Jehovah's Witnesses Self-Deception

By Leo Gura - February 4, 2026

The Jehovah’s Witnesses are a case-study in self-deception. The way to master epistemology is to deeply study case-studies in self-deception like this, analyzing them for specific self-deception mechanisms, and then generalizing those mechanism across the board to every mind, including your own. That’s how I mastered epistemology. I carefully, without bias, studied hundreds of major cases of self-deception across human history, and I did not hold my own worldview as above it. If you do that seriously, for years, eventually you will know every trick of the mind, of how the mind constructs paradigms and worldviews. Epistemology is not arm-chair philosophy. Epistemology is like a science. You learn it by studying real-world examples of self-deception. Observe how self-deception actually works and then realize that your mind operates by exactly the same principles as all self-deceived people. The key insight is to realize that no matter how scientific or rational you are, you are no better than a Jehovah’s Witness.

This is the foundation for everything I teach. The reason my work is so powerful is that from day one of this work, 20 years ago, I never assumed I was any better than a Jehovah’s Witness. This is what people misunderstand about my work. They think that I think I am above everyone else. That’s exactly backwards. I know that my mind has all the same self-deception mechanisms as the most deluded humans who ever lived. That’s why I take epistemology so seriously. No one takes epistemology as seriously as me. Which is why my work is what it is. The paradox is that I’m special because I know that I’m just like everyone else. You might say, “So what? Everyone knows that.” No! Almost nobody understands that they are as self-deceived as the most deluded people who ever lived. This is an exceptional insight. The paradox of my work is that on the surface it seems arrogant, but actually I am more epistemically humble than any scientist. That’s why my work is better than science. Not because I am arrogant but because I am humble. I was humble enough to understand that science can be as much a self-deception as Jehovah’s Witnesses. But scientists are too arrogant to understand that. People see the fruit but not the tree on which it grew. People see me being arrogant in a video or on the forum or in a blog post, but they don’t see the 20 years of epistemic toil and humility that I did beforehand, and so they misunderstand me. The real work that I did, no one will ever see. All you see is the fruit. Which is why I’m explaining it to you, because I want you to copy the work I did, not the fruit. Don’t become a Buddhist, do what the Buddha did. Don’t become a Christian, do what Christ did. Don’t become an Actualized.org fanboy, do the epistemic work that Leo did.

Believing stuff is not epistemic work!

It’s like, once you’re a billionaire, you can afford to burn some money. That’s what I’m doing when I’m a bit arrogant in my intellectual demeanor. But I didn’t become rich by burning money! Get it?

When I am arrogant, that’s like an agile peacock displaying its tail in front of a hungry lion. It’s a display of the epistemic depth I’ve built over decades of work. The peacock’s tail makes it more vulnerable. But an agile, masterful peacock who knows what he’s doing can pull it off and not get eaten by the lion. But if a newbie does it, the lion will eat him! In this case the lion is self-deception, Maya. When I’m being arrogant, I am using lots of skill to dance around self-deception in a clever way to entertain myself. Because once you’ve mastered a thing, it becomes play. The mechanics of self-deception are so obvious to me that I am bored by them. What do you do once you’ve mastered basketball? You show off a little bit. Why? Because there’s nothing else to do. It is boring for me to have a serious conversation with a scientist because he won’t even understand what I’m talking about. So what do I do about that? I entertain myself. Who else will entertain me? This is very different from a closedminded belief in one’s worldview.

And with all that said, I am still not immune to self-deception. A lion could eat the peacock any day. Reality will find ways to humble you.

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