The facts as ordinary people understand them are a mere narcotic, and you’re urged to shake off the anesthetic effects and wake up to the flat reality.

You’re exhorted to submit, to surrender, to accede to some higher wisdom.

Like other popular conspiracy theories, it beckons outsiders with a language of fraternity, suggesting that those who accept the truth become at once a part of an intimate, enlightened group a fellowship of those in the know. Today the flat-earth gospel thrives on Facebook and YouTube, shared by way of memes and image macros, and on websites that look like they were designed in the mid-1990s. Belief in a flat earth has always been, in essence, a pre-scientific – or anti-scientific – delusion.Īnd yet despite this the belief endures - and in strange places. Part trend, part cult, and part virus, the flat-earth movement is as good a symbol as any of the diminished value of truth and intelligence in 2017 - and its constituency continues to grow at an alarming rate.Īs any enterprising schoolboy will tell you, misconceptions about the shape of the Earth were convincingly rectified some time in 6th century BC that the planet is a sphere had been postulated by Pythagoras, corroborated by Aristotle and further authenticated – with greater and greater accuracy – by mathematicians and astronomers thereafter, until it was demonstrated outright by circumnavigation in early 16th century AD. Their dogma has long infected social media and contaminates the bored and gullible every day. This lunatic fringe is inflexible, tireless and cannot be persuaded by evidence or reason. Or not “global,” I suppose, but in any case pernicious and worldwide. These are the convictions – the firm, unrelenting beliefs – of the Flat-Earthers, a group which – as its sobriquet would suggest – insists that the earth is not round, that it is protected by a glass dome and that the prevailing mistruths about its shape represent a global conspiracy of indoctrination and control. This drivel isn’t the product of my imaginative fancy. “Facts” themselves are highly suspect, naturally.

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Backwards flat symbol