I’m currently a recovering addict. A few months ago on a whim I joined a FB group to debate Earth’s shape. I’ve come across flat Earthers before, online at least. Whether I’ve encountered adult Westerners who believe Earth is flat, I don’t know. Finding the group highly addictive, I became one of the main posters and enjoyed it a lot, but it isn’t really the best employment of one’s time. That said, it does constitute an interesting case study of the way we think and behave.
The useful thing about looking at flat Earther psychology is that it’s firmly established that Earth is spheroidal. The room for doubt is practically submicroscopic on this matter, so there’s no risk of being wrong or being drawn into believing that it’s flat, and because of that, rather than becoming embroiled in arguments which might persuade one, one can instead just examine how flat Earthers justify their position. Positions plural, actually. Most flat Earthers seem to believe we are on an almost flat surface under a transparent dome with the Sun going round us, but there are other views. For instance, some believe Earth as we know it is surrounded by broader rings of continents and oceans to which we have no access, and to be honest that is a really fascinating and appealing view which might go some way towards addressing the claustrophobia of the more restricted version, and a few of them seem to believe we are on an infinite plane. I say “seem to” because this is one of the problems with trying to work out what’s pagoing on: are they serious about this or just kidding around?
The answer to this is probably that it depends. This is one thing about groups seen from a distance as opposed to groups examined more closely: the details of individual differences become clearer. As far as I can tell, there seem to be several categories of “flat Earther”. There certainly are people who are just joking, and in fact when the flat Earth society was reëstablished in I think the ‘noughties, it appears to have been a joke. There are also trolls, which is a slightly different thing because I suspect the people concerned enjoy either tweaking the feathers of people they see as nerds or deceiving people into thinking it’s flat for fun. This seems to blend into a group of people who are trying to make money out of gullible people and present themselves as serious campaigners and investigators on the issue. Then there are their followers, who have bought into the whole thing, which is where the conspiracy theories start. There are few people who think independently on the issue, and there are then religiously-motivated people and people who are simply persuaded but not particularly religious. Finally, there are enquiring people who don’t seem to be skilled at fact-checking and simply feel that the two views, flat and round Earth, are equally open to question: kind of “false balance” people who think there is enough evidence for it to be a fair fight.
I can certainly vouch for the power of the force of gravity here, because I couldn’t leave it alone. Rather than manifesting itself as concluding Earth was flat for me, it came across as a compulsion to post and address issues even though I knew it wouldn’t persuade anyone to do it. It may be worth asking myself questions about why I felt the draw of the belief system and attempting to change it, and why “flat Eartherism” in particular has this pull. I know that I have obsessive-compulsive tendencies although I’m not going to pathologise that or embrace a self-diagnosis, but it is there and it probably is a factor for me. But it was also very time-consuming. Cutting my ties with it is also a judgement call, because it’s possible for some people actually to make a living out of addressing the issue. There are, for example, YouTube channels devoted to debunking flat Eartherism as well as all the so-called “Truth” channels focussing on promoting it. Pushing it far enough might in theory have brought some money in although I’m small fry in that pond,so probably not.
This raises the question of whether it’s harmless. In a way, this is beside the point. It’s more that the occurrence of the belief, which often seems to be a long way down the line for many people who have come to question other widely-held beliefs such as how genuine the Apollo program was, is symptomatic of poor fact-checking abilities, and when I say “ability” I do believe critical thinking can be developed in most people. They could even develop it themselves, although it may be difficult to overcome emotional and social attachment to a belief. It is also true that believing Earth is flat is going to exclude people from certain lines of work, or at least make it difficult for them to pursue them, such as on large engineering projects or piloting international aircraft, so maybe human resources are lost to society because of this belief. More broadly, however, there are the issues of overvalued ideas, vulnerability to more negative consequences from other beliefs (anti-vaccination comes to mind) and the general feeling of distrust and fear which may arise from the idea that there is a vast conspiracy to keep all this from the public. The size of this effort would be a lot bigger in this case than any other conspiracy I can think of, because so much more depends on the shape of the planet than other things.
Looking at the trolls, and here I presume that trolls exist and I’d expect there to be at least a few, an outsider would see them as pretending to be of low intelligence and poorly-educated, which is an odd thing to do to one’s reputation. I imagine that they are deriving entertainment from successfully deceiving others or annoying people they may see as nerds. I have in common with these people that I’m drawn into wasting my time and energy on a project which is not very productive and a bit of a pointless endeavour. Trolling is something I don’t fully understand and I sometimes wonder if trolls even know what their real motivations are, because it’s so easy to develop an online persona unintentionally. Beyond this, I can even develop a little conspiracy hypothesis of my own that the whole exercise is a distraction from more consequential issues for all of us, not just the flat Earthers. It’s possible to drop the whole intentional fallacy from this idea and just say, this is what it does and it doesn’t matter if it’s a concerted effort or not. This is one reason why I’ve given up on them, because it really is a bit of a waste of time.
