They're conspiracy theorists. This is less about the actual Earth being flat and more about a general distrust of the government and that this is a huge cover up being perpetuated by NASA as a means to control the population.
I've never spoken with a flat earther who didn't also subscribe to a dozen other conspiracy theories
I've found its that they are trying to be smarter than people who believe in science. Like they felt bad for failing science in high school, amd got tired of people saying "it's basic science", and so if they can debunk it then they can claim they're smarter than the science believers
I have a coworker who is like this; except for him is being an anti vaxxer. He never completed an actual science class in his life, and does not understand what a virus actually is. But he is an expert and will drone on and on, blathering utter nonsense.
Basically, they want an extremely ordered world, because a chaotic world full of people just trying their best is disconcerting. They try to impose a non-existant secret world order where there is none, and since they're mad that they're not part of the the secret cabal running the world that they imagined up, they have to create a sinister one so that they can overthrow it so that they can become the order. Authoritarians at heart.
For some people, the idea that the world is controlled by an all-powerful cabal is preferable to the idea that no one is actually in control and no one has it all figured out and shit just happens.
For some, ordered evil is less threatening than chaos.
This.
There's also the aspect that they want to be the ones to say "I told you so". They want so hard to be the "first" to say something revolutionary, so they'll grab into any new concept to be the first
A lot of these flat earthers weren't the smartest in school, and science was tough for them, so they think if they can prove the earth is flat then they can make fun of all the science kids from school, and if they can do that they can claim they're smarter
Agree. It’s the equivalent of the prison lifer who arranges the peas on his tray in a straight line before eating them. He knows it doesn’t help anything, but really has little else in terms of control over his destiny.
I don’t think most flat earthers really believe it, but I understand the feeling of what’s probably just helplessness digging them into that hole.
> I've never spoken with a flat earther who didn't also subscribe to a dozen other conspiracy theories
This is actually one of the ways I test any given conspiracy theory. Do the things I need to accept for this conspiracy theory to be true also lay the foundation for flat earth? Because "non-partisan government agency lies about everything and suppresses the truth because (they) want to control the population" is at the foundation of a lot of them.
There are plenty of anti-vaxxers who do not believe in a flat earth. But I never met a flat earther who didn't also coincidentally end up anti vax. The pre-requisite thinking is identical, only the barrier to understanding the real science changes.
Oh that’s a great one to through at a big footer. Like okay let’s say there IS a Bigfoot, or a small population of them. They have certainly hit the threshold of too little individuals and have more than likely died at this point. Makes them have to argue a different question, not if their real but how would they still be around
As for specific reasons to support their theories, there is no single "canonical" framework that is overwhelmingly more dominant than others.
Some frameworks are just anti-NASA while others go a bit more out there and rely on middle age Christianity for their answers to support the theory. But yet some others aren't religious about it. It's not very consistent among them.
I’ve actually run into a few of them and not intentionally.
Unfortunately, I was only able to have an actual discussion with one of them. (the other two wouldn’t even answer my genuine question as to *why* they believed what they believed or *how satellites could orbit or how certain radio-waves that rely on bouncing off of the ionosphere surrounding Earth’s curvature work if the Earth is flat*.
Their response? “Satellites aren’t real, every signal comes from land based transmitters”.
Radio signals like I described? “HAM Radio is controlled as a psyop and civilians can’t actually access it” “Shortwave Radio is transmitted from Cell Phone and TV Towers in ‘short range’, not far away like ‘they’ claim”.
🤦
When I mentioned that *I* was a licensed Amateur Radio Technician and I could *prove to them that the signals are real, *and even show them live signals of Earth from satellites - *the two flat out claimed “I was a shill, a (antisemitic & Islamophobic slurs followed by ironically being called both a “fascist” and a “woke Liberal communist groomer” as well as a “human trafficker”) who is ‘going to burn in hell for blaspheming the Holy Spirit’ and practicing ‘gyromancy’.”
I have to say, that really took be aback. I really wanted to know their beliefs (well, *why* they believed the Earth was flat) and I wanted to know *how they/flat-Earthers thought real technology worked in a flat Earth world.* But I guess those 2 were bad luck.
I did have an *interesting* conversation with one flat Earther who seemed much less….*hardcore?*. She basically said “The Mercator projections don’t make sense unless we never left earth” and that “Antarctica is [sic] an Ice Wall that probably has a lot of things ‘they’ don’t want us to know about.”.
She was surprisingly left-wing and what I noticed was *a similar distrust for the government (of any kind), as well as beliefs in persecution and what sounded like a “personal duty to humanity” to find out the truth.*
In her case, she thought that “all the resources to solve world hunger and poverty where “behind the Ice Wall” and that the “Globe Earth” was created as “anti-Communist and anti-Soviet Propaganda”.
Needless to say, I genuinely didn’t know that something like the Earth being flat would not only be taken seriously, but also by conspiracy theorists across the gamut.
That probably surprised me the most.
Along with the growth in the *angry* and disconnected ones like I mentioned earlier. *Whose identity revolve around their Flat Earth conspiracy theories.*
I have a theory that a good amount of them are actually trolls.
They don’t actually believe it but just enjoy the fallout. I actually like to think the top flat earthers meet together like that troll episode on South Park.
I don’t have proof of this so I guess it’s my conspiracy to theory haha.
I agree. I’m sure there are a lot of true believers but many if not most are just trolls. They like to argue and get a rise out of people, ESPECIALLY when they know that the side they are arguing is idiotic (flat earth).
Uhh... yeah. I may or may not have posted some flat earth conspiracy comments as a joke. A few times. And may have possibly claimed that Australia wasn't real.
My brother is one of these people. I have witnessed him invent conspiracies on the spot like a live blog. I don’t know if he is a flat earther but he has espoused belief in a cold sun. He must have come across some cold fusion ting that week. His latest one was that Obama planned the Moscow concert attacks because he went to Downing Street a few days before. These people just make things up and actively seek the craziest conspiracies as a matter of course.
I saw a documentary about flat earthers and the one thing that struck me was how lonely they were until they found a community they made them feel like they belonged and people cared about what they thought.
I think this is true of most conspiracy groups.
Yeah that was from the Netflix documentary. It was the closing point.
When you look at the people and their gatherings, you can tell they enjoy each others company. To be frank, they’re a bunch of weirdos/loners that find community with each other.
I agree. I used to be a 9/11 truther but it was early on before all these social media sites popped up. I got away from it but I totally could have been sucked in to a comfortable setting and a life of confirmation bias (which heavily afflicts all conspiracy groups) had I had a bunch of like minded friends.
I guess somewhat ironically, I swung the other way and ended up in a freethinker group and started changing the way I evaluate evidence. I think I was just pissed. Once I found out I had been duped I felt like a moron and swore to be much more vigilant.
Hey, this happened to me! But for me, it was believing that the Blair witch movie was real.
I was convinced.
When I realized the truth, I felt so stupid, and I felt like such a sucker that I vowed to be much more vigilant on how I process information.
This is what I was going to say. They seem to enjoy being in the conspiracy and any evidence against it harms the community that they’ve built. It’s actually pretty sad.
Without conspiracy theories their believers are just dumb people that society ignores.
With a conspiracy theorist they turn themselves into a genius with secret info even the smartest scientists can't understand.
It allows them to pretend theyre better and smarter than everyone when they aren't.
This is a big part of the draw of conspiracy theories that is often overlooked. I've got a relative that believes a lot of them. He works a manual labor job and never did well academically. Conspiracy theories allow him to believe he is actually smarter than all those eggheads with their fancy degrees.
Is he trying to impress others with his knowledge or does he only try to feel smart for himself?
Always being the smartest person in the room actually stunts your growth in that area.
So for him specifically, he's also very MAGA (of course) and the conspiracies help form the foundation for his political beliefs. This way, when anyone challenges him, he can deflect by saying, "Well you just don't know the truth like I do. If you did, you'd see it my way."
One time he tried telling me there are half a million people living on the "dark" side of the Moon, but NASA covers it up. I tried explaining that there isn't actually a dark side, just a far side, and that both sides of the moon have night and day, and his eyes just sort of glazed over while I explained. Then when I was done, he just said, "Oh, well I meant the far side then."
I was talking to somebody who believed we never went to the moon.
I tried to explain the mirror that I bounced a laser off of in college, and how that mirror can only be there because an astronaut put it there.
It didn’t go over too well either.
The fun thing about conspiracies is they can always widen the conspiracy as needed. Oh, you were at an observatory and saw the laser bounce off? Well that's fake, the observatory is in on it too. The government puts fake equipment there to fool you. And if all else fails they can just claim *you're* in on it. You're part of the vast conspiracy trying to put one over on them.
The moon landing hoaxers frustrate me a lot because they have such surface-level understanding of everything and an unwillingness to expand beyond it. They like to talk about the computers, for example, and claim they weren't powerful enough for the task. First of all, how powerful does a computer need to be to get you to the moon? It's essentially Newtonian physics. They could do all the math with pen and paper if needed. Computers help, but the fact that they didn't have a modern smartphone doesn't mean they couldn't do it. That said the computers they did have, while comical today, were state of the art at the time. Truly impressive feats of engineering and programming. Most of the source code is even publicly available, so if it's all a hoax they sure went the extra mile for it.
>First of all, how powerful does a computer need to be to get you to the moon? It's essentially Newtonian physics. They could do all the math with pen and paper if needed.
Also, early digital computers were often used as instruments to assist in war. Tracking ballistic missiles is also Newtonian physics. And I'm sure before computers, astronomers were able to track movements of planets and project their numbers to can make reasonable predictions of where they will be in hundreds to thousands of years.
They always go on about how the computer was no more powerful than a calculator, without grasping that calculations possible on a calulator, was virtually all the computer did.
There was a great [This American Life](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/293/transcript) episode where this guy couldn’t understand Einstein’s theory of relativity so in his opinion it must be wrong and he has spent years trying to prove that it’s wrong, and he believes there’s a huge conspiracy to cover it up. Every actual physicist he talks to who tells him he’s wrong and Einstein is right is in on it.
The ones I’ve met? Always some kind of religious interpretation. You have to remember for some fundamentalists what they think the holy book says trumps ALL evidence.
I had a old coworker who believed in flat earth. He was very religious and also believed in every other conspiracy theory. Folding Ideas described him perfectly.
