Leo D.M.J. Aurini - April 29, 2026


SCP-7524 - The Book of Rational Zealotry

Topics
weaponization of SCP-7524
Hosted by
Leo D.M.J. Aurini
Mentioned
Description SCP-7524 Mark Desireaux Addendum Dites
SatW Livestream 2026-04-25： Has God Gone Silent？ SatW Livestream 2026-04-29： Red Button, Blue Button： Nice, Smart, or Right？

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

164.6

Word count

1,446

Sentence count

84

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

SCP-7524 is a treatise written by Mark Desireaux arguing against superstition and promoting reason. After reading it, the individual who reads it becomes a case of SCPs7524-1, and over the course of a few months, their religious beliefs fade away.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Researcher Arini, and if you just follow my instructions, we will get through this as painlessly as possible.
00:00:12.100 Today, we are going to be discussing SCP-7524, Object Class, Euclid, Special Containment Procedures.
00:00:22.160 A single physical copy of each suspected instance of SCP-7524 is to be contained in the secure library annex of Storage Site 40.
00:00:30.000 Digital copies, including apparent duplicates, are to be archived on an EMP-shielded SSD with all metadata and retrieval information noted in accordance with Digital Anomaly Citation Standards 9040.3.
00:00:41.320 Testing upon confirmed instances of SCP-7524 is currently suspended due to the difficulty in finding D-class personnel who meet the criteria of susceptibility.
00:00:51.000 Suspected instances will only be tested with site director approval,
00:00:54.540 and if the automated textual analysis shows a variance greater than 10% from a confirmed instance.
00:00:59.740 Until then, they are to be presumed info hazards.
00:01:02.200 Under no circumstances are any SCP personnel to read the documents to completion.
00:01:06.260 Doing so may result in dismissal, detention, Class C amnestic therapy, or even termination.
00:01:11.580 Note that partial reading of the document is believed to be harmless and is permissible by assigned staff.
00:01:16.920 A single C-class personnel is to maintain the automated web crawler and review the results,
00:01:22.080 as well as manually searching forums and blog networks for undiscovered instances.
00:01:25.660 The use of non-foundation search engines is strictly forbidden.
00:01:29.220 Field agents working with the Library and Archival Division, the Silicon Valley Liaison Division,
00:01:33.240 and the Calls and Conferences Division are to familiarize themselves with this SCP.
00:01:37.200 If any suspected instances are discovered, they're to contact lead investigator, doctor, for further orders.
00:01:42.320 Suspected cases of SCP-7524-1 are to be detained, interrogated, and anesthetized, and any copies of SCP-7524 to be seized, following which they are to be reported to domestic intelligence authorities, if they instance a relevant subcultural niche, after which they are to be released.
00:01:59.680 Description
00:02:00.120 SCP-7524 is a treatise of approximately 50,000 words, titled The Figments of the Mind by Mark Desireaux.
00:02:07.740 The former was crossed out, and it goes on.
00:02:10.840 which goes by various titles and authors, all sharing a common theme,
00:02:13.960 which has variously been described as a text arguing against superstition and promoting reason,
00:02:18.060 though it doesn't appear to contain any unique or profound arguments.
00:02:20.960 SCP-7524's anomalous effects occur when the text is read by an individual who,
00:02:25.840 A. possesses the necessary 6th grade reading level in the language needed to understand it,
00:02:29.860 and B. scores in the top 40% of the modified CRS scale.
00:02:33.720 That was crossed out, it now says.
00:02:35.620 scores in the top 30% of religiosity on at least two of the following dimensions,
00:02:40.660 intellectual, ideological, and religious experience.
00:02:43.860 Public practice and private practice have been proven to be irrelevant.
00:02:47.520 Following the completion of SCP-7524,
00:02:49.780 the individual who reads it becomes a case of SCP-7524-1.
00:02:54.320 What follows is a two-stage shift within the individual over a period of several months.
00:02:57.760 Their prior religiosity will appear to dissipate.
00:03:00.320 They will stop attending religious services.
00:03:01.940 They will lose interest in religious and philosophical documents
00:03:04.040 and the use of religious terms in daily language will decline.
00:03:07.440 Their baseline morality and attitude remains unaffected, however,
00:03:10.140 making stage 1 easy to miss.
00:03:11.940 A small number of SCP-7524-1s experiencing this shift
00:03:15.420 have casually described themselves as atheist,
00:03:17.780 but the vast majority still consider themselves religious
00:03:19.580 despite having effectively abandoned their faith.
00:03:22.340 Stage 2 occurs when their latent religiosity reasserts itself.
00:03:25.460 The SCP-7524-1 will gradually become obsessed with a subcultural niche
00:03:29.480 which is sufficiently complex to allow religious devotion,
00:03:31.800 but is not part of an extant faith.
00:03:34.040 Examples of such niches include science fiction and fantasy universes, organic food, veganism, or fitness, UFOs and cryptids, far left and far right ideologies, role-playing games, multiplayer video games, antiques, collectibles, even barbecuing.
00:03:50.960 SCP-7524-1s will devote considerable energy to their new hobby to the detriment of pre-existing relationships, their work life, and in some cases their health.