There’s also something like the “sunk cost fallacy” operating here, perhaps on both sides. The sunk cost fallacy is the feeling that because you’ve spent a lot of time and resources, and have perhaps lost a lot in your own life socially and otherwise by pursuing a particular goal, it’s hard to back out of it. If you’ve become a flat Earther, you may value the comradeship of the people around you, online or off, and in many sallies away from majority opinion, people can lose friends and acquaintances, and also opportunities, and all of these things amount to costs. Another form of cost is the embarrassment one may experience from admitting one was wrong.
All that said, we should avoid “othering” people whose beliefs we’re confident are incorrect. One reason for this is that having delusions is part of the healthy human psyche, and even where they don’t serve a positive purpose they may nonetheless exist. Failure to acknowledge that we rationalise our beliefs, even if they’re correct and well-supported by evidence, is lack of self-awareness. Our beliefs also have functions beyond the practical. They can be like interests which bind a club together, and of course this is a substantial part of the function of religious beliefs. I have long maintained that religious belief of some kind is inevitable and therefore that we shouldn’t always resist it, as it can play a valuable part in maintaining good mental health. The question here is whether believing Earth is flat is worthwhile enough for the cost paid through lack of contact with reality.
I have an acquaintance who used to be quite a close family friend. We even went on holiday together and attempted some joint business ventures. Quite some time back, they expressed the view that the Apollo missions were a hoax. I engaged with them on this but they didn’t change their mind. I should point out at this stage that this person was a faithful Green Party voter and possibly even a member of the party. They were also an alternative medicine practitioner. This particular category of work has a lot of variation in it and can be stigmatised. It’s also how many people see me. Nonetheless there is a perceived issue of evidence supporting efficaciousness or otherwise which plainly does apply to some modalities. During the lockdown, they expressed support for Trump, not just regarding his approach to the pandemic but more widely. I could make a link between belief that Apollo was a hoax and this later conclusion. I found the incident very saddening and disappointing.
It seems that a lot of the more vocal flat Earthers nowadays connect their beliefs to the Apollo hoax idea, which makes sense if you think Earth is flat, and also to anthropogenic climate change denial, the New World Order conspiracy theory and anti-vaccination. Of all of these, I should point out that in the 1990s I was close to being anti-vaxx, although my problem was that as usual my opinion wasn’t similar to that of others. I tended to get lumped in with anti-vaxx people even though my actual position was that I wanted some vaccinations to be given by inhaler or nebuliser, not injection, rather than being opposed to vaccinations as such, and as such wasn’t opposed to the single tetanus jab or OPV per se. Now that this is being done routinely with children, I no longer have that objection although I am still concerned about the evolution of slow viruses by attenuation. However, I’ve long felt that the real problem with vaccination resistance is that much of the population doesn’t feel respected or listened to, and I wonder also if this is a factor here. This is one conspiracy theory I’ve seen from the inside. I get the impression also that flat Eartherism is the “hard drug” as it were. It’s the last thing people end up believing in once they’ve accepted all the others.
Due to the universal nature of delusions, a more useful marker for mental illness may be the overvalued idea. It isn’t so much that people believe Earth is flat as that they’re preoccupied with the idea and it comes to dominate their lives. It is understandable that if you think something so fundamental is different than how it’s presented publicly, you probably would think it was quite important to do something about it, and are also likely to think there may be a sinister reason behind the deception. Is it an overvalued idea for a starving person to focus on finding something to eat?
According to the conspiracy theory, the rationale behind persuading the world that Earth is round is to dislodge humans from the centre of creation and lose Earth in the vastness of an impersonal Universe, thereby undermining theism. If that were the aim, it seems like overkill. Why would it be necessary to keep “building” the Universe in the way they would have had to have been doing, for instance initially portraying distant galaxies as nebulæ within our own and likewise with quasars, before promoting them to enormous distances? There’s another perspective within this one that the Big Bang theory, evolution and flat Earthism are all part of a plot to do this, and are associated with the Illuminati, the Masons and unfortunately sometimes the Jews. This last association probably indicates why all this might be dangerous.
I actually find the bog-standard flat Earther view to be claustrophobic and think it makes the world feel like a prison. It also seems to guarantee that there is no life anywhere except on Earth, which for me is a deal-breaker for theistic prayer and worship. If God chooses to sustain a Universe where we are the only sentient beings in a single biosphere, it seems like God cannot be related to by humans on an emotional level. This makes more sense if one does see the Universe as vast, but it still works to some extent on the prison world hypothesis because whereas God could have chosen to sustain a vast Universe, she chose not to, which means we’re trapped conceptually. Of course, we could still be literally trapped on Earth in a vast Universe, but at least the way things are we do know how enormous the world is and the contrast with the largely lifeless Universe in which we’re embedded emphasises the specialness of this planet. This would be less true of an infinite plane Universe though there is still the problem of apparently being at its centre, since it is supposed to be infinite and therefore has either no centre or a ubiquitous one.
