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I'm thinking about joining the Flat Earth movement. Not because I believe in it. It just seems so fun!
This is the video that hooked me: https://youtube.com/watch?v=68YuU2tStoU?si=v2pOJnJQVS7I6HvT
It seems like a nice tight little group, wirking together worldwide. Theyre doing homemade science experiments, but not like real science which is so boring. Its more like medieval science- "let's launch a big steam rocket and see what happens!" Any conflicting evidence can be explained away by grand conspiracy theories. It's fun to think about wacky theories of how this flat earth could actually work. And it's nice to do hands-on science yourself, instead of relying on authorities: "look up some NASA footage" isn't really doing science.
If they actually succeeded, think what an Earthshaking result that would be! But in the mean time they're having a grand time doing fake science, going to conventions, and even their own dating app. My sense is that most of them don't even really believe in it, its just a hobby group like the SCA.
I read a comment on Reddit by someone who talked about posting Flat Earth stuff as a creative writing exercise. You get to think up clever arguments and find loopholes when arguing against people who are objectively correct, and not worry about getting your ego hurt if you're proven wrong because you're not actually taking it seriously. I browsed the Flat Earth sub for a bit after that and tried to figure out who was serious and who wasn't, though with no way to test that I have no idea how successful I was.
I think the main issue I'd have with actually participating is the propensity to delude naive and mentally ill people into joining unironically. The more people who are involved and having fun and aren't lunatics, the more legitimate the movement seems. Although on the other hand it's a relatively harmless conspiracy for people to believe, so maybe it helps steal thunder away from more dangerous conspiracies that mentally ill people might fall into, so maybe it's useful, I dunno.
I'm not so sure about that. It comes with all sorts of other beliefs if you think about it--for example, all pilots must be in on the conspiracy. I think you'd end up believing a host of other conspiracy theories and being overly skeptical in general. A belief which looks charming and harmless now might cause a low-IQ follower to refuse cancer treatments five years down the line, or shoot a cop the first time they get pulled over for a traffic stop.
Hence the word "relatively". All conspiracy theories carry some risk, via this sort of chaining, but the Flat Earth ones are indirect like this, while others like "the FBI is stalking me" have a much more direct path towards danger.
Not to get too contrary but I think it's one of the more risky ones. JFK, 9/11, vaccines, etc. all posit government conspiracy but don't go much further than that. Flat earth posits government and tons of other people are in on it.
In terms of scale it involves more people, but in terms of perceived threat and actionable measures it seems less threatening.
Like, JFK was assassinated. This is immediately violent. Believing that the government/CIA assassinated the president makes them dangerous bad guys who are willing to assassinate people they don't like, and potentially justifies violence against them in retaliation and/or self defense. 9/11 likewise killed lots of people, making the perpetrators dangerous and worth retaliating against (even ordinary non-conspiracists can get behind this, which is why there was so much support for military intervention in the middle east after 9/11).
The most likely response to threats of violence are accumulating weapons to defend oneself and possibly pre-emptively strike using violence. If someone points a gun at you, you point one back.
Vaccines and Flat Earth are about scientific lies. They say that the leading scientists and media are corrupt and in the pocket of the government or whoever is leading the conspiracy, and the things they say cannot be trusted. Nobody needs to die to cover up the truth, because they can be paid off instead. Now, maybe some of the variants of vaccine and Flat Earth conspiracy theories do involve the government murdering people to cover up, and those ones are potentially dangerous, but I have never heard a Flat Earther talking about assassinations, so I think it's uncommon.
The most likely response to media and scientists lying is to not trust them, and possibly have this mistrust bleed into other domains. If they're lying to you about X, why should you trust them about Y? Now this can lead to some harms such as people refusing to vaccinate themselves or their children, but this is significantly less dangerous than actual violence. If someone lies to your face, you lose respect for them and possibly try to avoid them, but very few people would respond with violence (except in weird edge cases, where it's probably not about the lie itself but about the underlying thing they were lying about).
Empirically I have to admit you're probably correct. It's hard to separate flat-earth, though, from all its comorbidities. The only flat earther I know is also a conspiracy theorist in pretty much every other way imaginable. I think there's probably some kind of conspiracy pipeline, and most people don't start with flat-earth, but essentially nobody ends with just flat-earth and none of the others, so it's objectively probably less "dangerous" than other theories which are both easier to swallow and posit more direct malicious intent by the people in charge.
The most frustrating part about my friend is that he definitely has the resources, and the intelligence, to verify flat-earth one way or another for himself, and yet he doesn't do so. I have no idea at all what his mental state is like to believe that so many people are lying, yet not want to figure it out for himself one way or another.
It's like sleepwalking through life.
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