Let’s be up front: the notion that the earth is flat is ludicrous. Anyone who believes this either is ignorant of the evidence, or simply wants to believe it more strongly than they care about evidence. A lot of people seem to think it has more to do with the former, but it almost certainly has more to do with the latter. This is because humans crave meaning-making mythologies, and the conspiracy cult of the flat earth offers just that.
This post was inspired by the following two videos:
The above video by Sabine Hossenfelder discusses a study that shows that flat-earthers (or “flearthers” as the she calls them) are less scientifically literate than the typical average person. (Other studies have found this as well). I could not find the entire study she discusses online for free (here is the abstract, here is an article on Psypost by Eric W. Dolan discussing the study), but Sabine offers some screenshots of the figures in her video (the images below are screenshots taken from the video):
The video by Dave Farina (of the Youtube channel Professor Dave Explains) quickly goes through and debunks the arguments that are purported to “prove” the flat earth model as put forward by Eric Dubay. What these two videos do, and what I think a lot of people in the science/philosophy space do, is take the position that flat-earthers are simply ill-informed. Perhaps, the thinking might go, if people were just better informed or more scientifically literate, they wouldn’t believe something so patently absurd.
I of course understand that debunking these beliefs is important to combating this ridiculous conspiracy cult, and that it is easier to assess facts and arguments than to dissuade people from cherished beliefs, but I think, for many of the poor victims who have succumb to the conspiracy cult of flat earth, this will never be enough. This is because, like with any cult belief system, the actual beliefs are not what draw people to it. The three-B framework in religion posits that religious adherence is about Behavior, Belonging, and Belief. What people get from the flat earth conspiracy cult, as far as how it fulfills their need for purpose and community, isn’t the belief. It is the behavior, but most especially the belonging.
I have discussed on this blog (and elsewhere) the ways in which our modern society has led people to take on comforting beliefs. We live in an alienating world, absent the community and comfort we once found in religion and other shared narratives. Because we have found that God does not exist, and have increasingly found traditional religion wanting in the meaning-making department, humans have sought meaning and belonging elsewhere. When someone is unable to cope with the absurd a la Camus, this can often come in the form of radical politics (e.g., Wokeism, Qanon) – what Camus would call a form of philosophical suicide (adopting these beliefs attempts to impose meaning on the meaningless, i.e., one takes a Kierkegaardian “leap of faith” at some putative meaning-making belief only to find that there was nothing on the other side, causing one to fall to one’s philosophical death). But it can also be found in less hostile, yet equally as ludicrous ideas, like the flat earth.
There is certainly something to be said about the epistemological problem of testimony here. Politicians, scientists, and cultural elites have squandered a great deal of good will, resulting in a (completely foreseeable) loss of trust in authority. And this certainly must explain part of the phenomena we observe in the adoption of these meaning-giving beliefs – or, at least, why people reject more rational beliefs in favor of various forms of contrarianism. But this is not the whole story, because it does not explain why people take on the new beliefs that they do (i.e., why, upon concluding no one is to be trusted, we do not just languish in epistemological nihilism, but instead adopt these new beliefs). What these people are doing, whether it is Wokeism, Qanon, or flat earth, is myth making.
The myths we tell about ourselves (and the myths we tell about our myths and their formation) are the way that we humans make sense of the world in which we live, and the groups to which we belong. The Jews have the covenant with Yahweh and the myth of the exodus. Christians have the myth of Jesus and the myth of how the myth of Jesus spread. The United States has its myths about “no taxation without representation” and manifest destiny. In modern times, the Woke have the myth of structural oppression, Qanon has the hero myth of Tump (and the eponymous Q) as well as the myth of the deep state, and the flat earth not only has the myth of the earth being flat, but also the myth of a conspiracy theory of truly titanic proportions that must be perpetrated by millions of people going back to the time of the ancients.
For many people, including myself, if we only think about the sort of cognitive dissonance a person must grapple with to believe in the absurd notion of the flat earth, we are left baffled and incredulous. Surely these people are just being trolls for the sake of contrarianism? But when viewed in terms of myth-making, it starts making a lot more sense.
Steven Pinker discusses in his book Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (see my review of his book here for a summary) that humans engage in factual thinking and mythological thinking. The first has to do with everyday concerns. Is it raining outside? Does the car need fuel? How much money do I have? Is my spouse angry at me? Is that dog dangerous? The answers to these questions are straightforward and, in general, people hold rational beliefs about them (even if they may not always act on those rational beliefs). But we also have mythological thinking, which has to do with questions that don’t affect our everyday lives most of the time (for the majority of people; obviously some of these affect people in real life). Beliefs such as: Israel and/or Palestine are the bad guys; COVID vaccines are putting computer chips into people; Jesus died and resurrected to save us from our sins; there are unavoidable structures of racism/sexism that explain many of the things about the world I don’t like; the deep state is pulling all the strings and controlling society from the shadows to further their nefarious goals; the earth is flat and millions of people are (and have been) lying about this for vague reasons.
The following video podcast discusses this idea about mythological vs. factual thinking as it pertains to religious belief:
What primarily sets the mythological beliefs apart from the factual beliefs are two things:
- Mythological beliefs give overriding explanations about how the world works (not just describe facts or proximate causes for facts about the world), one’s place in the world (and in history), and who are “my people” and who are not “my people”.