Of course one might be forgiven for asking why this matters given the current world situation, and that’s a valid question. It would be easy to come up with a conspiracy theory of one’s own here, that fine minds are being distracted from what matters in order that atrocities can be committed, but in response to that I would say that many of the minds which are being distracted, mine included, are rather far from fine and wouldn’t make much of a contribution anyway, and also that it’s a basic principle to focus on the consequences of a set of circumstances more than the cause, which is a distraction in itself and also symptomatic rather than the more general underlying cause of the problem, which would be worth addressing. The question remains, then, of whether one should bother with this at all. Unfortunately the answer seems to be yes, because analysis of how the issue has arisen allows insight into how other more serious issues have, or might do in future. It’s a kind of model for how, for example, Russian trolls might influence voting in elections or how the Rohingya genocide was engineered.
The idea of conspiracy has tended to centre on NASA as a major actor in this realm. This is peculiar as the sphericality of the planet seems to have been first suggested by Pythagoras in the sixth century BCE, its circumference measured by Eratosthenes in the third century BCE and it was then accepted by the Church into the European Middle Ages, to the extent that they used to discuss whether it was possible that God would have created land on the opposite side of the globe from Christendom because if it were inhabited, it might not be feasible for the Word of God to reach them. I have to admit to being a little confused by this as it seems to imply their view of gravity was quite modern, but it is nonetheless so.
This does, however, raise the question of what kinds of people accepted Earth as round at the time. It does seem quite likely that the average European peasant would not have had an explicit view of Earth’s shape at the time, as they had more pressing concerns, but that might be to underestimate their mentality. Likewise, it also seems entirely feasible that even today many peoples who have not had contact with Western civilisation would assume Earth is flat. The rather startling figure of seven percent of Brazilians, though, appears to refer to Europeanised Brazilians rather than the likes of the Yanomami.
I’ve noticed also that some flat Earthers are merely repeating claims without checking up on them. Two of these in particular are that until the 1920s, US public schools taught that the world was flat. This does not tally well with discoverable facts about history. It was the work of a couple of minutes to locate a digital archive of nineteenth century school geography textbooks, on whose first page it was stated categorically that Earth is round and we live on its exterior. This particular work was published in 1889. It is possible that children were being taught that the world was flat at a later date, for a couple of reasons. One is that teachers don’t necessarily teach what is on the curriculum, and could be either poorly educated themselves or believe that it’s flat, in which case they would presumably teach that if the issue arose. Another is that it isn’t clear how far such textbooks had penetrated by this time. A second, less consequential, claim is that Eratosthenes was inserted into textbooks in the 1980s. I am in the happy position of being able to refute this. I first read of his experiment in ‘The Collins New World Of Knowledge Encyclopedia Of Science And Technology’, published I think in 1973. It’s quite an audacious claim that it was added more recently than that, and I expect that if I were to bother to look, I would find earlier examples. These two claims make me feel that it’s almost Last Thursdayism. A rather similar claim is that NASA pictures taken in the 1960s are CGI, which is very peculiar as there would’ve been many other ways to fake images at that time.
Getting back to NASA, there are two oddities about this particular focus. One is that their existence is completely superfluous to the evidence Earth is round, which as I said is millennia old. Another is that they are only one of many space agencies, which I think probably reflects the US-centric nature of Flat Earthism. There are around sixteen space agencies with launch capability and several times that number capable of doing things like building satellites to be launched by others. These two aspects seem to reveal a considerable degree of ignorance about general knowledge. This is coupled with two other aspects of how flat Earthers view education. They often view mathematics with suspicion and are unwilling to apply the scientific method, often engaging in ad hominem attacks when these are used. All of this taken together had led me to feel that they have been poorly served by the schooling system. They seem to regard belief in a round Earth to result from indoctrination when well-expressed scientifically based tests which are easily reproduced by someone without elaborate equipment are actively avoided. This makes it more likely that their beliefs are motivated by religious sensibilities, but unfortunately not open-minded or progressive ones.
The Bible does seem to imply that its human writers tended to assume Earth was flat. Apart from references to “the four corners of the Earth” in the Tanakh, Jesus is depicted as rising into heaven above Earth, which suggests a sandwich-like cosmology with heaven constituting an entirely horizontal layer above the terrestrial realm. It also raises a question in my mind which I’ve been unable to answer so far. If Biblically literalist Christians (and also many Muslims but not religious Jews on the whole) are often young Earth creationists due to their approach to their sacred texts, why is it less common for them to be flat Earthers? Such a view is clearly assumed by Biblical authors just as creationism is, yet the view is much less popular. If I could crack this conundrum, it might lead me towards better arguments against creationism. This might also be a massive waste of time of course, like the rest of it.
