 Ahoy, ahoy. I'm Dr. Sumerian, not a real doctor, and today we are going to talk about how you are probably, yeah, we'll throw a probably in there, you are probably wrong, about secrecy and the SCP Foundation. Let's get started. Alright, so what in the heck do I mean by secrecy at the SCP Foundation? Well, the SCP Foundation has multiple purposes. One is to contain and protect the world, contain and protect the world specifically. No, to contain anomalies and to protect the world, though sometimes they do both, the other way around. But in addition to that, part of their responsibility is to keep anomalies secret from the rest of the world. There's always going to be a contingent of people who know that magic is real, that you can't avoid. However, the SCP Foundation has assumed the task, along with a couple of other organizations, of ensuring that for the average everyday person, you know, can't access magical portals to cross the entire world. Let's give that as an example, or infinite food, which as you can imagine, to some people might actually be useful with the Managed Charitable Foundation would probably get some good use out of something like that. And probably there's a couple of SCPs on the wiki, I'm sure, the SCPs, but GOI documents from the Managed Charitable Foundation involving such things. And if you think about it, there's so many different, there's so many anomalies that could have function in the real world. But they don't exist in the SCP Universe or in ours. Also, let's preface this right now. The SCP Foundation isn't real. I am going to be considering it from the position of if it was real, because this is a piece of fiction and that's what we're examining. But just to be clear, it isn't real. But if it was, the SCP Foundation essentially has three methods of keeping the veil up. And the veil is the term that the SCP wiki uses in a lot of fiction on the wiki, beyond just the SCP Foundation itself on the wiki, uses the words the veil basically to describe the secrecy surrounding anomalies. And the ideal that as long as the veil is down, you keep the public over here and you keep the anomalies over here and then there's a curtain between that keeps them separated. But there are three ways. Three ways the SCP Foundation manages the veil. One is just plain old conspiracy theory crap. You might be like, what do you mean conspiracy theory crap? I mean like government cover-ups. The kind of stuff that actually has happened in the past and that a lot of people believe happens more often and all the time and world-spanning conspiracies and lizard people and vaccines and 9-11 was an inside job and all that bull crap. But there are some conspiracies that actually took place. Not all conspiracy theories are wrong. Most of them are, but not all. The thing is that we know about a listing of them, but then there's the ones that we don't know about. So you have to wonder, which is it's fine. You can wonder. Just don't let it take over your life. But the SCP Foundation, say for example, let's start with a town. And the core anomaly at this town is that the water from time to time, even in the middle of the summer, no matter what the temperature is, will gather together and form ice sculptures in the street. This is our core anomaly. We're going to approach it from the three different possible ways that you could prevent this anomaly, or I'm sorry, prevent information of this anomaly from getting out into the world. One, and the core anomaly that could be a lot of fun, right? Like who's creating, what's creating these ice sculptures? Are they real? Do they live? Are they capable of feeling and talking? And yeah, there's a story you could build around it, but that's not important, which is just a throwaway anomaly that I just came up with literally while you were watching on the spot because I didn't prepare well enough. That's the anomaly. Water in this town periodically, no matter what the temperature is, forms ice sculptures in the middle of the streets. This can be problematic because it blocks up traffic sometimes and so on and so forth. So the SCP Foundation finds out about it and they approach it from one of three different ways. First is the conspiracy theory cover up. Get together with the government of the town, you cover up all mentions of this, you have a monitoring system that comes in and removes them as quickly as possible and maybe cover it up with like it's some street artist if it gets out, right? And this is a combination, by the way, of not just the conspiracy theory step but also normalization, which we'll talk about in a second, which we can do. Secondly, there's another way. And that's the good old fashioned magic. And you might be like, what do you mean magic? Well, the thing is the SCP Foundation has access to things that either are magic or functionally are no different than magic. Amnestics exist, but they're not public. They are anomalous, for lack of a better way to put it, and they are used to make people forget. So if somebody encounters one of these ice sculptures for some reason, you could give them amnestics and make them forget that they encountered this ice sculpture. That's magic. And world spanning SCPs that cause problems can lead to full on universe or world resets, reality resets, I should say, and so on and so forth. This is the SCP Foundation taking a heavy hand with ensuring that the veil still exists. And finally, we have normalization, which we talked a little