Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything

Prologue

  • Page 3 Flat Earth is best understood not as a viable science with meaningful specifics but as the ultimate incarnation of conspiratorial thinking. Members of the movement believe governments and scientists are actively peddling a "globe lie" in order to control the world by tarnishing religious teachings or by making people feel insignificant next to the great expanse of outer space.
  • Page 4 Jan- Willem van Prooijen, a psychologist specializing in conspiracy theories, lays out five criteria that qualify a belief as a conspiracy theory: the theory must explain correlations between events and actors; the perpetrators must have acted deliberately; multiple people must have been involved in the plot; the plot must be ominous in its deception (and not a benevolent cover- up, like concealing a surprise birthday party); and the cover- up must be ongoing.
  • Page 4 Conspiracies theories are ways to construct order and meaning in times of uncertainty. They let us shape our fears into something we understand.

    1 | In the Beginning

  • Page 7 Samuel Birley Rowbotham was twenty-two, radical, and according to a socialist newspaper's account, occasionally high off his mind on laughing gas when he began imagining a new world in 1838.
  • Page 7 Conspiratorial thinking is not a weird pathology, experienced by some and absent in others. It's part of a mental process hardwired into all of us, from Rowbotham's era and beforehand and afterward. The same powers of abstraction that make humans good at detecting patterns (like anticipating storms when dark clouds gather) can make us imagine patterns where they don't exist, especially when we're feeling stressed or powerless. Rather than languish in the unknown, we tell ourselves stories about the secret causes of our troubles. All of us do this.
  • Page 8 Conspiracy theories help us feel safe by providing an explanation for things that feel incomprehensible and beyond our control.
  • Page 13 Medical hoaxes prey on many of the same thought processes as conspiracy theories. Faced with frightening diagnoses or unaffordable treatments, we go looking for the One Weird Trick that will put us back in control of our health. It's easier than accepting the harsh reality that a cure might not be within our reach.
  • Page 13 Sometimes bogus medicine is actually an extension of conspiracy theory. The anti-vaccination movement that gained popularity in the late 1990s falsely claims that vaccines cause autism and can lead to a host of illnesses, and that governments and medical authorities are covering it up, for nefarious reasons ranging from pharmaceutical profits to population control.
  • Page 13 Theories like these help people grapple with feelings of powerlessness by positioning other human beings, with agendas and motivations, as responsible for medical conditions. In doing so, believers can avoid the uncomfortable truth: that life and death can lie with something like a virus, which cannot be voted out of office or sued for medical malpractice.
  • Page 15 Under their definition, "zetetic" suggested a brand of nothing-is-sacred skepticism, calling into question every revered figure from the Queen to Christ.
  • Page 17 Healthy skepticism allows for doubt without making doubt one's default position.
  • Page 19 Conspiracy theories -- sources of meaning making and blame casting
  • Page 25 Legendary astronomers Nicholas Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton had all estimated different distances between Earth and sun. Carpenter claimed the discrepancy should call the entire field of modern astronomy into question.

    2 | The Tyrant

  • Page 32 belief in faith healing and alternative medicine persists at unusually high rates among Flat Earthers, so much so that a Vanderbilt University researcher in 2018 used Flat Earth forums for a study on anti-doctor sentiment. In my own years traversing the conspiracy scene, Flat Earthers must have pitched me on half a dozen cure-all diets, from raw foods to veganism.
  • Page 33 In a 2007 Pew poll, 36 percent of Americans who believed in a god said they'd personally witnessed "a divine healing of an illness or injury."
  • Page 39 A funny thing sometimes happens with cultic religious groups in disarray. Rather than dissolve when a spiritual leader disappoints them or a promised paradise turns to hell, many groups double down on their beliefs.
  • Page 39 These groups often find trivial factors to blame for their disappointments, like a preacher for misinterpreting a prophecy, or themselves for possessing insufficient piety.
  • Page 39 They seldom find fault with their underlying belief system, proclaiming that something else, not the prophecy, has failed.

