The Episode:
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The Story:
There is an increasing number of people on the Internet discussing the hypothesis that people have been deceived about the shape of the earth. The rate that people have been googling the term “flat earth” has been steadily increasing since January 2015, and took a huge jump in January 2016. It’s unusual to think that people can become so obsessed about something which, at least on the surface, has such little influence on their lives. This seems to demonstrate a couple of things: 1. in the information age, people are curious, and 2. people do not like being deceived, or having the feeling that they might be deceived.
A common question when this subject is raised is, why would someone even want to do such a thing? Why would someone want to deceive the world in such a way that seems so pointless and so abstract, so far away from the everyday lives of regular people? There are actually several reasons. The first is bureaucracy – if a national space administration of a large government were to lie, saying that they’d explored outer space, and in doing so, confirmed that the earth were a certain shape, they would have to continue to uphold that lie almost no matter what, in an attempt to continue their funding and justify their own positions. A second explanation is that powerful people want to control the symbols and the lenses with which we view the world, because, through that method, they can continue to manipulate our perspective of the world. Another explanation is that powerful, perhaps psychopathic people, have ends which are unfathomable to normal, empathetic people, because their concept of what the world should look like is so far removed from our own conception.
In this episode, I encourage you to join me in donning a tin-foil hat and imagining a world that has been manipulated into believing a lie about the shape of their earth. What might the world look like? Why would they do it? How would they do it? And why is it important that you keep wondering? Join me in a Coriolis-effecting, globe-spinning, firmament-penetrating episode of … The Paradise Paradox!
The Links:
An open letter to Neil Degrasse Tyson