bit about in the earlier part. Now this is forget building a conspiracy theory sort of cover up or doing whatever. Leave the sculptures in the middle of the street and let the town deal with it. But make sure that the town and the news and everybody else believes that it's a normal thing. And you might be like, a normal thing. Now you can say that it's a vandal or an artist that's doing it, or you can come up with some kakamemi story about how ice sculptures sometimes just naturally form. How you go about doing that, I don't know yet. I would very much depend on how detailed these ice sculptures are. Maybe if they're geometric shapes or something like that, instead of people, you could conceivably convince people that it's just some natural occurrence. This is a really weird thing that happens in this one town because of air currents from Canada and warm air from the Gulf of Mexico coming up and so on and so forth. You just, you come up with some sort of weird complex explanation and it creates these geometric shapes in the middle of the street. That's normalizing it. And we can think about normalizing as probably the most effective version of this because it removes all doubt. Like there is no need for a contin- there's really no need for a continuous cover-up unless things change. You do need to monitor it, but you don't need to continue covering it up. You don't need to get in there and actually involve yourself too much. And this is where we finally get to the important point here in that normalization normalization is the easiest and best way to handle an anomaly. If you can make the anom- without breaking people's brains, if you can make the anomalous seem like a mundane thing, then it becomes a mundane thing. It's all about perception in this one place because of weird reasons ice sculptures form. And we can use- there are real world applications of this. I should say real world examples of this, not necessarily applications. I think that would imply that there is some sort of overarching intelligence that's trying to convince people of a thing. I'm saying in the real world there are anomalies that are unexplained things in science. Just as an example that we do the things that we don't quite fully understand that have become normalized. And the idea that we don't know what it is and don't understand it is fine. Like we don't really- I've seen some papers on this and for the longest time we didn't really understand why ice was slippery. That seems like a basic thing. And there's a lot of theories, you know, pressure causes the top level to melt. There's a layer of water on the top that makes it slippery and reduces friction and so on and so on. But none of them really makes sense when they looked at the science of it. There's possibility that every- almost every theory about it combines to account for all the possibilities. But that's one example. And that's what the paper recently said that literally no- there's no one explanation. Like a bunch of stuff has to come together for it to work. But that was like last year or two years ago that they finally came down with it. So up to that point ice being slippery was an anomaly, an unexplained strange thing about the world that science could not- could not quite understand. And there are a ton of things like that. The expansion of the universe is a great example of something we don't really understand when we talk about things like dark matter, dark energy and so on. What we're saying is when we talk about this in a scientific sense, and when I say we, I don't really mean me because I'm not an astrophysicist or an astronomer, but when we talk about those things, what we're really saying is that we don't really know why those things happen. We can observe the effects of those things, but because of it we have no idea. It might as well be magic. It's not magic. There's a- there's a real world thing that's causing it, but it might as well be magic. And that, dear friend, is how you normalize the anomalous. You take an anomaly and a thing that cannot be explained and you just say, that's how the universe works. It's weird, isn't it? Anyway, that's it. I thought I'd go over the- I was in the shower thinking about what to do today, and I was like, I know what I'll do. I'll talk about the veil and how the SCP Foundation can maintain it. And I was like, how do they do that? And then I thought the three possibilities. If you can think of something else that the Foundation does that doesn't fit into one of those categories, let me know in the comments down below. And then hit the subscribe button and then hit the notification bell next to that so you're notified when I upload new videos. A lot of you guys have probably noticed I stopped doing the premieres every single time. I'm still going to do it every once in a while, but this is probably going to be- this is a regular video release. I think I'm going to start restricting- not restricting, but I'm going to stop doing premieres every single time I release a video, and we'll see how that works out. But in the meantime, after you've done all of that, head on over to patreon.com forward slash D. Sumerian and pledge at any level like everybody here on the screen already has, including Dr. J. Redacted and Sinjeriki who have both pledged at $100. I don't know why I need to think about that. It's been the same for a long time. It's nice to know that I'm not alone out here, and I will see you all again on Thursday.