A major problem with how flat Earthers interact with the rest of humanity is that we who have an accurate view of Earth’s shape are often guilty of ridicule and insult towards them. This leads to entrenched positions which are defended and attacked not by reasoned argument but through largely emotional interaction. I can imagine a flat Earther becoming more relaxed about her beliefs and getting on with her lives in other ways, and then eventually not caring much about Earth’s shape or quietly conceding she was wrong, but if that day does dawn in their lives, it will do so a lot later if they’ve been pummeled for their beliefs in this way. They’re likely to thrive on persecution, and it is in any case wrong to behave thusly towards them. This may fuel the retention of the beliefs in question.
Flat Earthers, oddly, seem to see the rest of us as indoctrinated “sheeple”. Both sides seem to accuse the other of the same things, and for once because we are able to state confidently that Earth is not flat and back that up with evidence, it’s possible to separate the accusations from the reality, but it is still interesting that they perceive us as we perceive them. Unlike us, sadly in a way, the evidence they present is not remotely convincing and could only be believed by someone who was both unaware of science in the sense of it being a body of information and of the scientific method. They often think of scientists as having their views dictated by monetary interests, and to be honest this has been known to happen, as with medical research into the consequences of smoking tobacco, but in the case of investigating Earth’s shape this is easily reproducible. I have, as mentioned here before, suggested that in order to avoid accusations of manipulation, they come up with their own falsifiable test but I have never known one to do that.
It only takes one reliable falsification for a hypothesis to be rejected. In the case of Earth being flat, many falsifications are available. It would be interesting if the hypothesis that Earth is round could be falsified, but apart from minor details such as its oblateness this has not happened so far and nothing offered by flat Earthers that I’m aware of has succeeded in doing so. Good quality evidence would be most welcome, but is not forthcoming. The closest they get is objects being visible which seem to be beyond the line of sight, but when this is definitely testable it can be explained by refraction of light by the atmosphere, which can only make objects appear higher, i.e. visible if somewhat beyond the horizon, than they would be if no atmosphere was present. Other, similar attempts have been made, such as the claim that RADAR works beyond the horizon. It does, but that’s a special kind of RADAR called, appropriately, “over the horizon RADAR” and works by bouncing short wave radio waves off the ionosphere. Similarly, a microwave mast in Cyprus can communicate with one in the Lebanon, and since microwaves only work by line of sight this would only be possible if each is above the horizon from the other’s perspective, but in fact Lebanon is quite a mountainous country and this is not at all problematic.
I’ve also noticed quite basic misunderstandings which seem to result from not reading sources closely. One flat Earther claimed that my own claim that seismic waves indicated that there was an apparently spheroidal core centred six thousand odd kilometres below the surface was outdated because Earth’s core was not made of iron and nickel but of ionised light elements such as hydrogen and oxygen, and provided a link. What they actually linked to, if followed, reveals a paper which was scientifically quite rigorous but didn’t make this claim. Rather, it claimed that seismic waves appeared to show that Earth’s core was an alloy of iron and nickel combined with ionised hydrogen and oxygen which behaved differently due to the high pressure. This particular flat Earther said they were an ex-engineer who had accepted all their life that the planet was round, but changed their mind later on. Although I’m not questioning that, I do wonder if it’s a sign of cognitive decline, because the paper did not claim anything like they said it did. There were also many spelling mistakes not similar to autocomplete errors in their writing, which again doesn’t show for sure that they’re mistaken but does suggest something regarding their reliability.
All of this, then, seems to be the consequence of something characteristic of our time, perhaps like the Targeted Individual community, where people diagnosable as in a markèdly delusional condition meet others online who reinforce their beliefs of persecution, but combined with poor educational attainment and critical thinking skills. However, we can’t feel all superior about this because not only is it partly about bad luck with the education system, but it’s also nothing more than a delusion we happen not to share, unlike the individual delusions the rest of us happen to have.
If you’re a flat Earther reading this, I want to say the following to you. Although you’re wrong, I will also inevitably be wrong about some of my beliefs, and the reason you’re wrong is not connected to you being in the minority. Even if only a single person in the world believes something, the mere fact that it’s just the one person has no bearing on whether it’s true or not. I don’t want you to feel I treat you with contempt, and if any of what I’ve written has made you feel this way, I sincerely apologise. It takes courage to stick to a belief which the whole world is against, and I respect you for that. Who knows what else we might have in common outside this area?
A Box Of Chocolates 