00:03:58.980 Psychological testing indicates no change to personality, however the subject will now interpret all events through the lens of their new subculture, often becoming obnoxious or even belligerent. 0.93
00:04:07.380 Note that amnesic deep therapy can remove the memory of SCP-7524, but will not affect their new obsession. 0.63
00:04:13.860 This causes them to withdraw from their previous life, abandoning friends and family for the sake of their new belief system,
00:04:18.660 and in 70% of suspected field cases, this has resulted in arrest for an indictable offense within five years of exposure.
00:04:25.280 Non-political examples include...
00:04:27.660 was arrested in making death threats over a disagreement on in-universe lore in the tabletop strategy.
00:04:35.780 Pepper sprayed a clerk at over a dispute involving a children's book about UFOs on whose cover the gray aliens were colored green.
00:04:44.340 Chains and doors of City Hall in in protest of the pesticides used in city beautification.
00:04:49.320 was arrested by a person of a military antique shop in
00:04:53.420 apparently over-dispute regarding the authenticity of a World War II Japanese katana
00:04:58.020 and assaulted staff at
00:05:00.900 hospital in
00:05:02.520 following demands for antibiotics to treat an apparently fictitious illness.
00:05:08.760 SCP-7524-1s are not themselves in the medic hazard,
00:05:11.880 but are sometimes prone to sharing SCP-7524 on blogs, forums, or other discussion groups.
00:05:17.860 However, this doesn't appear to be a compulsion.
00:05:20.540 Nonetheless, the propensity for social collapse, which exposure entails,
00:05:23.400 demands swift action against any copies which are discovered in the wild.
00:05:26.440 Potential weaponization of SCP-7524 has been considered and dismissed.
00:05:30.560 See Addendum 7524-A.
00:05:34.340 SCP-7524 was discovered during the investigation of SCP-1425, Star Signals,
00:05:40.240 during which a book titled,
00:05:41.700 Star Signals, Finding the Power Within,
00:05:43.660 was investigated and determined to be non-anomalous.
00:05:46.020 The author, however, a man named, is suspected to be a case of SCP-7524-1.
00:05:52.700 He disappeared during the early investigation, likely at the hands of fifthists.
00:05:56.700 Researchers believe that fifthism was the cultural niche which his obsession drove him to,
00:06:01.300 though he wasn't actually a member of any fifthist cult.
00:06:04.160 And it appears he never got his hands on an actual copy of SCP-1425.
00:06:08.720 SCP-7524 was discovered as a PDF file hosted on his website, www.cf.net,
00:06:14.760 where he blogged extensively about fithism, most of it inaccurate,
00:06:18.720 and it was discovered by a junior researcher.
00:06:21.560 This eventually led to the incident at sight.
00:06:26.000 Post-numus investigation led to the discovery of the junior researcher's journal,
00:06:29.160 allowing doctors to ascertain the source of the mimetic hazard.
00:06:33.400 Since then, several other documents with similar titles, authors, and word lengths have been discovered,
00:06:37.620 which have the same mimetic effect.
00:06:39.140 The oldest extant text yet discovered was held in the Vatican's Leoprorum Prohibitorum
00:06:43.880 and is titled Dites-moi, Dites-you, by Marquis de Sade,
00:06:48.100 though there are no records, official or unofficial, of the Marquis publishing such a work.
00:06:52.740 Archival research has uncovered records of older texts which may have been examples of SCP-7524,
00:06:57.680 however the actual texts are lost.
00:07:00.000 Evidence seems to point to an original Ur text which was composed at some point during the 15th century,
00:07:04.560 and variations upon this original have been proliferating at a linear rate ever since.
00:07:08.780 Note, there is one prior example of a possible SCP-7524.
00:07:13.880 Tacitus mentions a treatise titled Opinioniae Structorum by Marcus Saladinus, which, according to his histories, was supposedly a favorite of Emperor Nero.
00:07:22.900 The origin and author of SCP-7524 continues to elude researchers.
00:07:27.320 ISBNs, if included at all, are incorrect, and tracing on any physical copies leads back to vanity publishers, dead email accounts, and payments made in bearer bonds or digital currency.
00:07:36.480 Until better investigation possibilities open up, the focus is on containment.
00:07:41.000 Addendum 7524a.
00:07:43.800 The O5 Council has considered several proposals as to how we might weaponize SCP-7524.
00:07:48.860 Quite frankly, gentlemen, unless if one of you has some deep strategy that we haven't thought of,
00:07:53.000 it's just not practical, and it's more likely to blow up in our faces. 0.74
00:07:55.840 To go into specifics, the Sarkic cults don't read.
00:07:59.860 Are we cool yet? We just become even more destructive with their anomalies. 1.00
00:08:03.560 Established organizations like the Serpent's Hand, the GOC, and...
00:08:06.700 We've detected before it did significant damage to their operations.
00:08:10.140 In effect, we'd just be handing them a tool to use against the general populace.
00:08:14.340 Please consider the possibility of a broken masquerade before submitting any more suggestions as to how we can weaponize SCP-7524. 0.84
00:08:20.280 Sufficiently stupid proposals may result in demotion and even restricted cafeteria access to the salad bar only.
00:08:26.920 Signed, 053. 1.00
00:08:29.840 Well, that about does it.
00:08:32.040 That reminds you of that physicist, what do you say?
00:08:34.300 It's good to have an open mind, but don't keep your mind so open that your brain falls out.
00:08:38.200 But anyway, that will do it.
00:08:40.860 Thank you very much for listening, class, assuming that you still are.
00:08:44.660 And class is dismissed.