Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time

by Michael Shermer

  The controversy over recovered versus false memories still rages among psychologists, psychiatrists, lawyers, the media, and the general public. Because childhood sexual abuse does happen, and probably more frequently than any of us like to think, much is at stake when accusations made by the alleged victims themselves are discounted. But what we appear to be experiencing with the recovered memory movement is not an epidemic of childhood sexual abuse but an epidemic of accusations (see figure 13). It's a witch craze, not a sex craze. The supposed numbers alone should make us skeptical. Bass and Davis and others estimate that as many as one-third to one-half of all women were sexually abused as children. Using the conservative percentage, this means that in America alone 42.9 million women were sexually abused. Since they have to be abused by someone, this means about 42.9 million men are sex offenders, bringing us to a total of 85.8 million Americans. Additionally, many of these cases allegedly involve mothers who consent and friends and relatives who participate. This would push the figure to over 100 million Americans (about 38 percent of the entire population) involved in sexual abuse. Impossible. Impossible even if we cut that estimate in half. Something else is going on here.

  This movement is made all the scarier by the fact that not only can anyone be accused, the consequences are extreme—incarceration. Many men and a number of women have been sent to jail, and some are still sitting there, after being convicted of sexual abuse on nothing more than a recovered memory. Given what is at stake, we must proceed with extreme caution. Fortunately, the tide seems to be turning in favor of the recovered memory movement being relegated to a bad chapter in the history of psychiatry. In 1994 Gary Ramona, father of his accuser, Holly Ramona, won his suit against her two therapists, Marche Isabella and Dr. Richard Rose, who had helped Holly "remember" such events as her father forcing her to perform oral sex on the family dog. The jury awarded Gary Ramona $500,000 of the $8 million he sought mainly because he had lost his $400,000-a-year job at the Robert Mondavi winery as a result of the fiasco.

  Not only are the accused taking action but accusers are suing their therapists for planting false memories. And they are winning. Laura Pasley (1993), who once believed she was a victim of sexual abuse during her childhood, has since recanted her recovered memory, sued and won a settlement from her therapist, and her story has made the rounds in the mass media. Many other women are now reversing their original claims and filing lawsuits against their therapists. These women have become known as "retractors," and there is now even a therapist retractor (Pendergrast 1996). Lawyers are helping to reverse the feedback loop by holding therapists accountable through the legal system. The positive feedback loop is now becoming a negative one, and thanks to people like Pasley and organizations like the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, the direction of information exchange is reversing.

  The reversal of the feedback loop was given another boost in October 1995, when a six-member jury in Ramsey County, Minnesota, awarded $2.7 million to Vynnette Hamanne and her husband after a six-week trial about charges that Hamanne's St. Paul psychiatrist, Dr. Diane Bay Humenansky, planted false memories of childhood sexual abuse. Hamanne went to Humenansky in 1988 with general anxiety and no memories whatsoever of childhood sexual abuse. After a year of therapy with Humenansky, however, Hamanne was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder— Humenansky "discovered" no less than 100 different personalities. What had caused Hamanne to become so many different people? According to Humenansky, Hamanne was sexually abused by her mother, father, grandmother, uncles, neighbors, and many others. Because of the trauma, Hamanne allegedly repressed the memories. Through therapy, Humenansky reconstructed a past for Hamanne that even included Satanic ritual abuse featuring dead babies being served as meals "buffet style." The jury didn't buy it. Neither did another jury, which on January 24, 1996, awarded another one of Humenansky's clients, E. Carlson, $2.5 million (Grinfeld 1995, p. 1).

  Finally, one of the most famous cases involving repressed memories was recently dismissed and the accused released from jail. In 1989 George Franklin's daughter, Eileen Franklin-Lipsker, told police that her father had killed her childhood friend Susan Nason in 1969. Her evidence? A twenty-year-old recovered memory upon which (and without further evidence) Franklin was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison in January 1991. Franklin-Lipsker claimed that the memory of the murder returned to her while she was playing with her own daughter, who was close to the age of her murdered childhood friend. But in April 1995, U.S. District Court Judge Lowell Jensen ruled that Franklin had not received a fair trial because the original judge refused to let the defense introduce newspaper articles about the murder that could have provided Franklin-Lipsker with the details of the crime. In other words, her memory may have been constructed, not recovered. Additionally, Franklin-Lipsker's sister, Janice Franklin, in sworn testimony revealed that she and her sister had been hypnotized before their father's trial to "enhance" their memories. The final straw was when Franklin-Lipsker told investigators that she remembered her father committing two more murders but investigators were unable to link Franklin to either of them. One of the memories was so general that they could not even find an actual murder to go with it. In the other, Franklin allegedly raped and murdered an eighteen-year-old girl in 1976, but investigators placed Franklin at a union meeting at the time of the murder, and DNA and semen tests confirmed Franklin's innocence. Franklin's wife, Leah, who testified against him in the 1990 trial, has now recanted and says she no longer believes in the concept of repressed memories. Franklin's attorney concluded, "George has been in prison or jail for six years, seven months, and four days. It is an absolute travesty and a tragedy. This has been a Kafkaesque experience for him" (Curtius 1996). Indeed, the entire recovered memory movement is a Kafkaesque experience.