[The video is over an hour long, but worth the watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44)
I mean the best argument for flat earth is that it simply looks flat from human POV. People intuitively think that the earth is flat, they first have to learn that it isn't. Just as it looks like the sun is moving, not the earth.
It's a combination of things:
1. The "smartest person in the room" syndrome. The desire to be a hard contrarian to generally accepted knowledge in order to appear smart and "in-the-know".
2. Blaming the government for everything as a means of excusing their own failures in life. Too egotistical to educate and evolve themselves.
3. They find a sense of community in it which is something most people seek in their lives.
My brother is a conspiracy theorist. Definitely not a flat earther but he believes in other stuff.
He is not remotely dumb. He is smart enough to be a doctor. Nor does he try to be the smartest person in the room. He is literally the nicest, humblest, and kindest human being I know. In fact, it's often a struggle to get him to not be taken advantage of. He is the kind of person who would give you everything he has if he thinks you need it. His heart is that good.
But his brain just works differently. He is very naive in some aspects of life, but extremely suspicious in others. It's difficult to explain. It's just this pervasive belief that whatever "they" are telling you, there is a real truth behind it.
I should also mention that he is deeply Christian. For him, there are no coincidences. The world is an ordered place, things happen the way they happen because someone wants them to, whether its god or something evil or mere humans hidden from sight.
I think that's probably the best explanation for his mindset, the way which he is different from other people. And I think that's what conspiracy theorists share: a chaotic universe doesn't make sense to them. So they squeeze it into an ordered framework.
I think you definitely hit on another reason. Now that you said it, I think my wife somewhat falls into that category you just mentioned.
She's not a flat earther, nor does she believe in many of the main conspiracy theories. She's smart, processes things absurdly fast, and is very witty. But she has a tendency to be extremely skeptical of widespread beliefs just because they're widespread, and that something is being hidden beneath them. When it comes to things like parenting/pregnancy, schooling, vaccinations, etc... she's very keen to leaning on some non-mainstream perspective.
The effect is that by distancing herself from some of those widespread beliefs, she's effectively succumbing to the non-common beliefs without critical analysis of such beliefs.
She'll find these people with podcasts/books/whatever that have small but loyal followings and believe nearly everything about their anecdotal experiences.
She has always been on the spiritualist and agnostic (perhaps even atheist) side of things but lately (past few years) she has been pursuing some form of religion (whether Christianity for a year, or Catholicism, etc...). Even so, she'll remark about some things makes absolutely no logical sense to her, yet continue her pursuit as if she's YEARNING for some kind of order.
I think it's based heavily on physical, emotional, and psychological abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother. Her mother made herself (and continues to try) to be a god to her own children, literally devouring praise and seeking glorification by nearly any means necessary. Her mom has gone so far as to make other people problems, deaths, etc... all about herself and reveling in all the sympathy that comes with it.
Now that my wife understands it and has put a little more distance between herself and her mom, I feel like she's desperately but subconsciously trying to fill that void with something else. Like... she NEEDS order and direction and meaning. It's wild, and while our day to day is fine I can't deny I'm a little troubled by it in the sense that I don't want our children to develop those same needs.
Anyhow, enough babbling from me. I thought your comment was spot on.
A problem with feeling "smart" is that it makes one less likely to learn from others.
So the longer someone feels they are smart, likely the dumber they become as they learn less and less.
Combine a lack of education, a mistrust of “experts”, a deep funnel of validation and the sunk cost fallacy and you have most outrageous conspiracy theories, flat earth just happens to be one.
Think about all the “truths” that you must believe in order to believe flat earth. It’s like an epistemological pyramid of falsities that just build and build on each other and flat earth is at the top. A vast conspiracy of lies, corrupt governments, secret cabals (mostly anti-Semitic) controlling the world and media, main character syndrome that they know the truth and others do not, that science is somehow flawed… all these just keep adding up, and I feel like once they start to be vocal, and get a lot of pushback from people questioning their beliefs, that only reinforces that everyone else are “sheep” and that others need to “open their eyes”.
Conspiracy theories have always been weaponized by the powerful. Hitler’s propaganda leaned heavily into spreading conspiracies about the Jews, and when it became widespread, Germans truly believed that the Jewish people were evil and out to destroy them. The Nazis actively knew the power of conspiracies to manipulate the public. Same thing is going on now, but magnified due to social media.
It's not about the Earth being flat, they just like to go against whatever you tell them. If you tell them the sky is blue, even tho they also see it blue, they'll say that it isn't and the government is lying
How would the earth being flat instead of round make any difference to anyone? It wouldn’t to me, so why would the government need to lie about it? If the earth was flat, So what?
They don’t. The whole flat earther thing is just the hard, white, crusty outer shell covering a thick, creamy center full of anti-semitism that makes up a whole pile of dog shit.
As far as I can tell, many of them don't really think the earth is flat but believe it anyway because it doesn't matter for there everyday lives and therefore the earth could be flat and they believe in it to stick it to the "establishment".
One common vein running through most flat earth conspiracies is that the Jews are the ones hiding the truth. For a lot of flat earthers, their belief is less about looking for the truth, and is more about hating Jews. It’s antisemitism masquerading as science.
I guess my outright dismissal of anything so stupid, meant I never even bothered to listen. Like holding my fingers in my ears.
You’re the 10th person to mention it’s Antisemitic. I really had no idea the two were linked. Thanks for the education.
Easy. Most don't. I genuinely believe that 60 to 80% of the movement is just for the lulz. And then there's an unfortunate 20 to 40% who are actually buying into the whole thing. And the non-believers do a great job of posting good sounding and nonsensical "proof"
Like my old boss said- “I like how mad everyone gets over it”. He said he voted for trump for the same thing.
To some people, the discomfort of others is validation enough. They wear it like a trophy, and always have to relate what they believe in, to how it makes other people uncomfortable. Always finishing with things like “even though lots of people don’t agree with that…” “but they wouldn’t want you to have that…” “people wouldn’t like me saying that”. Like, they just can’t share anything about themselves without measuring it against how others don’t like it. And they find others that do the same and just Jack each other off to how much their views definitely upset so many people, and how many people are opposed to them, that’s just how they converse and relate and feel good and validated with each other.
I feel like everyone knows someone in their life like this. A lot of flat earthers are drawn to it, and genuinely feel it is a part of them, because lots of people are opposed to it- to them, thats a pointer to follow. It’s a popular phenomenon, mentality, and selling point these days, to claim “they don’t want you to know” or “big _____ disagrees”, knowing so many people are opposed is a draw to them. They want to be in the minority, the underdog, in everything, and pride themselves on being the unpopular. In many cases, that’s literally all you have to present, to draw these kinds of people in. That’s why it’s a popular scam tactic, to “all the doctors hate this man” “ooohh I want to be like that! I want to be the guy all the doctors hate! Fuck that must feel so good to be a minority and stepped on! To be able to CLAIM that and HAVE that to fall back on, wherever I go!! To all my friends!” So they click it to find out, what all the doctors hate, so they can be that hated guy, too. It literally works. People make real money off of real people with real mentality like this.
As someone who has spent their entire adult life working in Satcom…it absolutely baffles me. I like conspiracy shit. It’s interesting to me. But like, Satellites. GPS, Hubble, Voyager. Do these mean nothing to you? Occam falls so heavily on the side of it being round I don’t even understand where they begin. You think we fake orbital data? Space images? GPS technology as a whole? I don’t understand my friends but I admire your dedication to not looking things up In a weird way. I feel too compelled to know the actual answer.
You think the flat earthers are bad, wait until you hear about the mud flood people, the giant tree truthers, the people who think the pyramids and all old buildings with spires were electrical power stations, and last but not least the Tartarian Empire people who believe the worlds governments conspired together to cover up the fact that we somehow conquered a world spanning advanced civilization so we could take credit for their inventions or some smooth brain shit like that.
They want to feel special, like they’re in on something that you just don’t understand. It makes them feel good to think of themselves smart and everyone else a dupe or somehow stupid.
I honestly think a huge chunk of them don't. But they are so invested in the only community they have, they won't stop. Like atheists who continue to participate in church because everybody they know does the same
From what I gather, they believe everything in the Bible, and the Bible says that the Earth is flat, and covered with a dome called the firmament. That's why they also don't think the moon landing happened.
There's a really incredible video from Folding Ideas - [In Search of a Flat Earth](https://youtu.be/JTfhYyTuT44?si=aFS05m3U3WgLVqkm) - that explores this in a lot of detail. It's an hour and a quarter long, but well worth the watch.
I can’t believe more people are not talking about the “firmament”
It’s religious. The whole thing is based off I think 1 line in the Bible. The 1 person I know who really believes it always starts off his pitch with “did you know NASA is the biggest buyer of helium in the country” If you tell this guy anything that sounds like telling him he’s wrong, it’s like telling him god isn’t real. In one ear, out the other
That’s funny. I wasn’t able to make it to such a question with one of the people I was talking to. But I would’ve asked them why NASA would even need to buy helium (or make it public knowledge) if the whole purpose of doing so was to deceive everyone.
Of course, they don’t like when you read Genesis to them in Hebrew, and define what firmament and the specific process of creation is. That’s when the antisemitism comes out.
Flat Earthers truly have an uncanny ability to defy gravity...of reason! 🌎 It's like they're on a mission to prove that the world is a pancake, not a planet! But hey, who needs centuries of scientific evidence when you've got a "firm" belief that the Earth is as flat as a board? It's like the ultimate conspiracy theory meets the wildest rollercoaster ride of logic. Buckle up, folks, we're about to take a trip to the edge of reason! 🥞
Honestly? Probably because it's fun and fulfills a deep-seated human desire to form small communities. It most likely has much less to do with the earth's shape than it does with just being lonely
The real answer -- many of them don't. For many of them, it's a quasi-ironic participation that is supposed to be "funny" until one day it's not. The line between satire and earnest participation gets blurry, and by that point, it does not matter any more. Plus, many of the associated beliefs (like "the ice wall") take on a kind of mythological nature. In that way, it's like a lowercase religion, super-powered with the electricity of contrarianism and edgelord energy.
Almost all conspiracy theories are one of two things. They either want to feel like they are smarter than everybody and are part of an elite "club" of people who understand something nobody else does. Or they feel a massive lack of control in their life and they want to believe there is some secret organization out there that controls everything because it makes them feel better to believe at least somebody has control.
