It's commonplace for older generations to criticize the young. In my early career, an older fellow told me he wouldn't hire anyone who didn't know how to use a slide rule. Another only a decade older than me said he only wanted to work with people who had built their own crystal radio or some equivalent.

In ancient Egypt, the heart was the key to a happy afterlife. It lived on after death, they believed, and in the Duat, the Netherworld, it revealed a truth man's words could not hide.

The 42 gathered gods would measure the heart and if it weighed more than the Feather of Truth which adorned the head of Maat, their Goddess of Justice, Order, and Truth, it was consumed by the Goddess Ammit, Devourer of the Dead, who had the body of a crocodile, a lion, and a hippopotamus, and you were gone from existence forever.

People had a lot of ways to get heavy hearts. Theft, anger, even eavesdropping added weight. 

In politics, one way to make your belief in alternative energy seem feasible is to make its competitors expensive. President Obama did that when he began to subsidize the domestic solar energy industry at unprecedented levels.(1) He brought in Dr. Stephen Chu, who had advocated $9-a-gallon gasoline, from inside his high-paying job in academia to be in charge of energy policy for Democrats. He was right in his agenda, solar could be feasible if its conventional energy competitors were forced to be 300% more expensive.

Once upon a time, wealthy white women virtue signaled to other wealthy white women when they spent $500 on snacks at stores they're paid to promote, like "upscale" grocery chain Erewhon, where its overpriced nonsense supposedly leads to a "radiant" lifestyle.

That time is still now. This one is especially fun, because two words after assuring us it "has literally sold out everywhere" she tells gullible viewers that you can buy it at the store she's being paid $5 to promote.

If you read environmental groups, we are closer to our doom than ever. Bees are nearly extinct, cell phones are causing cancer, and hydroelectric power is devastating the land.

None of those are true yet they all have claims found in journals and in media. So it has been with mercury emissions, where computer models so poorly designed they'd get you fired in the private sector if you tried to recommend a working prototype using them sail through peer review. 

Do you think the 2008 financial meltdown was caused by religious evil? I don't, I think it was caused by populism in Congress that made it a potential prison sentence to deny anyone a mortgage and guaranteed mortgages for unqualified people.(1)
If you instead think it was evil, "Slaves of Satan" by Patrick R. Bell is a solid work. For the rest of us, well, maybe. It requires a certain amount of suspension of disbelief. The 20th century philosopher Bertrand Russell proposed if you create a closed system and introduce a contradiction anything can be proven. Dan Brown used this to fantastic effect in books like "The Da Vinci Code" and if you believe in evil as an external control, like demons, it can explain a lot.