  The parallels with Trevor-Roper's description of how a medieval witch craze worked can be eerie. Consider the case of East Wenatchee, Washington, in 1995. Detective Robert Perez, a sex-crimes investigator who took as his mission the rescue of the children of his city from what he believed was an epidemic of sexual abuse. Perez accused, charged, convicted, and terrorized citizens of this rural community with literally unbelievable claims. One woman was charged with over 3,200 acts of sexual abuse. One elderly gentleman was charged with having sexual intercourse twelve times in one day, which he admitted was impossible even when he was a teenager. And who were the accused? As in the medieval witch crazes, they were mainly poor men and women unable to hire adequate legal counsel. And who was doing the accusing? Young girls with active imaginations who had spent a lot of time with Detective Perez. And who was Perez? According to a police department evaluation, Perez had a history of petty crime and domestic strife, and it described him as "pompous," with an "arrogant approach." The report also stated that Perez appeared "to pick out people and target them." Soon after he was hired, Perez began interrogating vulnerable, dysfunctional girls without their parents being present. Not surprising, he did not tape the interviews; instead, he wrote out statements of accusation for the girls, who then signed them, usually after hours of relentless questioning (Carlson 1995, pp. 89-90).

  While no one was burned in East Wenatchee, these young girls (the most prolific accuser was ten years old), because of Perez's influence and powers as a police officer, put more than twenty adults in jail. Over half of the incarcerated were poor women. Interestingly, anyone who hired a private attorney was not imprisoned. The message was clear—fight back. In the case of the ten-year-old accuser, Perez pulled her out of school, questioned her for four hours, then threatened to arrest her mom unless she admitted to being the victim of sex orgies that included her mom. "You have ten minutes to tell the truth," Perez insisted, promising that he would let her go home if she did. The girl signed the paper and Perez promptly arrested and jailed the mother. The girl did not see her mother again for six months. When the mother finally hired a lawyer, all 168 charges were dropped. East Wenatchee was firmly locked in a w
itch craze feedback loop that reached criticality when this epidemic of accusation was reported in the mass media (including a one-hour special on ABC and a Time magazine article). Now that Perez has been exposed, the accused are turning on him, the girls are retracting their accusations, lawsuits are being filed by the victims and their destroyed families, and the feedback loop has reversed itself.

  The troubling aspect of this particular craze and of the sexual abuse hysteria sweeping across America over the last few years is that some genuine sex offenders may well go free in the inevitable backlash against the panic. Childhood sexual abuse is real. Now that it has been turned into a witch craze, it may be some time before society finds its balance in dealing with it.

  8

  The Unlikeliest Cult

  Ayn Rand, Objectivism, and the Cult of Personality

  According to psychoanalysts, projection is the process of attributing one's own ideas, feelings, or attitudes to other people or objects— the guilt-laden adulterer accuses his spouse of adultery, the homophobe actually harbors latent homosexual tendencies. A subtle form of projection is at work when fundamentalists make the accusation that secular humanism and evolution are "religions" or announce that skeptics are themselves a cult and that reason and science have cultic properties, a claim that sounds absurd given that a cult is by definition 180 degrees out of phase with reason. And while it should be obvious to the reader by now that I am strongly pro-science and pro-reason, a recent historical phenomenon has convinced me that the seductiveness of facts, theory, evidence, and logic may mask some flaws in the system. The phenomenon provides a lesson about what happens when a truth becomes more important than the search for truth, when the final results of inquiry become more important than the process of inquiry, when reason leads to so absolute a certainty about one's beliefs that anyone who is not for them is anathematized as against them, and when supposedly intellectual inquiry becomes the basis of a personality cult.

  The story begins in the United States in 1943 when an obscure Russian immigrant published her first successful novel after two consecutive failures. It was not an instant success. In fact, the reviews were harsh and initial sales sluggish. But slowly a following grew around the novel, not because it was well written (which it wasn't) but because of the power of its ideas. Word of mouth became its most effective marketing tool, and the author began to develop a large following. The initial print-run of 7,500 copies was followed by print-runs in multiples of 5,000 and 10,000 until by 1950 a half-million copies were circulating in the country.

  The book was The Fountainhead, and the author was Ayn Rand. Her commercial success allowed her the time and freedom to write her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957. Atlas Shrugged is a murder mystery about the murder not of a human body but of a human spirit. It is a sweeping story of a man who said he would stop the ideological motor of the world. When he did, there was a panoramic collapse of civilization, but its flame was kept burning by a handful of heroic individuals whose reason and morals directed both the collapse and the subsequent return of culture.