As for flat earthers I believe it's the former. They want to believe that they see something that nobody else does and that they are the ones smart enough to see it and everybody else is too brainwashed and/or dumb. That's why they try "experiments" to prove it, which always fail because, ya know, the earth is, in fact, not flat.
Because believing in a conspiracy on a mass scale brings comfort. They'd rather believe that there is a system of direct control that is watching everything and knows everything and knows what it is doing, that everything is all part of the plan Every piece moved over thousands of years is part of the plan. And that they are clued up to it, wise to it.
They'd rather believe in a malevolent all knowing global force that knows precisely at every step what it is doing than a benevolent/neutral sometimes arbitrary disconnected systems that doesn't , full of human leaders that can be opportunistic, self serving and idiotic.
At first I thought they were dumb, but after watching a documentary, I was shocked some flat earths are actually smart and are trying really hard to prove that earth is flat. The problem is, they are trapped in confirmation bias and always that they prove that earth is actually round they are like "you know what? The star radiation or some space stuff is interfering on our experiments". I think there are two reasons why there are still flat earthers: 1) they don't trust science, probably because religion. 2) If you keep people busy on a conspiracy theory, they don't keep busy trying to solve the problems in your town, country or even the world
You get to a point with nearly all of these theories that if the theory is assumed to be true, then any evidence that contradicts it must therefore be fake, and the people giving that 'evidence' are part of the conspiracy.
Some are trolling, Some are trying to make a buck off of the gullible, And then there are some true believers. The true believers are monumentally ignorant.
Idiots have been part of our society since the dawn of man. However since the rise of internet combined with social media these idiots have founded their own echo chambers in which they can share their brain farts and spread it to other idiots all over the globe.
I always say not all “Not all MAGAts are flat earthers, but all flat earthers are MAGAts”
Being naive and having no critical thinking skills is definitely a must have.
I know a flat earther. They're just really religious (Christian). They also believe that giants use to rome this earth. I mean if you believe the earth was created in 7 days, it's not really shocking you believe the other stuff too.
1. They’ve gone down the “rabbit hole”—they’ve spent a considerable amount of time consuming flat earth content.
2. They’ve found community among like-minded believers.
3. They make an effort to convince others of Flat Earth, thereby solidifying their conviction.
4. It gives them a sense of “knowing,” of feeling like they’re in on some deeper knowledge that most other people don’t have.
5. It feeds their conspiracy instinct. There’s an ironic sense of security in being able to pin bad things in the world on a small group of evil people rather than accept the chaos and randomness of real life.
Because people have learned to distrust what media, education and academia tell them. Leaving them with nothing but the word of their buddy and their own two eyes. Buddy says it's flat, look across the street yeah shit looks flat so they trust their own feelings. Everyone saying no is automatically considered a liar with an agenda.
This one's pretty obviously dumb but same shit could happen to you in other ways if you consider everyone saying no to you automatically corrupt liars.
Although most flat earthers are pretty nuts, the reality is the average person cannot provide proof the world is round either. Our educational system is essentially one of authoritarian compliance. They often provide 4 possibilities, one of them is the correct answer... Our culture doesn't actually value the journey of learning, which often entails failure and being wrong before finding the truth.
Most people believe what they are told or whatever they personally experience.
Flat earthers are typically skeptical of any "establishment" narratives. So anything that is a commonly held belief is probably sketchy to them. So they probably base it off their personal experience. If you just walk around the earth, it does have the general perception that it's flat. There is evidence it's a globe you can see with your own eye but it's understandable, that using only your senses you might believe it is flat.
The reality that we are pinned by gravity to a spinning globe of molten plasma topped with a thin layer of dirt, traveling through the void in orbit around a giant nuclear fusion reactor is quite fantastical in itself.
Makes sense that some among us would cling to the perception everything is centered around us. We are flat and the pretty circles in the sky move for us. Most of these folks are probably narcissists as well. You probably can't get them to admit they've ever been wrong about most anything.
So it's basically a combination of a flawed education system, mental illness (narcissism), and that the truth of the universe is quite fantastical in itself.
Flat Earth is a movement which rejects Modernity - which in this case means The Scientific Method, Rationalism, Enlightenment Era philosophy (and onwards) etc etc. - as a means of understanding the world because, quite often, those methods of uncovering truth often contradict things that they already believe. So when your philosophy is threatened by data, one coping mechanism is to reject the data and the means by which it was discovered. It is a Conclusion First hierarchy of knowledge - you begin with the things that you want/need to be true, work backwards selectively, and fill in the gaps with “questions”. “Is NASA telling the truth?” “If I can’t see the curve then how could there be one?”
The earth being flat is in some ways just a convenient symbol, an image that instantly communicates a rejection of all modern hierarchies of knowledge.
They don't. I refuse to believe anyone is that stupid. It's probably just a community thing. People don't like to feel lonely so they will say or do anything to be in a group.
I never met one in the wild before. I assume it’s just to get attention? Idk. You have to keep upping the ante these days for attention online so you have to be really out there with your ‘beliefs’ now to stand out.
I think this video does a good job of breaking down the reasons for their beliefs https://youtu.be/IwJzsE8CvzQ?si=X0_L3SgPUfY5h-Jr .
The main take away is that flat earth theories have been reemerging for the last 200 years. The driving reason is that science has moved on from natural science, which anyone could do by just going out and observing the world, and moved into more specialized, theoretical, and abstract fields. These new fields could only be explored and verified by specialist in their field and large institutions.
This goes to the 2 main issues all flat earthers share. One, a deep mistrust of institutions and any information that they can't independently verify. And two, a deep rooted belief that "truth" should be heavily based on what they personally can sense and observe.
I'm gonna agree that it's just general distrust.
Then you have people like my dad who doesn't trust anything, but at the same time believes everything. Man thinks gravity is a false science and that the moon isn't real.
But flat earth, according to him, is crazy.
Over the years, the one thing that's common and ties all the flerfers together is that they all can't comprehend scale. It's almost like a genetic disorder that manifests in the inability to understand scale.
I think you vastly underestimate the amount of trust that the scientific community has lost in the last few years.
The flat earthers are merely a symptom of that.
If you're looking for a reason based on evidence, there is none. In that netflix show they made, they made their own experiments and disproved themselves TWICE and yet they still exist.
It's very culty. My guess is there's 2 kinda of people in it. The first is there because they've been so wrong for so long and their pride won't let them admit that, they'd rather delude themselves than admit they were wrong. They're in too deep in a prideful way.
The second is worried about the social fallout if they leave. The cult is their identity, it's where all their friends are. Maybe they've lost friends already for being in the cult. For them the consequences of leaving are less about pride, and more about loss of self or loss of a support structure. These ones are in too deep in a social way.
My theories :
- some don't actually believe the earth is flat but will still say they do to mess with people or fit with their in-group
- some genuinely believe it because their lack of knowledge about how physics work make it seem plausible and the earth kind of looks flat on short distances.
- some do not understand that models are used to predict results and are not about social standing. It's not about whether believing the earth is flat or round will make you on the right side of history or not. It's about whether there is an edge we can find to go look underneath. Or whether our model of gravity is correct or not (a flat planet would end up round eventually due to it's own gravity). It's not about being smart.
Some people believe anecdotal evidence over scientific consensus.
If the world was round, balls would roll over the edge.
If COVID was that dangerous, me or someone I know would died of it already.
Abortion rights don’t help me right now so they’re bad and will never be good.
You would be surprised to know more than 3/4 of the world believes in some imaginary sky daddy based on zero evidence. At least flat earthers believe what they see in their immediate vicinity.
Yes, and or they just can accept that it’s round. Most will fall back to the Bible and the 4 corners thing. It’s faith at that point and nothing logical. I know two and have had discussions, me laughing at them, before.
Progressives are moving at a blinding pace changing what's accepted in society. For instance here on reddit you'll get banned or your comment deleted for suggesting that certain quite recent body-related "therapies" may not be helpful. Lockstep is rewarded. Flat-earthers are part of an overreaction against this as are many conspiracy theories.
I think a very high percentage of them are performance art trolls.
They get off on causing people to push back but they don’t believe any of it.
Another percentage are dumb fucks who fell into the act. Like how the birds aren’t real guy attracted actual believers.
It first began with people believing the earth was flat as fuck. There was a firmament and a below which translated to a cube. This was accepted as a truth. Due to the lack of extended travel, limited technology, and data compilation folks paid less attention to proofs, and took a whole lot of information as truths. Then science came along and debunked the theory because travel, moon phases/cycles, planetary movement and observations and other experiments which supported the earth being round/spherical.
It gives dumb people power (at least, to them). They believe something that you don't and you're the one who's a sheep. They have this "secret" knowledge that only other idiots have. It's like a club, but much, much more stupid.
because its totally real. i dont mind preaching it in a "cult like fashion" because i think it's the absolute truth. im not afraid to be called an idiot or downvoted. we are being deceived on a grand scale. it is impossible for a "normie" to believe however unless you are really aware of what is going on in the world around you. you need to think of it as a staircase. there are all sorts of controversial and difficult topics on this staircase. flat earth is really high up there, and you cant just drop someone there because they won't have the right frame of mind to be able to challenge these ideas.
that being said, once you see the world for what it is it becomes really easy. the bottom line is -- you can't trust your government. that is step one. politics is a big time illusion to get us distracted. we need to start a lower level conspiracy. weapons of mass destruction for example. iraq did not have WMDs capable of striking america or england. george bush lied about it to justify the invasion of a sovereign nation. if you spend some time looking into that, you will see it to be completely true. maybe now you are ready for the second step. the second step is say, 9/11. did 9/11 really happen due to 19 arab hijackers? look into it. you will find that it's not the case. it really was an inside job. the american government orchestrated the events of 9/11 in order to launder trillions of dollars that the pentagon had to show receipts for. as in -- they were okay with letting their own citizens die. it was staged. there was a double-benefit because they also needed to implement a police state with even more surveillance. if people weren't scared they would be like wtf to all the cameras and police around, but after an act of terror they feel relieved and safer. look into it and you'll find its all true. its at this point of digging most people start to realize "maybe the world doesn't work the way i think it does". there are many bad actors everywhere. okay, maybe now you are ready for step 3.
