Some of the Cleverest People I Know Are Flat-Earthers... [Part I]
Some people find it difficult to grasp the complexities of the debate between flat-earthers and globe-ists, so to help you I’ve devised a simple experiment you can conduct at home.
Take a Kilner jar
Fill it with 100 red ants and 100 black ants.
Shake the jar
Observe.
Alternatively, you could perform an even simpler experiment like I did on my Telegram channel the other day. Just launch a new thread with the words “Think it’s about time we had a flat earth thread. You’re all so strangely reticent on the subject.” Having lit the touch paper stand a good distance back and enjoy the fireworks.
These fights are so much more enjoyable when you haven’t yourself (yet) got a dog in them. They also afford a useful opportunity to assess the tone of the opposing sides. Quite often, I find, the way people make their points can be as instructive a tell as the actual substance of their arguments. If they come across as angry, indignant, defensive, vicious or underhand for example, it inclines me to think that their case isn’t quite as strong as they pretend it to be.
I first noticed this in my days fighting the Climate Wars. Back then - as now, come to think of it - there were only a handful of people publicly contradicting the official ‘global warming’ narrative. Some were elderly scientists no longer dependent on academic tenure and therefore more inclined to speak their mind; some were maverick journalists, like myself and Christopher Booker, who weren’t averse to being dismissed by people we despised as ‘anti-science’ lunatics.
Against us was arrayed a multi-billion dollar - now approaching multi-trillion dollar - coalition of academics, politicians, activists, corporate rent-seekers, teachers, celebrities, media whores and so on, all pushing the green agenda. The imbalance of money, power, and media clout was so vast you did rather wonder why they bothered to engage with us. Surely if our sceptical arguments were so feeble, and their science so cast iron, the more sensible thing would have been to ignore us completely?
But they didn’t. Instead, they devoted a chunk of their considerable resources to try to make us look like fools and to make our lives miserable. Sceptical scientists were denied the right to publish in any of the peer-reviewed journals or - in the case of Willie Soon - were pettifoggingly demoted by their university to a smaller, more remote office. Journalists like Booker were regularly reported to what was then known as the Press Complaints Commission, and forced laboriously and time-consumingly to defend every true word they had written. In my own case, the BBC teamed up with Rockerfeller-funded scientist Sir Paul Nurse and the Guardian newspaper to perform a hit job on me in the form of a Horizon documentary partly designed to show just how little I supposedly knew about ‘climate science.’
Now I don’t know about you but if somebody makes a claim against me which I know to be ludicrously, risibly inaccurate I don’t waste a lot of energy worrying about it. The other day, for example, someone accused me on social media of being a high level freemason, based on the fact that I had identified with Gawain and the Green Knight in one of my podcasts. This bothered me about as much as it would have done if someone had pointed to my cat and said: “That’s definitely a dog, that is.” It’s the kind of comment which elicits, at most, a bemused shrug of the shoulders. Definitely not something that eats you up inside and has you plotting dire revenge against the perpetrator of this vile calumny.
As with climate change ‘denial’, so with the flat earth. Though I’m not yet at the point where I believe globe theory to be as big a pile of confected nonsense as I know man-made global warming theory to be, I’ve definitely noticed some similarities in the way their proponents behave. It is not enough for them to prove their opponents’ arguments wrong using ‘scientific’ argument. No, they must ridicule them, marginalise them, humiliate them, destroy them, crush them utterly. Now why would anyone wish to do that to their opponent unless they considered them to be a threat?
Let’s give the globe-ists the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are correct: that flat-earth theory is indeed a load of bollocks. What I’d like to ask them in this case is: what exactly is it that is so special about the globe earth paradigm that makes them so passionately keen to defend it? Or, to put it another way, why when they encounter a flat-earther putting forward the flat earth case don’t they just respond in the same way as I - you too, probably - would if someone claimed that our cat was a dog? Why do they care so much about an issue on which, wherever the truth lies, isn’t going to make the slightest impact on anyone’s life?
Most ‘conspiracy theories’ - once accepted - have significant mental consequences. JFK and 9/11, for example, will change for ever your understanding of the relationship between people and their government. False flags like the Manchester Arena bombing will make you sharply reconsider the nature of the ‘war on terror’. Death of Diana will stop you ever again feeling rosy towards the Royal Family. Paul Is Dead makes it almost impossible to enjoy - if you ever did - another Beatles song. And so on.
