Complex Numbers

Off the Edge

Today's article is... well, see for yourself:

What we can learn from people who take the Flat Earth theory seriously  
“Flat Earth enables people to cast out all previous information that they didn’t want to believe and rebuild the world from scratch.”

You know, I can almost appreciate that. Almost. There's a certain allure to things that tell you that everything you've learned is wrong, and here's the Truth.

Problem is, they're the ones that are almost always wrong. Sure, science is always revising itself, but when it comes to some really basic shit like the general shape of the planet, it's as close to certainty as it's possible to get that it's round.

Across the globe, millions of people believe the Earth — that whirling blue sphere, spinning through space — is, in fact, a flat plane.

Old joke: "The Flat Earth Society has members all around the globe."

Another old joke: "We know the Earth isn't flat because if it were, cats would have pushed everything off the edge by now."

It’s unclear how many people believe some version of Flat Earth theory.

And it doesn't matter. One would be too many. If it were eight billion, they'd still be wrong.

And polling gives us some sense of the scale of this belief system: As many as 1 percent of Americans (that’s more than 3 million people) and 7 percent of Brazilians (11 million people) say they believe the Earth is flat, for example.

Polling? "Polls just tell you what They want you to think."

The modern Flat Earth movement has its origins in a snake oil salesman and utopian named Samuel Rowbotham, said Kelly Weill, a journalist who covers fringe movements for the Daily Beast and spent years researching this movement and its adherents.

"Snake oil salesman" is all you should need to know.

Weill spoke to Grid’s misinformation reporter, Anya van Wagtendonk, about the movement’s appeal, its overlap with religious beliefs and the QAnon conspiracy theory, and how we’re all susceptible to conspiratorial thinking.

"Misinformation reporter" could have two distinct meanings. Just saying.

The rest of the article is the interview, which doubles as a stealth ad for Weill's book.

But I think there’s an emotional truth to Flat Earth. People come to it when they feel like the world is very broadly wrong.

Oh, but the world is very broadly wrong. For instance, there are flat-Earthers living in it.

Samuel Rowbotham, the theory’s inventor, used a lot of biblical tools in his writing, saying that the globe model conflicted with a round Earth. A lot of modern Flat Earthers will use the theory to get into other alternative Christian beliefs. A lot of them are creationists.

It is the case that a purely literal reading of the Bible (were such a thing actually possible) supports a flat Earth. It also sets the value of pi at exactly 3. I take this to indicate that the facts in the Bible are wrong. The same literal reading says that the sky is, in a real sense, a "firmament," keeping the waters above from crashing down (as supposedly happened in a certain flood). We know that this is not the case.

...a lot of Flat Earthers — depending on their belief in why there’s a Flat Earth cover-up — believe that, when the flat earth is finally revealed, that it will usher in a new era of peace or religious enlightenment, things that conveniently align with their vision of utopia.

Which is, incidentally, my version of dystopia. Not the peace part, but the religious endarkenment part; but remember: peace can be achieved by wiping out all of humanity. Peace is great, but it's important to know what one means by it.

I’ve had people tell me that there’s going to be a societal breakdown, but that we will rebuild a more enlightened, Christly version of society.

There is going to be a societal breakdown if we don't rein in these flat-earthers. And an enlightened society is the exact opposite of a Christly one. Don't believe me? Look at history. Individual belief is fine; I'm all for it. But when a bunch of True Believers get together, bad things happen to innocent people.

There’s a tendency to think of conspiracy theorists as tinfoil hatters, as crazy people. But the processes are really ones that we’re all susceptible to.

I would tend to agree with that. I catch myself in conspiracy thoughts sometimes. I'm usually able to logic my way out of them, but I'm still not convinced, for example, that PETA isn't run by synthetic fur and vegan food manufacturers.

Maybe we can bring that empathy to those conversations and use that as a basis for bringing people back to reality.

I don't want to bring them back to reality. I want to push them off the edge of the planet.

Wait...