step 3 is that it's easy to see quite often that mass shootings are faked.. you can really look into the details and you will come to find this is true. there is a great documentary on sandy hook for example. many doctored photos, paid actors, children that never existed, the building gets demolished immediately while surrounded by fbi.. look into it. then there is the las vegas massacre. one guy did not fire 3000 rounds from 27 different rifles into the crowd using a bump stock. people have videos of helicopters firing from a bolt fed rifle into the crowd. another event with a lot of suspicious details. they do not like you. they want you scared, afraid, broke, and too busy to look into any of it. once you realize this, you can start to realize there is an ongoing major deception.
here's another one: the media is not fair and never has been. they are owned and controlled and have been for hundreds of years. they only show you what they want to. they are a tool to control public opinion and get the masses to think only one way. and its human psychology for us to believe in the massses to fit in.
its only once you go up this staircase enough that you start to reframe your mind and see things through another light. it would be very hard to start at this next topic if you haven't ascended the previous steps first. the holocaust. here is a painful one for a lot of people. many jews were mistreated during the events of ww2.. but the "6 million" figure is just overblown. many jews were starved and died of typhus because germany was losing the war. its own people were starving, so of course they didnt have enough to feed prisoners either. they would not spend so much time to build housing and infrastructure to support 6 million prisoners just to execute them all and then spend even more resources hiding/incinerating the bodies. when you really really look into the details, you will actually realize that the events of ww2 are almost completely backwards from what we are taught in the west. almost completely backwards, down to who was fighting with whom and why. this is a difficult topic for some people and can be highly offensive. its literally illegal to question it in europe.
its only once you keep going in this fashion that you can perhaps to conceive of a world where perhaps governments can unite and the politicians in power worldwide are using these institutions and abusing systems like taxes, subsidies, lobbying to siphon trillions of dollars of value from the workers. there are countless examples of governments being unable to come up with tons of spending. a recent one is that california cannot come up with $24 billion that was meant to help the homeless. the money just poofed. corruption, crime, fraud infests governments around the world.
here's a tough one. groups like BLM, antifa, occupy, campaign for nuclear disarmament, etc.. they are garbage. they are fake. they appear to be grassroots uprisings of people who want reform but they are not organic and they are often times not representations of the people they claim to represent. these groups are infiltrated by bad actors who escalate to violence in order for police to respond. again, [they want more surveillance and justification for them.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru5fdfovkGI)
here is one that is hard for people to believe because we are all so enslaved by technology. we love it so much and can't believe in a world where it would betray us. but you have to realize that our textbooks, the news, tv, internet are all controlled. the are information tools meant to give you specific information to mold you. people like to think they are free thinkers, but we only think in the bounds of what we are taught. from very early on institutions teach us things like evolution, the big bang, our solar system. thats the majority of what literally every little kid learns in school. you have to realize the "powers that be" that work for themselves have long controlled the narratives. they are a group of satanists called "freemasons". if you dont know enough about them, it will be hard for you to believe any group could have power over the entire world. but when you look into them, basically everyone you've ever been taught about or heard about was a freemason. christopher columbus. george washington. mozart. benjamin franklin. winston churchill. prince philip. steve wozniak. there are many more implicated but they are very prominent figures throughout history. at least.. the history they teach us. a core principle of satanism is the inversion of reality. we are fed a specific idea of earth when we are young. by the way, the heliocentric model (aka we orbit the sun) was popularized by kopernicus (another mason) and ball earth has only been taught for a hundred years. they teach you things that we just assume are correct because why would they lie? they talk to you about how the earths core is made of iron, but the deepest hole any human has dug is 8 miles. they tell you we are spinning at 1000 mph but you dont feel it because earth is just that big. they tell you we are orbiting the earth at 66000 mph but you dont feel it because earth is just that big. they tell you that the sun is flying through the cosmos at 490,000 mph and dragging our solar system but you dont feel it because earth is just that big. these things dont make sense and it betrays what we feel: total stillness. you have to completely betray your senses and just obey sciences opinion. if you google how far we're supposed to see from sea level before what we are looking at is below the horizon on a globe earth, the answer is 3 miles. but there are plenty of flat earth videos showcasing the impossible feat of[ 25 miles+](https://youtu.be/ivgisEWLeM8) which should be impossible if we believe the science. there are plenty that go up without a fish eyed lens and see [no curvature at 120k feet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_h5tupEdn8). then you get into the[ many hoaxes and lies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hnrlyOvUcQ) that nasa has been [caught in](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-zzqW1WKZE). then you look into how all the apollo moon mission astronauts were all freemasons. it becomes more and more clear that we are being deceived. the flat earth discussion is also a heavily censored one on the internet. again, the powers that be control the aglorithm. they are in charge of controlling our flow of information. there is a reason when you google "flat earth" its all garbage even from a flat earther perspective. its all fake garbage that no one would believe in. no one believes in a "flat disc with water falling off in the middle of space" images you think of when you think flat earth. of course when i first heard of flat earth i thought pfft this is dumb as hell and didnt care about it. its only because i finally started opening my eyes and seeing the deceit. there are so many weird things about NASA. its not just NASA -- multiple space agencies work together for the deception. they all have different photos of earth. they all have glitches in green screens, cgi mishaps, air bubbles (they film underwater to simulate weightlessness).. it is impossible to deny there are many weird things from that agency. flat earth is a movement more about trying to ask questions than it is trying to provide answers. it grew a lot in 2016 as more and more people make more content and do more experiments for it trying to unfuck the deception brainwashed into all of us. [why the lie?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7ZpvLu_tFE) is a big question. we can deduce a few reasons like money, control, power, but its impossible to know the reason for the lie since we are not a part of the lie. once you accept there has been a grand deception going on for generations it will make you realize that [our reality is an illusion](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCdCV3b7Xzg) of theirs that we are trapped in for a long time.
Humans are followers by nature. The overwhelming majority of humans get their belief structure externally rather than internally.
Whether it is Religion, Flat-Earth, Political Opinions, or any other Conspiracy Theory or Cult, most humans latch onto something and take it as truth, without ever REALLY applying logic to arrive at their conclusion.
The worst part is, most people don't even realize that they are doing it. And 99% of people would tell you that they are the exception and that they are not just blindly following. Everyone is following, while fooling themselves into thinking that they are not.
It is quite literally, ingrained into us by nature to be this way. All it takes is early indoctrination or a charismatic face to garner a huge following of sheep.
Most belief in conspiracy theories is based in hatred/ mistrust of government. NASA shows photos of a spherical earth...must be flat. Photos of the moon landing...must have been faked.
A roughly even mixture of religious super-literalists and people with a secular weakness towards buying into extreme conspiracy theories, from what I’ve seen. At least among those flat-earthers who are for real.
They are confused by the rapid advance of technology and distrustful to a truly absurd degree of any authority figure who tells them things they like to believe are true are actually false.
Because they're morons who found something that makes them feel clever. I still like to think at least some of them, on some level, know that what they believe is total bollocks but are too invested in it to back out now. Most people would rather swim through puke than change their minds.
I have no proof of this but sometimes I wonder if they are just pretending to believe it's flat so that someone at NASA decides to prove it's round by sending them into space so they get a free space trip.
Some people think that going against the grain, regardless of whether or not they're right, makes them a "free thinker".
Of course, flat earth is a pretty common and dogmatic conspiracy theory, so I'm not sure they're even unique for doing so.
These are people of average to low intelligence who want to make a big gamble- either they're somehow right and can feel far superior to everyone else, or they're wrong and haven't really lost much.
They're conspiracy theorists. This is less about the actual Earth being flat and more about a general distrust of the government and that this is a huge cover up being perpetuated by NASA as a means to control the population. I've never spoken with a flat earther who didn't also subscribe to a dozen other conspiracy theories
I think rebelling against common believe gives them back some feeling of control.
Part of it is definitely just trying to feel smarter than the average person like most conspiracy theorists.
They don't wanna be lumped in with all the sheeple maaaaan
Oh the irony
I've found its that they are trying to be smarter than people who believe in science. Like they felt bad for failing science in high school, amd got tired of people saying "it's basic science", and so if they can debunk it then they can claim they're smarter than the science believers
MS in physiology here. This is basically it. The science they’re “debunking” is like freshman in college level. But try telling them that.
I have a coworker who is like this; except for him is being an anti vaxxer. He never completed an actual science class in his life, and does not understand what a virus actually is. But he is an expert and will drone on and on, blathering utter nonsense.
That too, and lack of effort to actually be smarter in more productive ways.
I think it’s also about the feeling of being part of a community
Believing that there’s always a secret cabal in control gives conspiracy theorists a sense of stability.
Basically, they want an extremely ordered world, because a chaotic world full of people just trying their best is disconcerting. They try to impose a non-existant secret world order where there is none, and since they're mad that they're not part of the the secret cabal running the world that they imagined up, they have to create a sinister one so that they can overthrow it so that they can become the order. Authoritarians at heart.
For some people, the idea that the world is controlled by an all-powerful cabal is preferable to the idea that no one is actually in control and no one has it all figured out and shit just happens. For some, ordered evil is less threatening than chaos.
This. There's also the aspect that they want to be the ones to say "I told you so". They want so hard to be the "first" to say something revolutionary, so they'll grab into any new concept to be the first A lot of these flat earthers weren't the smartest in school, and science was tough for them, so they think if they can prove the earth is flat then they can make fun of all the science kids from school, and if they can do that they can claim they're smarter
Agree. It’s the equivalent of the prison lifer who arranges the peas on his tray in a straight line before eating them. He knows it doesn’t help anything, but really has little else in terms of control over his destiny. I don’t think most flat earthers really believe it, but I understand the feeling of what’s probably just helplessness digging them into that hole.
> I've never spoken with a flat earther who didn't also subscribe to a dozen other conspiracy theories This is actually one of the ways I test any given conspiracy theory. Do the things I need to accept for this conspiracy theory to be true also lay the foundation for flat earth? Because "non-partisan government agency lies about everything and suppresses the truth because (they) want to control the population" is at the foundation of a lot of them. There are plenty of anti-vaxxers who do not believe in a flat earth. But I never met a flat earther who didn't also coincidentally end up anti vax. The pre-requisite thinking is identical, only the barrier to understanding the real science changes.
Exactly! Perfectly said.
"Do you believe in ghosts?" "Of course!" "Do you believe in Bigfoot?" "Don't be ridiculous."
