The famous basketball player Shaquille O'Neill has stated that he is a supporter of the flat earth theory. Despite the comic tone of the statement, this message immediately hit the headlines of the media and caused a heated discussion among conspiracy theorists. RT asked a psychologist why the marginal Flat Earth Society is becoming mainstream and why people are beginning to believe in more and more incredible things.
NBA legend center player Shaquille O'Neal said he shared the position of Cleveland point guard Kyrie Irving, who said the Earth was flat.
It's true. The earth is flat. Look, there are three ways to manipulate consciousness: through what we read, see and hear. The first thing we are taught at school: Columbus discovered America. But think about it: when he got here, he met red-skinned people with long hair, smoking pipes of peace. So Columbus didn't discover America,”O'Neill said during his The Big Podcast. After this discouraging statement, the legendary basketball player continued to tease his co-hosts.
A few weeks earlier, Cleveland Cavaliers point guard Kyrie Irving made a similar statement, but later said he was only joking. Such comedic comments by famous athletes have caused a stir in the American segment of the Internet, because, as it turned out, the Society of the Flat Earth Supporters is becoming more and more popular.
The Flat Earth Society is a marginal organization even according to a variety of US conspiracy theorists and alternative historians following the trail of UFOs, Bigfoot, and Masonic conspiracies. So, the popular conspiracy channel on YouTube Secure Team has almost a million subscribers and regularly posts videos with supposedly alien objects and murky photographs of alien bases on the moon. In one of the published materials, the authors of the channel expressed regret for the "growing number of people who regressed to this ancient belief." The channel was immediately attacked by thousands of Flat Earth followers.
The society itself on its website declares that it is guided exclusively by scientific principles. According to the proponents of the theory, resorting to the method of Cartesian skepticism, the burden of proof lies with all who believe that the Earth is spherical. They regard the evidence as insignificant or fabricated. At the same time, they are happy to publish videos from low orbit, allegedly proving that the Earth is flat.
“The most reliable proof of a flat earth is the Bedford level experiment. Taken many times over a six-mile stretch of water, it has shown results that prove there is no curvature of the earth's surface,”the society's website says.
The experiment cited by the organization was carried out by the English inventor and founder of the society, Samuel Rowbotham, in 1838.
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Bedford experiment
Members of the community claim that our planet is a flat disc 40,000 kilometers in diameter, centered at the North Pole. Also, adherents of this theory deny the existence of gravity and the South Pole, instead of which a huge wall of ice extends around the disk.
The followers of this theory claim that all photographs of the Earth from space are generated on a computer, and the belief in a spherical Earth supports a global conspiracy of governments and scientists. Space flights are a hoax, and the moon landing was filmed jointly by Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky, based on a script by Arthur Clarke.
The society produces a huge amount of Internet content, literally flooding its supporters and opponents with a variety of "proofs": from obscure mathematical formulas to lists of quotes from the Bible. It got to the point that even fundamentalist Christians took up arms against the followers of the flat earth. Steven Anderson, a radical Baptist preacher who is himself spreading conspiracy theories about world government, lashed out at his followers.
Many alternative journalists, historians, and conspiracy theorists have suggested that government intelligence agencies may be behind the Flat Earth Society themselves, who want to ridicule any alternative worldview.
RT turned to the candidate of psychological sciences Alexander Neveev for a comment. The scientist explained that there are two reasons why people can suddenly begin to take anti-scientific postulates seriously.
“The first is external to a person. We receive a huge amount of information in the form of specially prepared information packages. We are simply told something, and we take it for granted. This is completely normal, since we do not need to learn absolutely everything from our own experience. You don't need to go to America to find out how people live there. But the side effect of this is that people have misunderstandings and fears that some forces may distort any information. The media saturate a person with news, facts, but no one is concerned with developing their understanding. As a result, we have a similar situation. No one has seen our globe with their own eyes, only in photographs, respectively, a huge amount of innuendo is possible,”said the psychologist.
“The second reason is that our minds are initially embedded in error systems - cognitive distortions and heuristics. Under the influence of these distortions, we tend to consider our version of events the most plausible. A person is not looking for a refutation of his beliefs. Our mind functions according to the principle of cognitive ease - what does not bother us, we tend to consider the truth. This is actually an illusion. Conspiracy theories exploit the problem that we cannot directly show a person proof to the contrary - to send him into orbit and show that the Earth is round. It is very difficult to explain to them mathematically, astronomically the parameters that made scientists come to this conclusion. It is very easy to say that scientists have lied and the Earth is flat, and it is very easy to perceive it,”the expert concluded.
Alexander Karpov