  As with The Fountainhead, reviewers panned Atlas Shrugged with a sarcastic brutality that only seemed to reinforce followers' belief in the book, its author, and her ideas. And, also like The Fountainhead, sales of Atlas Shrugged have sputtered and clawed forward, to the point where the book has regularly sold over 300,000 copies a year. "In all my years of publishing," recalled Random House's head, Bennett Cerf, "I've never seen anything like it. To break through against such enormous opposition!" (in Branden 1986, p. 298). Such is the power of an individual hero . . . and a cult-like following.

  What is it about Rand's philosophy as presented in these novels that so emotionally stimulates proponents and opponents alike? At a sales conference at Random House before Atlas Shrugged was published, a salesman asked Rand if she could summarize the essence of her philosophy, called Objectivism, while standing on one foot. She did so as follows (Rand 1962, p. 35):

  1. Metaphysics: Objective Reality

  2. Epistemology: Reason

  3. Ethics: Self-interest

  4. Politics: Capitalism

  In other words, reality exists independent of human thought. Reason is the only viable method for understanding reality. Every human should seek personal happiness and exist for his own sake, and no one should sacrifice himself for or be sacrificed by others. And laissez-faire capitalism is the political-economic system in which the first three flourish best. This combination, said Rand, allows people to "deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit." This is not to say, however, that "anything goes." In these free exchanges, "no man may initiate the use of physical force against others" (Rand 1962, p. 1). Ringing through Rand's works is the philosophy of individualism, personal responsibility, the power of reason, and the importance of morality. One should think for oneself and never allow any authority to dictate truth, especially the authority of government, religion, and other such groups. Those who use reason to act in the highest moral fashion, and who never demand favors or handouts, are much more likely to find success and happiness than the irrational and unreasonable. Objectivism is the ultimate philosophy of unsullied reason and unadulterated individualism, as expressed by Rand through the primary character in Atlas Shrugged, John Galt:

  Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind. (1957, p. 1016)

  In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours. (1957, p. 1069)

  How could such a highly individualistic philosophy become the basis of a cult, an organization that thrives on group thinking, intolerance of dissent, and the power of the leader? The last thing a cult leader wants is for followers to think for themselves and exist as individuals apart from the group.

  The 1960s were years of anti-establishment, anti-government, find-yourself individualism. Rand's philosophy exploded across the nation, particularly on college campuses. Atlas Shrugged became the book to read. Though it is 1,168 pages long, readers devoured the characters, plot, and philosophy. The book stirred emotions and provoked action. Ayn Rand clubs were founded at hundreds of colleges. Professors taught courses on the philosophy of Objectivism and the Literary works of Rand. Rand's inner circle of friends grew, and one of this circle, Nathaniel Branden, founded the Nathaniel Branden Institute (NBI) in 1958, which sponsored lectures and courses on Objectivism, first in New York and then nationally.

  As Rand's popularity shot skyward, so too did confidence in her philosophy, both Rand's and her followers'. Thousands of people attended classes, thousands of letters poured into the offices of the NBI, and millions of books were sold. By 1948, The Fountainhead had been made into a successful film starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, and the movie rights for Atlas Shrugged were being negotiated. Rand's ascent to power and influence was nothing short of miraculous. Readers of her novels, especially Atlas Shrugged, told Rand they had changed their lives and their way of thinking. Their comments include
(Branden 1986, pp. 407-415 passim):

  • A twenty-four-year-old "traditional housewife" (her own label) read Atlas Shrugged and said, "Dagny Taggart [the book's principle heroine] was an inspiration to me; she is a great feminist role model. Ayn Rand's works gave me the courage to be and to do what I had dreamed of."

  • A law school graduate said of Objectivism, "Dealing with Ayn Rand was like taking a post-doctoral course in mental functioning. The universe she created in her work holds out hope, and appeals to the best in man. Her lucidity and brilliance was a light so strong I don't think anything will ever be able to put it out."

  • A philosophy professor concluded, "Ayn Rand was one of the most original thinkers I have ever met. There is no escape from facing the issues she raised. At a time in my life when I thought I had learned at least the essentials of most philosophical views, being confronted with her . . . suddenly changed the entire direction of my intellectual life, and placed every other thinker in a new perspective."

  The November 20, 1991 issue of Library of Congress News reported the results of a survey conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club of readers' "lifetime reading habits," indicating that Atlas Shrugged was ranked second only to the Bible in its significance to their lives. But to those in the inner circle surrounding and protecting Rand (in a fit of irony, they named themselves "the Collective"), their leader soon was more than just extremely influential—she was venerated. Her seemingly omniscient ideas were inerrant. The power of her personality made her so persuasive that no one dared to challenge her. And Objectivism, since it was derived through pure reason, revealed final Truth and dictated absolute morality.