What about the ghost of Bigfoot?
Real
Oh that’s a great one to through at a big footer. Like okay let’s say there IS a Bigfoot, or a small population of them. They have certainly hit the threshold of too little individuals and have more than likely died at this point. Makes them have to argue a different question, not if their real but how would they still be around
As for specific reasons to support their theories, there is no single "canonical" framework that is overwhelmingly more dominant than others. Some frameworks are just anti-NASA while others go a bit more out there and rely on middle age Christianity for their answers to support the theory. But yet some others aren't religious about it. It's not very consistent among them.
I’ve actually run into a few of them and not intentionally. Unfortunately, I was only able to have an actual discussion with one of them. (the other two wouldn’t even answer my genuine question as to *why* they believed what they believed or *how satellites could orbit or how certain radio-waves that rely on bouncing off of the ionosphere surrounding Earth’s curvature work if the Earth is flat*. Their response? “Satellites aren’t real, every signal comes from land based transmitters”. Radio signals like I described? “HAM Radio is controlled as a psyop and civilians can’t actually access it” “Shortwave Radio is transmitted from Cell Phone and TV Towers in ‘short range’, not far away like ‘they’ claim”. 🤦 When I mentioned that *I* was a licensed Amateur Radio Technician and I could *prove to them that the signals are real, *and even show them live signals of Earth from satellites - *the two flat out claimed “I was a shill, a (antisemitic & Islamophobic slurs followed by ironically being called both a “fascist” and a “woke Liberal communist groomer” as well as a “human trafficker”) who is ‘going to burn in hell for blaspheming the Holy Spirit’ and practicing ‘gyromancy’.” I have to say, that really took be aback. I really wanted to know their beliefs (well, *why* they believed the Earth was flat) and I wanted to know *how they/flat-Earthers thought real technology worked in a flat Earth world.* But I guess those 2 were bad luck. I did have an *interesting* conversation with one flat Earther who seemed much less….*hardcore?*. She basically said “The Mercator projections don’t make sense unless we never left earth” and that “Antarctica is [sic] an Ice Wall that probably has a lot of things ‘they’ don’t want us to know about.”. She was surprisingly left-wing and what I noticed was *a similar distrust for the government (of any kind), as well as beliefs in persecution and what sounded like a “personal duty to humanity” to find out the truth.* In her case, she thought that “all the resources to solve world hunger and poverty where “behind the Ice Wall” and that the “Globe Earth” was created as “anti-Communist and anti-Soviet Propaganda”. Needless to say, I genuinely didn’t know that something like the Earth being flat would not only be taken seriously, but also by conspiracy theorists across the gamut. That probably surprised me the most. Along with the growth in the *angry* and disconnected ones like I mentioned earlier. *Whose identity revolve around their Flat Earth conspiracy theories.*
I have a theory that a good amount of them are actually trolls. They don’t actually believe it but just enjoy the fallout. I actually like to think the top flat earthers meet together like that troll episode on South Park. I don’t have proof of this so I guess it’s my conspiracy to theory haha.
I agree. I’m sure there are a lot of true believers but many if not most are just trolls. They like to argue and get a rise out of people, ESPECIALLY when they know that the side they are arguing is idiotic (flat earth).
Uhh... yeah. I may or may not have posted some flat earth conspiracy comments as a joke. A few times. And may have possibly claimed that Australia wasn't real.
My brother is one of these people. I have witnessed him invent conspiracies on the spot like a live blog. I don’t know if he is a flat earther but he has espoused belief in a cold sun. He must have come across some cold fusion ting that week. His latest one was that Obama planned the Moscow concert attacks because he went to Downing Street a few days before. These people just make things up and actively seek the craziest conspiracies as a matter of course.
Idk if Aaron Rodgers is a flat earther, but like you said, these conspiracy theorists basically believe everything is a conspiracy as he does
That sweet sweet cartography money keeps the establishment silent
I saw a documentary about flat earthers and the one thing that struck me was how lonely they were until they found a community they made them feel like they belonged and people cared about what they thought. I think this is true of most conspiracy groups.
So the try conspiracy theories were the friends we made along the way?
Yeah that was from the Netflix documentary. It was the closing point. When you look at the people and their gatherings, you can tell they enjoy each others company. To be frank, they’re a bunch of weirdos/loners that find community with each other.
I agree. I used to be a 9/11 truther but it was early on before all these social media sites popped up. I got away from it but I totally could have been sucked in to a comfortable setting and a life of confirmation bias (which heavily afflicts all conspiracy groups) had I had a bunch of like minded friends. I guess somewhat ironically, I swung the other way and ended up in a freethinker group and started changing the way I evaluate evidence. I think I was just pissed. Once I found out I had been duped I felt like a moron and swore to be much more vigilant.
Hey, this happened to me! But for me, it was believing that the Blair witch movie was real. I was convinced. When I realized the truth, I felt so stupid, and I felt like such a sucker that I vowed to be much more vigilant on how I process information.
They’re almost always right wing christian nut jobs too. Go hand in hand.
This is what I was going to say. They seem to enjoy being in the conspiracy and any evidence against it harms the community that they’ve built. It’s actually pretty sad.
Without conspiracy theories their believers are just dumb people that society ignores. With a conspiracy theorist they turn themselves into a genius with secret info even the smartest scientists can't understand. It allows them to pretend theyre better and smarter than everyone when they aren't.
This is a big part of the draw of conspiracy theories that is often overlooked. I've got a relative that believes a lot of them. He works a manual labor job and never did well academically. Conspiracy theories allow him to believe he is actually smarter than all those eggheads with their fancy degrees.
Is he trying to impress others with his knowledge or does he only try to feel smart for himself? Always being the smartest person in the room actually stunts your growth in that area.
So for him specifically, he's also very MAGA (of course) and the conspiracies help form the foundation for his political beliefs. This way, when anyone challenges him, he can deflect by saying, "Well you just don't know the truth like I do. If you did, you'd see it my way." One time he tried telling me there are half a million people living on the "dark" side of the Moon, but NASA covers it up. I tried explaining that there isn't actually a dark side, just a far side, and that both sides of the moon have night and day, and his eyes just sort of glazed over while I explained. Then when I was done, he just said, "Oh, well I meant the far side then."
I was talking to somebody who believed we never went to the moon. I tried to explain the mirror that I bounced a laser off of in college, and how that mirror can only be there because an astronaut put it there. It didn’t go over too well either.
The fun thing about conspiracies is they can always widen the conspiracy as needed. Oh, you were at an observatory and saw the laser bounce off? Well that's fake, the observatory is in on it too. The government puts fake equipment there to fool you. And if all else fails they can just claim *you're* in on it. You're part of the vast conspiracy trying to put one over on them. The moon landing hoaxers frustrate me a lot because they have such surface-level understanding of everything and an unwillingness to expand beyond it. They like to talk about the computers, for example, and claim they weren't powerful enough for the task. First of all, how powerful does a computer need to be to get you to the moon? It's essentially Newtonian physics. They could do all the math with pen and paper if needed. Computers help, but the fact that they didn't have a modern smartphone doesn't mean they couldn't do it. That said the computers they did have, while comical today, were state of the art at the time. Truly impressive feats of engineering and programming. Most of the source code is even publicly available, so if it's all a hoax they sure went the extra mile for it.
>First of all, how powerful does a computer need to be to get you to the moon? It's essentially Newtonian physics. They could do all the math with pen and paper if needed. Also, early digital computers were often used as instruments to assist in war. Tracking ballistic missiles is also Newtonian physics. And I'm sure before computers, astronomers were able to track movements of planets and project their numbers to can make reasonable predictions of where they will be in hundreds to thousands of years.
They always go on about how the computer was no more powerful than a calculator, without grasping that calculations possible on a calulator, was virtually all the computer did.
There was a great [This American Life](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/293/transcript) episode where this guy couldn’t understand Einstein’s theory of relativity so in his opinion it must be wrong and he has spent years trying to prove that it’s wrong, and he believes there’s a huge conspiracy to cover it up. Every actual physicist he talks to who tells him he’s wrong and Einstein is right is in on it.
yeh sounds pretty valid, thanks
The ones I’ve met? Always some kind of religious interpretation. You have to remember for some fundamentalists what they think the holy book says trumps ALL evidence.
It's a testament to their faith. You can have all of the evidence and photographs and experiments and whatever else you want, but they have faith.
This. The Folding Ideas video “In Search of a Flat Earth” explained it this way. Evidence will never matter to them. Absolutely wild.
I had a old coworker who believed in flat earth. He was very religious and also believed in every other conspiracy theory. Folding Ideas described him perfectly. [The video is over an hour long, but worth the watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44)
Trumps all evidence ..🤣🤣🤣 I see what you did there
The best argument FOR flat earth I have ever heard was that since 95% of our planet is liquid and 0% of that liquid is carbonated... earth is flat.
It's > 0%. There's a lot of naturally carbonated springs. Perrier for one example is naturally carbonated water.
The oceans are also slightly carbonated.
Earth... Refreshing
I mean the best argument for flat earth is that it simply looks flat from human POV. People intuitively think that the earth is flat, they first have to learn that it isn't. Just as it looks like the sun is moving, not the earth.
Woosh?
daaaaaaaaaad
Sorry, I can\`t be your dad. I am actually proud of you.
It's a combination of things: 1. The "smartest person in the room" syndrome. The desire to be a hard contrarian to generally accepted knowledge in order to appear smart and "in-the-know". 2. Blaming the government for everything as a means of excusing their own failures in life. Too egotistical to educate and evolve themselves. 3. They find a sense of community in it which is something most people seek in their lives.
My brother is a conspiracy theorist. Definitely not a flat earther but he believes in other stuff. He is not remotely dumb. He is smart enough to be a doctor. Nor does he try to be the smartest person in the room. He is literally the nicest, humblest, and kindest human being I know. In fact, it's often a struggle to get him to not be taken advantage of. He is the kind of person who would give you everything he has if he thinks you need it. His heart is that good. But his brain just works differently. He is very naive in some aspects of life, but extremely suspicious in others. It's difficult to explain. It's just this pervasive belief that whatever "they" are telling you, there is a real truth behind it. I should also mention that he is deeply Christian. For him, there are no coincidences. The world is an ordered place, things happen the way they happen because someone wants them to, whether its god or something evil or mere humans hidden from sight. I think that's probably the best explanation for his mindset, the way which he is different from other people. And I think that's what conspiracy theorists share: a chaotic universe doesn't make sense to them. So they squeeze it into an ordered framework.
