorities, amplifying the pre-existing and unreconstructed biases of “center-right” America towards whiteness, and supposed “liberty,” including purported economic freedom. Meanwhile, the far-right stole the store and remade the company in their image.

The natural GPS of communities and “organized society” – media, journalism, clubs, churches, schools – have been in disarray and decline for decades, under stress of economic, technological, and cultural change, yielding more uncertainty and potential for misdirection. There hasn’t been enough glue, and there has been active centripetal dissociation and realignment, much of it for malicious purposes. The center does not hold. It could not accommodate diversity (of ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender), and economic equity. It could not tolerate true inclusivity. So our old demons, exclusion and division, America’s oldest parents, present since 1619 on this continent, who made themselves “gods,” were beckoned in the form of Roy Cohn, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, Nixon, Reagan, Limbaugh, Trump, and all their ilk. This patriarch wants to win at all costs, demands total obedience to its will, authority, and belief system, and cuts down challengers with their facts and reasoned, or impassioned, dissent.

We are vulnerable, uncertain, socially anxious, and ripe for either learning and growth, or exploitation

We are left to our own devices, literally and figuratively, and our devices toy with our natures. Our opinions, beliefs, convictions, and ideologies are a product of brain and society. Are we essentially benevolent and kind, especially towards “strangers,” especially under threat? Or are we truculent and cruel, prone to violence of mind, word, and fist? Can we be ginned up to gun someone down?

I’ll bring us back to Pierre’s central point: we are all vulnerable. We are all prone to what he calls the “Three M’s”: mistrust, misinformation, and motivated reasoning. I’d add a fourth M: We can all be manipulated. 

Now, believing the Earth is flat is one thing, but believing the opposition to be evil incarnate? To be radicalized into a terrorist who thinks he’s a warrior or “freedom fighter” to eliminate the “scourge” of people who think or look different?

P.T. Barnum said “there’s a sucker born every minute.” Some people are highly persuasive and motivated to attract an audience. What are they trying to get you to believe and do?

Pierre ably dissects the vulnerabilities of our thinking brain, which is eager to find meaning and “connect the dots” in a world in which the GPS signals of society are spotty, and inclined to “reset to factory settings” of dangerous cultural biases. Our “cognitive pitfalls” (in addition to the splitting, othering, and potential dehumanization noted above) include:

“bullshit receptivity [gullibility] …unwarranted overconfidence (the Dunning-Kruger effect), faith in intuition, confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, epistemic mistrust (declining trust in traditional authorities and experts), and exposure to the barrage of both misinformation and disinformation that’s out there in the world.”

Screenshot of Dr. Pierre’s Talk on YouTube

Thinking – Right and Left?

But just as there’s a “thinking fast and slow” as per Daniel Kahnemann, there seems to be a thinking Right and Left. And frankly, to my eyes, the Right thinks fast in favor of itself, and rarely seems to slow down to question Fox or Trump. 

Pierre also points to some evidence that:

“conservatives tend to have greater needs for certainty and control, greater concerns about threats, more cognitive rigidity and a greater tendency to think intuitively than analytically, and more dogmatism compared to liberals, this account of ideological asymmetry is sometimes referred to—with the tone of a pejorative—as the ‘rigidity of the right’ hypothesis.”

Researcher John Jost states that partisanship is driven by epistemic, existential and relational needs. Those on the right favor the “three C’s”: certainty, closure, and control. Jost says “people on the Right favor tradition and hierarchy, whereas people on the Left favor progress and equality.”

Another screenshot of Dr. Pierre’s talk.

Finally and most alarmingly,

“some researchers have found evidence that political conservatives are more likely than liberals to prioritize faith in intuition, feelings, and instincts over analytic thinking, evidence, and objective data, suggesting that such differences might explain why conservatives today might be more vulnerable to misinformation, conspiracy theories, and anti-science beliefs.”

Those same priorities can be found in once-fringe “wellness” communities, which became a pass-through to Q-Anon and anti-vaxx conspiracies. The confluence of conservative and “wellness” priorities paved a royal road for our Secretary of Health and Human Services, RFK, Jr.

An old cartoon, relevant once again.

How do we get out of this mess?

Pierre leans into creating systemic tire-kicking on beliefs with his “Holy Trinity of Truth Detection”: intellectual humility, cognitive flexibility, and analytical thinking. Finland has done this. Educational interventions have been created here in the US as well, and could be scaled, given the will. But the will to mislead seems greater than our strength to love, at this point. Though he hopes for “Truth, Justice, and a Better Tomorrow” against the firehose of falsehoods, the monsoon of misinformation, the deluge of disinformation, he recognizes the danger before us.

“It’s therefore entirely possible that we’ll lose the war on misinformation and succumb to false belief in the end so that previously unified societies will fracture, democracies will crumble and authoritarian regimes will arise from the wreckage, millions more will die from ignoring scientific evidence, and the planet will burn.”

