The Flat Earth Theory (FET) is a punching bag for our society, a belief that gets dragged out on stage for the public to mock and howl at them. Fearing that my stance against FET was my having the mind of the mob, I approached the Flat Earth Theory with no reservations, and the intent to judge it on it’s own merits. I visited www.theflatearthsociety.org and spent an hour or so reading threads. Any believers out there, temper your expectations; this is not a conversion story. With a totally clean approach and the intent to find something to convince me, I found only rampant intellectual dishonesty and abuse of social mechanisms to fortify belief. They would have you believe they are free men, strange and curious, grappling with an intellectual behemoth, but really it was anything but. Imaginative facts are grafted together in a hodge-podge manner which makes for an embarrassingly complex monstrosity besides the minimalistic mainstream theory. To probe or to cut at any part of this invites only to extend this horrid mass. In fact, browsing the forum reminded me of the theory that the entire FET is a memetic weapon used to derail subversive discourse. Of course, it’s difficult to say any such thing for sure, but many people do feel this is happening, by design or otherwise.
Now, I can merely laugh at a person who would believe something like this, but other people see something like FET as an existential threat to our society. Has no one really asked what real harm there is for an individual to believe this? That it suggests the government conspires to lie to the public? But it’s true. One is better off to suspect everything they say than to trust everything. That it suggests scientists could be liars or unethical? Our society esteems the ethics of scientists too greatly, a holdover from the Enlightenment which makes no sense in the contemporary landscape of research. Scientists have no special ethical qualities compared to any other person. That this theory makes people stupid? The sequence is backwards, FET cannot be taken seriously by someone who is not stupid so they must be stupid to begin with.
I don’t understand why people should be held to a particular notion of nature, or why it is important for them to be correct. After all, the average person only believes the Earth is round. Except for the sailors and pilots, they do not understand this fact in a meaningful way, in that believing this or not will have no impact on their lives. People are told this in school and accept it. Similarly, urban people are told that vegetables grow in the ground and beef comes from cow, yet most have never encountered growth, harvest, and slaughter. Their knowledge is an invented system of symbols in their mind, existing in an abstract vacuum; this cannot be real knowledge, as one can implant any arbitrary system, including the false, such as when we make children believe in Santa Claus. What we see gives us knowledge that is at least closer to truth than what we are just told. What difference would it make to a city-dweller if they believed carrots came from the bones of cow and mince beef is the root of a plant? Their life would still be the same, buying carrots and mince beef at the supermarket, and eating it. This disconnect between man and his food is like the disconnect between man and his planet.
The Flat Earth theorists are fools, but are not so problematic as the media makes them out to be. Any person who believes the FET is an existential threat to society is a fool too, for they have uncritically assumed the position mass media has asked them to. It would not surprise me if ego is a factor too, for people take pleasure in seeking out those more stupid than themselves and laughing at them.