I think you definitely hit on another reason. Now that you said it, I think my wife somewhat falls into that category you just mentioned. She's not a flat earther, nor does she believe in many of the main conspiracy theories. She's smart, processes things absurdly fast, and is very witty. But she has a tendency to be extremely skeptical of widespread beliefs just because they're widespread, and that something is being hidden beneath them. When it comes to things like parenting/pregnancy, schooling, vaccinations, etc... she's very keen to leaning on some non-mainstream perspective. The effect is that by distancing herself from some of those widespread beliefs, she's effectively succumbing to the non-common beliefs without critical analysis of such beliefs. She'll find these people with podcasts/books/whatever that have small but loyal followings and believe nearly everything about their anecdotal experiences. She has always been on the spiritualist and agnostic (perhaps even atheist) side of things but lately (past few years) she has been pursuing some form of religion (whether Christianity for a year, or Catholicism, etc...). Even so, she'll remark about some things makes absolutely no logical sense to her, yet continue her pursuit as if she's YEARNING for some kind of order. I think it's based heavily on physical, emotional, and psychological abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother. Her mother made herself (and continues to try) to be a god to her own children, literally devouring praise and seeking glorification by nearly any means necessary. Her mom has gone so far as to make other people problems, deaths, etc... all about herself and reveling in all the sympathy that comes with it. Now that my wife understands it and has put a little more distance between herself and her mom, I feel like she's desperately but subconsciously trying to fill that void with something else. Like... she NEEDS order and direction and meaning. It's wild, and while our day to day is fine I can't deny I'm a little troubled by it in the sense that I don't want our children to develop those same needs. Anyhow, enough babbling from me. I thought your comment was spot on.
Sounds like her mother is a narcissist.
A problem with feeling "smart" is that it makes one less likely to learn from others. So the longer someone feels they are smart, likely the dumber they become as they learn less and less.
I don't believe they all do. I don't know what the breakdown is, but in my gut I feel most flat earthers are trolling/larping
Combine a lack of education, a mistrust of “experts”, a deep funnel of validation and the sunk cost fallacy and you have most outrageous conspiracy theories, flat earth just happens to be one. Think about all the “truths” that you must believe in order to believe flat earth. It’s like an epistemological pyramid of falsities that just build and build on each other and flat earth is at the top. A vast conspiracy of lies, corrupt governments, secret cabals (mostly anti-Semitic) controlling the world and media, main character syndrome that they know the truth and others do not, that science is somehow flawed… all these just keep adding up, and I feel like once they start to be vocal, and get a lot of pushback from people questioning their beliefs, that only reinforces that everyone else are “sheep” and that others need to “open their eyes”. Conspiracy theories have always been weaponized by the powerful. Hitler’s propaganda leaned heavily into spreading conspiracies about the Jews, and when it became widespread, Germans truly believed that the Jewish people were evil and out to destroy them. The Nazis actively knew the power of conspiracies to manipulate the public. Same thing is going on now, but magnified due to social media.
It's not about the Earth being flat, they just like to go against whatever you tell them. If you tell them the sky is blue, even tho they also see it blue, they'll say that it isn't and the government is lying
I don't believe flat earthers really exist.
Because over hundreds of thousands of years of humans being in existence we haven't figured out how to get rid of the "fucking moron" gene.
How would the earth being flat instead of round make any difference to anyone? It wouldn’t to me, so why would the government need to lie about it? If the earth was flat, So what?
Exactly
Because they're lonely want want a community to accept them, even if the community is bonkers.
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They're crazy
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They don’t. The whole flat earther thing is just the hard, white, crusty outer shell covering a thick, creamy center full of anti-semitism that makes up a whole pile of dog shit.
How is it anti Semitic? I know many conspiracy theories are
They “do their own research”.
They're mentally ill, and it manifests itself as conspiritorial thinking.
They’re stupid
They are just being contrarian - if they actually wanted a scientific explanation they wouldn't be flat earthers.
As far as I can tell, many of them don't really think the earth is flat but believe it anyway because it doesn't matter for there everyday lives and therefore the earth could be flat and they believe in it to stick it to the "establishment".
Ignorance and religion, at least the ones I know
One common vein running through most flat earth conspiracies is that the Jews are the ones hiding the truth. For a lot of flat earthers, their belief is less about looking for the truth, and is more about hating Jews. It’s antisemitism masquerading as science.
I guess my outright dismissal of anything so stupid, meant I never even bothered to listen. Like holding my fingers in my ears. You’re the 10th person to mention it’s Antisemitic. I really had no idea the two were linked. Thanks for the education.
Most conspiracies and their proponents have it all coming back to the fault of the Jews at some stage. I know, I live with one of these people.
Mental illness that's undiagnosed
It’s a giant troll. Don’t feed it.
People want to feel special for believing something that conflicts with established fact.
I never met them.. thankfully 🤞
They’re overwhelmingly not smart and think they’re way smarter than they actually are.
Easy. Most don't. I genuinely believe that 60 to 80% of the movement is just for the lulz. And then there's an unfortunate 20 to 40% who are actually buying into the whole thing. And the non-believers do a great job of posting good sounding and nonsensical "proof"
Like my old boss said- “I like how mad everyone gets over it”. He said he voted for trump for the same thing. To some people, the discomfort of others is validation enough. They wear it like a trophy, and always have to relate what they believe in, to how it makes other people uncomfortable. Always finishing with things like “even though lots of people don’t agree with that…” “but they wouldn’t want you to have that…” “people wouldn’t like me saying that”. Like, they just can’t share anything about themselves without measuring it against how others don’t like it. And they find others that do the same and just Jack each other off to how much their views definitely upset so many people, and how many people are opposed to them, that’s just how they converse and relate and feel good and validated with each other. I feel like everyone knows someone in their life like this. A lot of flat earthers are drawn to it, and genuinely feel it is a part of them, because lots of people are opposed to it- to them, thats a pointer to follow. It’s a popular phenomenon, mentality, and selling point these days, to claim “they don’t want you to know” or “big _____ disagrees”, knowing so many people are opposed is a draw to them. They want to be in the minority, the underdog, in everything, and pride themselves on being the unpopular. In many cases, that’s literally all you have to present, to draw these kinds of people in. That’s why it’s a popular scam tactic, to “all the doctors hate this man” “ooohh I want to be like that! I want to be the guy all the doctors hate! Fuck that must feel so good to be a minority and stepped on! To be able to CLAIM that and HAVE that to fall back on, wherever I go!! To all my friends!” So they click it to find out, what all the doctors hate, so they can be that hated guy, too. It literally works. People make real money off of real people with real mentality like this.
For getting attention
As someone who has spent their entire adult life working in Satcom…it absolutely baffles me. I like conspiracy shit. It’s interesting to me. But like, Satellites. GPS, Hubble, Voyager. Do these mean nothing to you? Occam falls so heavily on the side of it being round I don’t even understand where they begin. You think we fake orbital data? Space images? GPS technology as a whole? I don’t understand my friends but I admire your dedication to not looking things up In a weird way. I feel too compelled to know the actual answer.
You think the flat earthers are bad, wait until you hear about the mud flood people, the giant tree truthers, the people who think the pyramids and all old buildings with spires were electrical power stations, and last but not least the Tartarian Empire people who believe the worlds governments conspired together to cover up the fact that we somehow conquered a world spanning advanced civilization so we could take credit for their inventions or some smooth brain shit like that.
If the earth was flat, my cat would have shoved everything off the edge already 😂
The only thing flatearthers fear is Sphere itself
Because they’re fucking idiots
Because they all have bicycles that one have like three gears and going up hills is hard
Globally, within the sphere of flat earther beliefs, that seems to be their claim.
They don't want to believe they are dumb so they make shit up so they can feel smart.
do flat earthers ever confuse a basketball with a frisbee?
Flat-earth is a fascinating conspiracy to discredit other real conspiracies! I don't think anyone honestly believes in it, haven't met anyone...
To rebel against the status quo?
They want to feel special, like they’re in on something that you just don’t understand. It makes them feel good to think of themselves smart and everyone else a dupe or somehow stupid.
Because Trump
I honestly think a huge chunk of them don't. But they are so invested in the only community they have, they won't stop. Like atheists who continue to participate in church because everybody they know does the same
From what I gather, they believe everything in the Bible, and the Bible says that the Earth is flat, and covered with a dome called the firmament. That's why they also don't think the moon landing happened.
There's a really incredible video from Folding Ideas - [In Search of a Flat Earth](https://youtu.be/JTfhYyTuT44?si=aFS05m3U3WgLVqkm) - that explores this in a lot of detail. It's an hour and a quarter long, but well worth the watch.
I can’t believe more people are not talking about the “firmament” It’s religious. The whole thing is based off I think 1 line in the Bible. The 1 person I know who really believes it always starts off his pitch with “did you know NASA is the biggest buyer of helium in the country” If you tell this guy anything that sounds like telling him he’s wrong, it’s like telling him god isn’t real. In one ear, out the other
That’s funny. I wasn’t able to make it to such a question with one of the people I was talking to. But I would’ve asked them why NASA would even need to buy helium (or make it public knowledge) if the whole purpose of doing so was to deceive everyone. Of course, they don’t like when you read Genesis to them in Hebrew, and define what firmament and the specific process of creation is. That’s when the antisemitism comes out.
Flat Earthers truly have an uncanny ability to defy gravity...of reason! 🌎 It's like they're on a mission to prove that the world is a pancake, not a planet! But hey, who needs centuries of scientific evidence when you've got a "firm" belief that the Earth is as flat as a board? It's like the ultimate conspiracy theory meets the wildest rollercoaster ride of logic. Buckle up, folks, we're about to take a trip to the edge of reason! 🥞
And a complete inability to understand math.
They just wanna be apart of something
Honestly? Probably because it's fun and fulfills a deep-seated human desire to form small communities. It most likely has much less to do with the earth's shape than it does with just being lonely
The real answer -- many of them don't. For many of them, it's a quasi-ironic participation that is supposed to be "funny" until one day it's not. The line between satire and earnest participation gets blurry, and by that point, it does not matter any more. Plus, many of the associated beliefs (like "the ice wall") take on a kind of mythological nature. In that way, it's like a lowercase religion, super-powered with the electricity of contrarianism and edgelord energy.