Screenshot from Dr. Pierre’s talk.

He concludes with an exhortation, the words also concluding Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax:

“UNLESS someone like you
Cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better.
It’s not.”

However, he seems far more circumspect in calling out the bad actors, preferring to hope for us to collectively come to our senses. (He is less circumspect in a recent article, in references, in which he warns we are at risk of “suicide by false belief,” and does much more to call out the apex predators and the ecosystem they are creating. He recognizes in this article what he was more neutral about in his book, naming the “weaponization of false belief.” We are, in fact, being attacked. In the book, though, he mostly remains a neutral guide to boosting our epistemological understanding of how we come to “know what we know” and become unwilling to admit we don’t know.)

“My hope is that reading this book will result in a kind of humbling self-awareness of our brains, our beliefs, and ourselves as less than perfect and that, armed with that insight, we might soften our convictions, view our ideologic opponents with compassion and understanding, and mend the rifts in our relationships as individuals and societies alike.”

Humbling self-awareness is certainly an ongoing and necessary project. 

“The world is divided into those who are right.” 

“Do not take offense, even if it is offered.” 

“What are the chances you are right about everything?” 

I’d be happy to lower the temperature on any policy discussion. But we need to empower the project of love and compassion with actual political and cultural power. We have to figuratively “knock out,” block and contain the apex predators so that humanity can survive. As a society, we need to evolve out of our predatory impulses, and not propagate them. Perhaps this challenge to their exploitation is what frightens them, because it threatens to knock out supercapitalism, militarism, and racism, MLK’s Giant Triplet.

Right now, the loudest, wealthiest, and most extreme voices are in power. They are trying to protect wealth, the volume of their voice, and the agency of their own extremism. They seem to be activating half the population into becoming like infected zombies in The Last of Us, brains eaten out, alive only to attack the surviving humans. And certainly those we think of as right-wing “zombies” tend to think of us as literal “alien enemies” as they have done before, destroying what they conceive of as “their America.” 

Even I find it hard to soothe my fears of those I feel dehumanize me and target vulnerable communities. It took a trip to Bismarck, ND (which I’ll be writing about soon) to ameliorate some of my fears and biases about the people who live in red states, and touch a common ground of connection. Still, that Trump sticker on the pickup truck outside my hotel gave me pause, and for most of the time, I walked around, hypervigilant, with a fear of incoming aggressions. (Which did not materialize, except for a horrendously bad hamburger which I almost took personally, at Space Aliens. Avoid.)

Note to space aliens – please avoid the burgers at Space Aliens.

We are all vulnerable. The extremes can mirror each other in mindset and tactics. However, this isn’t a both-sidesist moment to be neutral. Trump, reflects, embodies, and amplifies the chest-thumping worst of us. He has chosen the path of abusive power and the infliction of pain. His broken brain is breaking society. Many of us are doubling down on shared humanity, compassion and insight, but it seems an uphill battle. As a Black man said to me a few years ago, “love my enemies, sure – but first get his boot off my neck.”

The boot of false beliefs is on our neck. The people who told you immigrants were “eating cats and dogs” are in power. Their xenophobic, racist, and transphobic false beliefs are what’s most dangerous, in addition to the generation of knee-jerk mistrust of their political alternatives in favor of a dictatorship of their kakistocracy.

Why would you trust these false messiahs?

References and further reading:

Photo by Bob Hsiang, 2022

Ravi Chandra is a psychiatrist, writer, compassion educator, and civilizational health shaman in San Francisco, and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He is the recipient of the 2025 Kun-Po Soo Award for Achievement in Asian American Psychiatry from the APA and APA Foundation. Here’s his linktree. Please sign up for East Wind  and Psychology Today updates via Substack where you can also support his educational and creative mission by becoming a free, paid or founding subscriber.  For fourteen years, he was lucky to have his MOSF posts published by the Center for Asian American Media, and is now at work broadening and building a diverse creative community and coalition through reflecting on culture and psychology for East Wind eZine. Sign up for updates here, and see all the posts here. He writes from the metaphorical intersection of The Fillmore and Japantown in San Francisco, where Black and Asian communities have mingled since the end of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. He literally works there, between two Indian restaurants, go figure. His debut documentary was named Best Film (Festival Director’s Award) at the 2021 Cannes Independent Film Festival. The Bandaged Place: From AIDS to COVID and Racial Justice is available on-demand, and with the discount code “Awake” you can get a 20% discount. His nonfiction debut, Facebuddha: Transcendence in the Age of Social Networks, won the 2017 Nautilus Silver Award for Religion/Spirituality of Eastern Thought. You can find him on Psychology Today, Medium, Twitter,  Threads, Facebook,  Instagram,  YouTube,  TikTok, SoundCloud, or better yet, in the IRL.

Leave a Comment