Obviously, flat earth has some consequences too. It means kissing goodbye to whatever respect you may have had for Galileo, Newton, Copernicus, Brian Cox and even, probably, dear old Patrick Moore (the monocled astronomer, I mean, not the Greenpeace co-founder). You might feel like chucking out the antique globe that you used to like spinning around on your writing desk or laughing scornfully every time you see the BBC’s globe logo. But these consequences, such as they are, are fairly minor ones. About the worst thing that could happen - and it does, quite a lot, I fear - is that you might become a bit of a flat earth bore whenever you corner anyone you suspect of being susceptible to your theory. You’re not going to become a different person, though, or any kind of menace to society. No more so, at any rate, than are subscribers to the myriad other conspiracy theories out there.
Do you see what I’m getting at here? Flat earth is just one conspiracy theory among many. Yet for reasons I’m struggling to understand it has been singled out as the ne plus ultra of deranged credulousness. And not just by Normies but even, if social media chat is to be believed, by people who profess to be Awake.
Now I can understand where the Normies are coming from because I used to be one myself. But the Awake anti-flat-earthers I do not understand at all for their position strikes me as so utterly inimical to the state of being Awake. To be Awake, surely, is to have reached that point of understanding where you realise that anything and everything you have been taught about the world - from its science to its history to its very shape - is potentially a lie. To be Awake, surely also, is to adopt a degree of “I have been wrong in the past, so I might be wrong again” humility.
But when I read supposedly Awake people attacking flat-earthers on social media and elsewhere, I’m not getting any of that judicious scepticism, still less any of that humility. What I’m getting, instead, is people acting like complete cocks; people making the kind of Appeals to Authority which any truly Awake person should have learned to shun long ago; people behaving with exactly the sort of intolerance they so resent experiencing themselves, from Normies, when they broach apparently more acceptable conspiracy theories like JFK or 9/11. Are they just being stupid? Or lazily hypocritical? Or is there, perhaps, something more sinister going on here?
The answer, I suspect, is a mixture of the three. Part of the problem is something I addressed in an earlier essay on the subject of the Purple Pilled. That is, people who have taken the red-pill but still want to keep one foot in the world of the blue-pilled, and who consequently are forever on the look out for ‘conspiracy theories’ they can dismiss out of hand to show how rational and sensible they are really. Flat earth serves their purposes perfectly.
Another is down to conditioning. Yes, of course, everyone who has gone down the rabbit hole imagines themselves to have escaped the matrix and freed their minds from the mental shackles, the propaganda, the psyops and so on which the System uses to control us. But every time I see someone wheel out variants on that tired old phrase “it’s designed to discredit our cause and muddy the waters”, I think to myself “How come you’re so sure that you’re not the one who is being played here?”
I may once have written an essay on this very phrase. If I didn’t I should have done. I think there’s something lazy, second-hand and intellectually dishonest about it. Too often Awake people use it without thinking, in much the same knee-jerk way Normies do when they trot out phrases like “Holocaust denier” or “conspiracy theorist”. It smacks to me not of a considered response but a Pavlovian one, like that of a dog who has been trained by the system to bark angrily every time he hears the boo phrase ‘flat earth’. The person who uses the ‘discredit our cause’ cliche wants you to know that he is nobody’s fool. But what I tend to think when I hear it is “actually you are somebody’s fool - and that somebody is probably the person at one of the three-letter agencies who devised the ‘discredits our cause’ trope - and then inveigled it into Awake groups everywhere.”
Sure, I recognise that ‘flooding the zone’ with disinformation and inserting bad actors into the truth movement are both widely used tactics of the Predator Class. But it does not automatically follow that this is the case with flat earth and the people propounding it. Or not all of them. I’ve read globe-ists claim, for example, that Eric Dubay - probably the world’s go-to flat earth apologist - is in fact a 33rd degree freemason and agent of the Illuminati. But even supposing it’s true, that’s not a refutation of his arguments, it’s merely an ad hom. If our enemies are as devious as I think they are, it’s entirely conceivable that they would infiltrate one of their own into our camp and have him say true things in order for these true things subsequently to made to look untrue when he was finally outed as a wrong ‘un. Isn’t that the point of Russell Brand, for example?
My other big problem with the ‘it discredits our cause’ argument is that it’s based on a false premise. It presupposes that the world is chock full of Normies just itching to go down the rabbit hole but unable to do so because it would mean throwing in their lot with flat-earthers. But that’s just not the case, is it? It’s not flat-earth that puts them off: it’s the whole shebang. To them, the very idea that their governments might conspire against them, stage false-flags to frighten them, spray the skies to poison them, or force them to take jabs designed to kill and maim them, is anathema. Scapegoating flat earthers doesn’t help our cause. It just does the Enemy’s ‘divide-and-rule’ work for them.
[Ctd in Part II]