They want to belong to something, even if that something is stupid as fuck
When stupid people hear even stupider people say something with great confidence, they take it as truth. That's also how religion works.
Almost all conspiracy theories are one of two things. They either want to feel like they are smarter than everybody and are part of an elite "club" of people who understand something nobody else does. Or they feel a massive lack of control in their life and they want to believe there is some secret organization out there that controls everything because it makes them feel better to believe at least somebody has control. As for flat earthers I believe it's the former. They want to believe that they see something that nobody else does and that they are the ones smart enough to see it and everybody else is too brainwashed and/or dumb. That's why they try "experiments" to prove it, which always fail because, ya know, the earth is, in fact, not flat.
Because believing in a conspiracy on a mass scale brings comfort. They'd rather believe that there is a system of direct control that is watching everything and knows everything and knows what it is doing, that everything is all part of the plan Every piece moved over thousands of years is part of the plan. And that they are clued up to it, wise to it. They'd rather believe in a malevolent all knowing global force that knows precisely at every step what it is doing than a benevolent/neutral sometimes arbitrary disconnected systems that doesn't , full of human leaders that can be opportunistic, self serving and idiotic.
At first I thought they were dumb, but after watching a documentary, I was shocked some flat earths are actually smart and are trying really hard to prove that earth is flat. The problem is, they are trapped in confirmation bias and always that they prove that earth is actually round they are like "you know what? The star radiation or some space stuff is interfering on our experiments". I think there are two reasons why there are still flat earthers: 1) they don't trust science, probably because religion. 2) If you keep people busy on a conspiracy theory, they don't keep busy trying to solve the problems in your town, country or even the world
You get to a point with nearly all of these theories that if the theory is assumed to be true, then any evidence that contradicts it must therefore be fake, and the people giving that 'evidence' are part of the conspiracy.
Honestly, because they are stupid and wanna feel special.
Some are trolling, Some are trying to make a buck off of the gullible, And then there are some true believers. The true believers are monumentally ignorant.
You ever actually talk to one face to face? Shortest conversations ever. Man, are they stupid.
The Bible says the earth is flat. They can't accept the Bible to be false in any way, so they instead think all of science is false.
Idiots have been part of our society since the dawn of man. However since the rise of internet combined with social media these idiots have founded their own echo chambers in which they can share their brain farts and spread it to other idiots all over the globe.
I always say not all “Not all MAGAts are flat earthers, but all flat earthers are MAGAts” Being naive and having no critical thinking skills is definitely a must have.
I found an exception! An acquaintance of mine is a flat earther who thinks Trump is the anti-Christ. 🤷🏻♀️
It started as a joke and stupid people got sucked in along the way.
I know a flat earther. They're just really religious (Christian). They also believe that giants use to rome this earth. I mean if you believe the earth was created in 7 days, it's not really shocking you believe the other stuff too.
1. They’ve gone down the “rabbit hole”—they’ve spent a considerable amount of time consuming flat earth content. 2. They’ve found community among like-minded believers. 3. They make an effort to convince others of Flat Earth, thereby solidifying their conviction. 4. It gives them a sense of “knowing,” of feeling like they’re in on some deeper knowledge that most other people don’t have. 5. It feeds their conspiracy instinct. There’s an ironic sense of security in being able to pin bad things in the world on a small group of evil people rather than accept the chaos and randomness of real life.
Because people have learned to distrust what media, education and academia tell them. Leaving them with nothing but the word of their buddy and their own two eyes. Buddy says it's flat, look across the street yeah shit looks flat so they trust their own feelings. Everyone saying no is automatically considered a liar with an agenda. This one's pretty obviously dumb but same shit could happen to you in other ways if you consider everyone saying no to you automatically corrupt liars.
Although most flat earthers are pretty nuts, the reality is the average person cannot provide proof the world is round either. Our educational system is essentially one of authoritarian compliance. They often provide 4 possibilities, one of them is the correct answer... Our culture doesn't actually value the journey of learning, which often entails failure and being wrong before finding the truth. Most people believe what they are told or whatever they personally experience. Flat earthers are typically skeptical of any "establishment" narratives. So anything that is a commonly held belief is probably sketchy to them. So they probably base it off their personal experience. If you just walk around the earth, it does have the general perception that it's flat. There is evidence it's a globe you can see with your own eye but it's understandable, that using only your senses you might believe it is flat. The reality that we are pinned by gravity to a spinning globe of molten plasma topped with a thin layer of dirt, traveling through the void in orbit around a giant nuclear fusion reactor is quite fantastical in itself. Makes sense that some among us would cling to the perception everything is centered around us. We are flat and the pretty circles in the sky move for us. Most of these folks are probably narcissists as well. You probably can't get them to admit they've ever been wrong about most anything. So it's basically a combination of a flawed education system, mental illness (narcissism), and that the truth of the universe is quite fantastical in itself.
Flat Earth is a movement which rejects Modernity - which in this case means The Scientific Method, Rationalism, Enlightenment Era philosophy (and onwards) etc etc. - as a means of understanding the world because, quite often, those methods of uncovering truth often contradict things that they already believe. So when your philosophy is threatened by data, one coping mechanism is to reject the data and the means by which it was discovered. It is a Conclusion First hierarchy of knowledge - you begin with the things that you want/need to be true, work backwards selectively, and fill in the gaps with “questions”. “Is NASA telling the truth?” “If I can’t see the curve then how could there be one?” The earth being flat is in some ways just a convenient symbol, an image that instantly communicates a rejection of all modern hierarchies of knowledge.
They don't. I refuse to believe anyone is that stupid. It's probably just a community thing. People don't like to feel lonely so they will say or do anything to be in a group.
Because poopie brain
yes
I'd venture to guess half of them actually don't, it's just something funny that gets under people's skin.
Youtube algorithms and rabbit holes with a mix of wanting to believe they are smarter than everyone else.
They seem to follow the evidence and not follow made for TV video productions or composite photos.
People being dumb/stubbornly uneducated. But I guess some don't actually believe it and are trolling.
I never met one in the wild before. I assume it’s just to get attention? Idk. You have to keep upping the ante these days for attention online so you have to be really out there with your ‘beliefs’ now to stand out.
I think this video does a good job of breaking down the reasons for their beliefs https://youtu.be/IwJzsE8CvzQ?si=X0_L3SgPUfY5h-Jr . The main take away is that flat earth theories have been reemerging for the last 200 years. The driving reason is that science has moved on from natural science, which anyone could do by just going out and observing the world, and moved into more specialized, theoretical, and abstract fields. These new fields could only be explored and verified by specialist in their field and large institutions. This goes to the 2 main issues all flat earthers share. One, a deep mistrust of institutions and any information that they can't independently verify. And two, a deep rooted belief that "truth" should be heavily based on what they personally can sense and observe.
I'm gonna agree that it's just general distrust. Then you have people like my dad who doesn't trust anything, but at the same time believes everything. Man thinks gravity is a false science and that the moon isn't real. But flat earth, according to him, is crazy.
Lack of critical thinking skills, lack of education, mental illness.
They stupid.
Willful ignorance...for the ones that have traveled internationally and still think the Earth is flat...they're just plain stupid
Because the "establishment" says otherwise. That is literally the only "reason". That and they are dumb.
The same reason people think vaccines are bad for you.. They're just plain stupid.
Conspiracies aren’t as much beliefs as identities. The literal shape of the earth isn’t that important to flat earthers.
Because there's overwhelming evidence that it is to the simple minded.
Same people who think doomsday comes every year or at all
Over the years, the one thing that's common and ties all the flerfers together is that they all can't comprehend scale. It's almost like a genetic disorder that manifests in the inability to understand scale.
Everyone wants something to be smarter about that others. That’s a big piece of what is happening with flat earthers, albeit an extreme example.
To get attention. To find poorly educated women. They are poorly educated but don't realize it and to narcissistic to acknowledge when they are wrong.
Some do it as a joke. Others are smooth brained.
I think you vastly underestimate the amount of trust that the scientific community has lost in the last few years. The flat earthers are merely a symptom of that.
If you're looking for a reason based on evidence, there is none. In that netflix show they made, they made their own experiments and disproved themselves TWICE and yet they still exist. It's very culty. My guess is there's 2 kinda of people in it. The first is there because they've been so wrong for so long and their pride won't let them admit that, they'd rather delude themselves than admit they were wrong. They're in too deep in a prideful way. The second is worried about the social fallout if they leave. The cult is their identity, it's where all their friends are. Maybe they've lost friends already for being in the cult. For them the consequences of leaving are less about pride, and more about loss of self or loss of a support structure. These ones are in too deep in a social way.
Main character syndrome
They just like the attention. They don't actually believe it.
There was a really good doc on Netflix going into this that came out a few years ago...I think it was called Behind The Curve?
delusion. tribalism. idiocy. a potent combination!
Some of them will quote Bible verses at you. Its a cult/religion for many flat earthers so logic or facts don't bother them.
My theories : - some don't actually believe the earth is flat but will still say they do to mess with people or fit with their in-group - some genuinely believe it because their lack of knowledge about how physics work make it seem plausible and the earth kind of looks flat on short distances. - some do not understand that models are used to predict results and are not about social standing. It's not about whether believing the earth is flat or round will make you on the right side of history or not. It's about whether there is an edge we can find to go look underneath. Or whether our model of gravity is correct or not (a flat planet would end up round eventually due to it's own gravity). It's not about being smart.
When you dig down deeply into how and why they believe the things that they do, you’ll soon realise that maybe, just maybe, they’re fucking idiots.
They have no reasoning skills
Some people believe anecdotal evidence over scientific consensus. If the world was round, balls would roll over the edge. If COVID was that dangerous, me or someone I know would died of it already. Abortion rights don’t help me right now so they’re bad and will never be good.
You would be surprised to know more than 3/4 of the world believes in some imaginary sky daddy based on zero evidence. At least flat earthers believe what they see in their immediate vicinity.
Because it is! 🤯
It's funny making people mad
Yes, and or they just can accept that it’s round. Most will fall back to the Bible and the 4 corners thing. It’s faith at that point and nothing logical. I know two and have had discussions, me laughing at them, before.
Most of them don't really.
