There’s a scene in the movie that more or less sums it up entirely. Flat Earth “scientist” Bob Knodel hypothesises that, if – as the global, sorry, international cabal of governments, astrophysicists, academics, kids with telescopes, and every other disciple of disinformation would have us believe – Earth rotates 360 degrees in 24 hours, it must rotate 15 degrees in one hour, and to prove this, a gyroscope should show the same.
And so, assuming Foucault got it totally wrong in 1852 but we’ve been pretending he didn’t because… because, Knodel acquires a $20,000 gyroscope to prove that, in fact, the Earth does not rotate 15 degrees an hour, or 360 degree in 24 hours, or ever.
“What we found is that when we turned on that gyroscope, we found the we picking up a drift. A 15 degree per hour drift,” he admits. “We obviously were not willing to accept that.”
Because that’s exactly how flat Earth conspiracy theory works. If it’s not the evidence you want, it isn’t real, and b-b-besides, planes don’t fly in the southern hemisphere and even if those flights are scheduled, they never actually take off, don’t you know. You can’t disprove that, and if you can, you’re a phony.
Director Daniel J. Clark’s flat Earth documentary Behind the Curve is hard to watch. Not because it’s so embarrassing (that too, though), but because it’s also a worrying indictment of the anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-everything-that-opposes-my-very-important-opinions “fake news” culture and its consequences. It’s a stupefying irony that a community of “sceptics” aren’t even sceptical. I mean, which is more plausible – that the Earth is a flat disc inside some kind of enormous artificial dome, and the stars, moon, sun, and other celestial things are fake, and some secret organisation of, like, almost everybody else is colluding to maintain this deception for its own inscrutable purposes; or that the Earth is round because it’s a fucking planet like the other planets.
And this sort uncritical thinking isn’t limited to flat Earth conspiracy theory – it extends to most other conspiracy theories too. The Sandy Hook school shootings was a hoax orchestrated by US politicians and hired actors to push gun control legislation that didn’t happen but that’s not relevant and disarm the population ahead of an economic collapse that also didn’t happen but that’s not relevant either, and totally not an otherwise ordinary mass murder perpetrated by a disturbed kid. The condensation visible behind airliners that occurs as a result of water vapour from jet engines freezing in the low ambient temperature above 7,500 metres are really biochemical sprays, funded by pharmaceutical companies to make people sick and sell more medication. References to “cheese pizza” in emails are ingeniously coded references to child porn and a Satanic sex abusers club, not cheese pizza.
But I guess Occam’s razor has two sides because it’s a razor, and it was probably developed by the FBI to kill people who ask too many questions anyway.
And it would be easy to ignore these absurdities, except it isn’t. The problem is that psychological biases, however stupid and irrational and demonstrably false, are manifested in reality. If somebody is convinced that vaccines are toxic and prescribed as part of some covert medical experiment because it was in this video on the internet, that person could also be responsible for wiping out humanity with chicken pox. Which perhaps isn’t the worst prospect for humanity, since it also conveniently wipes out anti-vaxxers.
In one excruciating moment in Behind The Curve, YouTube flat Earth and other conspiracy theories advocate Patricia Steele gets so close to the truth. Some members of the Flat earth community, she tells the camera, have started propagating conspiracy theories about her. One of these, for example, cites her name as incontrovertible proof that she’s an agency operative – because it’s Patricia. PatriCIA. CIA. You can’t make this shit up.
“I can’t prove any of it wrong. I could show people my birth certificate, my driver’s licence, photos of myself as a child, and they’ll say ‘well, if you’re CIA, all of that stuff can be constructed’,” she explains. “People will still say ‘you don’t have a real family’, that ‘you don’t have a brother and sister’, there’s nothing that I can do. So, anybody can believe whatever they want to believe about me, but I wonder if in their hearts, people who do that know they’re lying – or are they so conspiratorial, they actually believe it? Then it makes me worry about maybe things I believe in. Am I like another version of them?”
She doesn’t even pause – but I’m pausing for dramatic effect – before she concludes…
“But I know I’m not.”
So close, Patricia.