- Mythological beliefs, for many people who hold them, do not affect their everyday lives (e.g., whether a typical U.S. citizen is pro-Israel or pro-Palestine is not going to significantly alter the course of their day; a flat-earther is not going to insist on taking a flight that does not use great circles, they are just going to get on the plane).
Because of that first aspect, these beliefs have deep meaning for ourselves, because they are important in telling us who we are as people, and to which people we belong. In political science, one way of differentiating between a race and an ethnicity is that the former is imposed from the outside while the latter is adopted from within. Although language is probably the biggest factor in how people decide on their ethnic group, one of the biggest factors is also shared myths (this is also why religion is often very important for this, since religion offers a package deal of shared myths). The point being, what we believe tells ourselves about what kind of person we are, and tells others what kind of person we are (e.g., virtue signaling). We form communities around mythological beliefs, not factual beliefs (this is one of the main weaknesses of secularism – it does not offer an alternative meaning-making myth, instead allowing people to construct myths outside the framework of pure secularism; more on this below).
The second aspect, though, means that for many people, there is little personal cost to adopting beliefs, regardless of how ridiculous they are. This is especially true in WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) nations where people are unlikely to face persecution for their beliefs (they might call it persecution when someone is being mean to them, but this is a very “first world problem” form of persecution – nobody is forcing them from their homes at gunpoint or throwing them in reeducation camps or arresting/killing them for not covering their hair). This means that there is more to gain from virtue signaling (in the form of great esteem among one’s myth-belief cohort), since one can do so without having to incur substantial personal costs for flaunting their beliefs.
Part of the myth, for flat-earthers and many others in the secular west (e.g., Wokeism, Qanon), is that they are speaking truth to power, that they are courageous underdogs overcoming great hardship in the face of adversity. This narrative myth helps lend further credibility among their myth-belief cohort, but without having to pay any real personal toll, thus helping perpetuate the myth: when it is easy to keep saying, loud and proud, that one is overcoming great adversity, then there is no incentive to discontinue boasting of one’s courage for all the world to see. This enhances their in-group esteem while also giving naive outsiders the impression that joining this group of people will also make them just as courageous (as they already believe themselves to be, but now this courage will be recognized by others) and give them a group to which they can find a sense of belonging.
There are two conundrums (conundra?) here for anyone hoping to dissuade people from this bizarre manifestation of postmodernism. The first is that, by attacking the belief in flat earth, one is merely playing into the mythology, which is the more important aspect for most devotees of the conspiracy cult. The myth flat-earthers tell about themselves is that they are the ones who are brave enough to speak the truth, and anyone who criticizes them only lends credence to that image of themselves. Yet, it is nearly impossible to argue with someone at the level of personal/social meaning-making myth, and so it is understandable and unavoidable that criticism comes in the form of debunking the propositions one must believe to signal their place as a hero within the mythology.
But perhaps the more pessimistic conundrum is that, lets say, hypothetically, we can get every single adherent of the flat earth conspiracy cult to take a trip to space to look at earth from far enough away they can see with their own eyes that it is a sphere. One of two things will happen. The first is that many of them will continue believing in the flat earth conspiracy cult, rationalizing it by saying that the spaceship was fake, that it was all CGI or something. I cannot help but think about this scene from the comedy series Avenue 5, where the passengers of a spaceship have learned that they are stuck on the ship out in space and will not be able to go home for a very long time, and so some have taken to believing that this is a lie and they can just leave out the airlock:
It’s interesting that many doomsday cults, whereupon their leader gives a definite date for the end of the world and then it fails to transpire, the adherents often double down on the belief (e.g., Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses). One would think that having the prediction so thoroughly refuted would be enough to dissuade someone, but apparently not. It could very easily be the same thing for flat-earthers when confronted with such thorough refutation of their core belief. Indeed, I would argue that the evidence against flat earth is already so overwhelming that their continued adherence is already bordering on being tantamount to the third group of passengers to step out the airlock in the above video.
The second thing that could happen is that the flat-earthers do believe their eyes and use their rational faculties to abandon the beliefs following such a thorough refutation. But then what? People will simply go in search of some other meaning-making mythology. The underlying problem has not gone away, namely that humans have a powerful psychological need for a meaning-making mythology, and now that it has become clear that traditional religion fails in this regard (not that it does not work as a meaning-making mythology, only that it is becoming more widely accepted that its myths are untrue, or that they do not offer the kind of meaning people now crave, likely for other sociological and cultural reasons), people are looking for para-secular mythologies (i.e., meaning-making mythologies to adopt from outside the void of meaning-making mythologies offered by secularism). The point being, without offering some less ridiculous or pernicious alternative that serves the same function, efforts to quash these sorts of conspiracy cult meaning-making mythologies are going to be a never ending game of wack-a-mole. But, it seems, some people find meaning in doing that.
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Edit 5/5/2024: the following video discusses some of the same things I do above, but more through the lens of race (in particular, between 24:52 and 34:25).
While his diagnosis is spot on (because, you know, it agrees with my thesis), I think Hughes sort of drops the ball on the question of what cause people ought to get behind to fill the void left by the loss of religion and nationalism. He essentially says that people need to just find meaning in secular behaviors (e.g., humanism, charity, community engagement). These things lack the sort of meaning-making mythology that religion and nationalism once offered, and now Wokeism, Trumpism, and other conspiracy cults deliver.