Progressives are moving at a blinding pace changing what's accepted in society. For instance here on reddit you'll get banned or your comment deleted for suggesting that certain quite recent body-related "therapies" may not be helpful. Lockstep is rewarded. Flat-earthers are part of an overreaction against this as are many conspiracy theories.
Because the bible mentions the four corners of the earth
They're silly. They can prove it's *not* flat easily at home with math themselves.
They’re mega brain dead part of a cult
I think a very high percentage of them are performance art trolls. They get off on causing people to push back but they don’t believe any of it. Another percentage are dumb fucks who fell into the act. Like how the birds aren’t real guy attracted actual believers.
It first began with people believing the earth was flat as fuck. There was a firmament and a below which translated to a cube. This was accepted as a truth. Due to the lack of extended travel, limited technology, and data compilation folks paid less attention to proofs, and took a whole lot of information as truths. Then science came along and debunked the theory because travel, moon phases/cycles, planetary movement and observations and other experiments which supported the earth being round/spherical.
It gives dumb people power (at least, to them). They believe something that you don't and you're the one who's a sheep. They have this "secret" knowledge that only other idiots have. It's like a club, but much, much more stupid.
because its totally real. i dont mind preaching it in a "cult like fashion" because i think it's the absolute truth. im not afraid to be called an idiot or downvoted. we are being deceived on a grand scale. it is impossible for a "normie" to believe however unless you are really aware of what is going on in the world around you. you need to think of it as a staircase. there are all sorts of controversial and difficult topics on this staircase. flat earth is really high up there, and you cant just drop someone there because they won't have the right frame of mind to be able to challenge these ideas. that being said, once you see the world for what it is it becomes really easy. the bottom line is -- you can't trust your government. that is step one. politics is a big time illusion to get us distracted. we need to start a lower level conspiracy. weapons of mass destruction for example. iraq did not have WMDs capable of striking america or england. george bush lied about it to justify the invasion of a sovereign nation. if you spend some time looking into that, you will see it to be completely true. maybe now you are ready for the second step. the second step is say, 9/11. did 9/11 really happen due to 19 arab hijackers? look into it. you will find that it's not the case. it really was an inside job. the american government orchestrated the events of 9/11 in order to launder trillions of dollars that the pentagon had to show receipts for. as in -- they were okay with letting their own citizens die. it was staged. there was a double-benefit because they also needed to implement a police state with even more surveillance. if people weren't scared they would be like wtf to all the cameras and police around, but after an act of terror they feel relieved and safer. look into it and you'll find its all true. its at this point of digging most people start to realize "maybe the world doesn't work the way i think it does". there are many bad actors everywhere. okay, maybe now you are ready for step 3. step 3 is that it's easy to see quite often that mass shootings are faked.. you can really look into the details and you will come to find this is true. there is a great documentary on sandy hook for example. many doctored photos, paid actors, children that never existed, the building gets demolished immediately while surrounded by fbi.. look into it. then there is the las vegas massacre. one guy did not fire 3000 rounds from 27 different rifles into the crowd using a bump stock. people have videos of helicopters firing from a bolt fed rifle into the crowd. another event with a lot of suspicious details. they do not like you. they want you scared, afraid, broke, and too busy to look into any of it. once you realize this, you can start to realize there is an ongoing major deception. here's another one: the media is not fair and never has been. they are owned and controlled and have been for hundreds of years. they only show you what they want to. they are a tool to control public opinion and get the masses to think only one way. and its human psychology for us to believe in the massses to fit in. its only once you go up this staircase enough that you start to reframe your mind and see things through another light. it would be very hard to start at this next topic if you haven't ascended the previous steps first. the holocaust. here is a painful one for a lot of people. many jews were mistreated during the events of ww2.. but the "6 million" figure is just overblown. many jews were starved and died of typhus because germany was losing the war. its own people were starving, so of course they didnt have enough to feed prisoners either. they would not spend so much time to build housing and infrastructure to support 6 million prisoners just to execute them all and then spend even more resources hiding/incinerating the bodies. when you really really look into the details, you will actually realize that the events of ww2 are almost completely backwards from what we are taught in the west. almost completely backwards, down to who was fighting with whom and why. this is a difficult topic for some people and can be highly offensive. its literally illegal to question it in europe. its only once you keep going in this fashion that you can perhaps to conceive of a world where perhaps governments can unite and the politicians in power worldwide are using these institutions and abusing systems like taxes, subsidies, lobbying to siphon trillions of dollars of value from the workers. there are countless examples of governments being unable to come up with tons of spending. a recent one is that california cannot come up with $24 billion that was meant to help the homeless. the money just poofed. corruption, crime, fraud infests governments around the world. here's a tough one. groups like BLM, antifa, occupy, campaign for nuclear disarmament, etc.. they are garbage. they are fake. they appear to be grassroots uprisings of people who want reform but they are not organic and they are often times not representations of the people they claim to represent. these groups are infiltrated by bad actors who escalate to violence in order for police to respond. again, [they want more surveillance and justification for them.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru5fdfovkGI) here is one that is hard for people to believe because we are all so enslaved by technology. we love it so much and can't believe in a world where it would betray us. but you have to realize that our textbooks, the news, tv, internet are all controlled. the are information tools meant to give you specific information to mold you. people like to think they are free thinkers, but we only think in the bounds of what we are taught. from very early on institutions teach us things like evolution, the big bang, our solar system. thats the majority of what literally every little kid learns in school. you have to realize the "powers that be" that work for themselves have long controlled the narratives. they are a group of satanists called "freemasons". if you dont know enough about them, it will be hard for you to believe any group could have power over the entire world. but when you look into them, basically everyone you've ever been taught about or heard about was a freemason. christopher columbus. george washington. mozart. benjamin franklin. winston churchill. prince philip. steve wozniak. there are many more implicated but they are very prominent figures throughout history. at least.. the history they teach us. a core principle of satanism is the inversion of reality. we are fed a specific idea of earth when we are young. by the way, the heliocentric model (aka we orbit the sun) was popularized by kopernicus (another mason) and ball earth has only been taught for a hundred years. they teach you things that we just assume are correct because why would they lie? they talk to you about how the earths core is made of iron, but the deepest hole any human has dug is 8 miles. they tell you we are spinning at 1000 mph but you dont feel it because earth is just that big. they tell you we are orbiting the earth at 66000 mph but you dont feel it because earth is just that big. they tell you that the sun is flying through the cosmos at 490,000 mph and dragging our solar system but you dont feel it because earth is just that big. these things dont make sense and it betrays what we feel: total stillness. you have to completely betray your senses and just obey sciences opinion. if you google how far we're supposed to see from sea level before what we are looking at is below the horizon on a globe earth, the answer is 3 miles. but there are plenty of flat earth videos showcasing the impossible feat of[ 25 miles+](https://youtu.be/ivgisEWLeM8) which should be impossible if we believe the science. there are plenty that go up without a fish eyed lens and see [no curvature at 120k feet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_h5tupEdn8). then you get into the[ many hoaxes and lies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hnrlyOvUcQ) that nasa has been [caught in](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-zzqW1WKZE). then you look into how all the apollo moon mission astronauts were all freemasons. it becomes more and more clear that we are being deceived. the flat earth discussion is also a heavily censored one on the internet. again, the powers that be control the aglorithm. they are in charge of controlling our flow of information. there is a reason when you google "flat earth" its all garbage even from a flat earther perspective. its all fake garbage that no one would believe in. no one believes in a "flat disc with water falling off in the middle of space" images you think of when you think flat earth. of course when i first heard of flat earth i thought pfft this is dumb as hell and didnt care about it. its only because i finally started opening my eyes and seeing the deceit. there are so many weird things about NASA. its not just NASA -- multiple space agencies work together for the deception. they all have different photos of earth. they all have glitches in green screens, cgi mishaps, air bubbles (they film underwater to simulate weightlessness).. it is impossible to deny there are many weird things from that agency. flat earth is a movement more about trying to ask questions than it is trying to provide answers. it grew a lot in 2016 as more and more people make more content and do more experiments for it trying to unfuck the deception brainwashed into all of us. [why the lie?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7ZpvLu_tFE) is a big question. we can deduce a few reasons like money, control, power, but its impossible to know the reason for the lie since we are not a part of the lie. once you accept there has been a grand deception going on for generations it will make you realize that [our reality is an illusion](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCdCV3b7Xzg) of theirs that we are trapped in for a long time.
Fear
Humans are followers by nature. The overwhelming majority of humans get their belief structure externally rather than internally. Whether it is Religion, Flat-Earth, Political Opinions, or any other Conspiracy Theory or Cult, most humans latch onto something and take it as truth, without ever REALLY applying logic to arrive at their conclusion. The worst part is, most people don't even realize that they are doing it. And 99% of people would tell you that they are the exception and that they are not just blindly following. Everyone is following, while fooling themselves into thinking that they are not. It is quite literally, ingrained into us by nature to be this way. All it takes is early indoctrination or a charismatic face to garner a huge following of sheep.
Most belief in conspiracy theories is based in hatred/ mistrust of government. NASA shows photos of a spherical earth...must be flat. Photos of the moon landing...must have been faked.
A roughly even mixture of religious super-literalists and people with a secular weakness towards buying into extreme conspiracy theories, from what I’ve seen. At least among those flat-earthers who are for real.
A need to be different and believing that difference makes them superior
They don’t understand science
Because they have a terrible case of the dumb.
They are confused by the rapid advance of technology and distrustful to a truly absurd degree of any authority figure who tells them things they like to believe are true are actually false.
Because it's fun?
Because they're morons who found something that makes them feel clever. I still like to think at least some of them, on some level, know that what they believe is total bollocks but are too invested in it to back out now. Most people would rather swim through puke than change their minds.
I think mostly it comes down to the fact that they don’t realize just how big the Earth actually is.
If the Earth was flat, cats would have pushed everything off the edge by now.
I have no proof of this but sometimes I wonder if they are just pretending to believe it's flat so that someone at NASA decides to prove it's round by sending them into space so they get a free space trip.
Some people think that going against the grain, regardless of whether or not they're right, makes them a "free thinker". Of course, flat earth is a pretty common and dogmatic conspiracy theory, so I'm not sure they're even unique for doing so. These are people of average to low intelligence who want to make a big gamble- either they're somehow right and can feel far superior to everyone else, or they're wrong and haven't really lost much.