    3 | The Joke

  • Page 57 Shenton soon became convinced his doubters had ulterior motives: the gatekeepers of knowledge were engaged in some shadowy conspiracy against him.
  • Page 62 Attendees "tried in vain to disprove his theories," but only became confused about their own arguments, the East Kent Gazette reported after a 1961 lecture.
  • Page 63 The strength of that conviction was tested in spring 1961, when the United States and the Soviet Union both managed to send men into space. British journalists who remembered the initial commotion over the first IFERS meetings called Shenton for his opinion on the launches. He held firm. "It would not have been possible to put a man in Space if the world was round, because if the world was revolving the man could not be recovered," he told the Daily Mirror after the first American breached the planet's boundaries that May.
  • Page 64 (Later in his career, he would refuse to call Flat Earth a "theory," insisting that he knew it to be fact). "Science cannot shout us down. Take the moon, for example. It's transparent you know," he said, adding that his group believed so because they thought they'd seen stars shining through it. "I don't believe man will ever get there," Shenton said of the moon, "but if he does he'd better be ready to come right back. There isn't anything much to land on."
  • Page 64 NASA sent the unmanned space probe Lunar Orbiter 1 to orbit the moon. On August 23, 1966, the probe sent back the first picture of Earth from the lunar orbit. The black- and- white photo shows the curved edge of the moon, and beyond it our decidedly round planet. What inspired awe in some viewers -- the fullest view of Earth to date, the sweeping view of our home wreathed in cloud and shadow -- nearly prompted an existential crisis for Flat Earthers. "I confess," Shenton told the Observer days after the photograph was released, "that it really knocked me. It was a terrible shock." ... But he quickly recovered himself and suggested a reasonable explanation for the picture. "It is probably one of the non-luminous bodies between us and the moon," he said. After subsequent space missions took pictures of the round planet, Shenton started alleging an outright cover-up.
  • Page 65 Some of the pictures have been blatantly doctored. Studio shots, probably." Shenton's talk of staged photographs was an echo from the future. In 1970, the United Press International wire service polled 1,721 Americans and discovered "wide support for a theory that the government and the news media conspired to hoodwink the public with a fake telecast of a Moon landing."
  • Page 66 If God had intended humanity to walk on the moon "he'd put it closer by," the man said -- sounding like the conspiracy theorists of 2020 who refused to wear protective face masks during a deadly pandemic because doing so would "throw God's wonderful breathing system out the door."
  • Page 71 Both men, who witnessed the fields of natural sciences and evolution gaining strength and offering alternatives to biblical theories, claimed Globe Earth theory was an attempt by scientists to deny God and hide the truth of the world.
  • Page 72 But Charles Johnson put forth an even broader conspiracy theory: the global domination plot. Going further even than Kaysing's geopolitical paranoia about the moon landing as a cover-up of US military failures, Johnson alleged that Russia and Rome were about to unite, with England's backing.
  • Page 72 Johnson's wording might have been muddled, but it echoed a growing body of conspiratorial language about a New World Order or a One World Government that hoped to bring the planet under its sole control. Fears of secretive ruling groups had been latent in the West since the late 1700s, when popular conspiracy texts had blamed the Illuminati for the French Revolution.
  • Page 72 In the hands of paranoid groups like the far-right John Birch Society, the term became something deeply sinister. Spurred by a fierce Christian nationalism, militant anti-leftism, and no small measure of racism and antisemitism, this crowd alleged a worldwide conspiracy to strip the United States of its sovereignty and place it under control of a shadowy world government. These theories often blamed a combination of communist and Jewish interests, in the latter case building off centuries of antisemitic hoaxes that accused Jews of pulling the strings of world power.
  • Page 73 "The space program is in the entertainment field," Johnson told a reporter many years later, in 1994. "We're not mad about it. We're not wringing our hands over it. It's entertainment for the masses, like a perpetual Star Trek going on. But there's not reality in it."

    4 | The Reboot

  • Page 77 in 2015, the year Donald Trump launched a conspiracy-laden presidential campaign that many dismissed as a joke, Flat Earth began a much-mocked comeback. The joke was on the doubters.
  • Page 78 Maybe Flat Earthers know the sensation, but it was new for me: the disorienting knowledge that everyone around you subscribes to an interpretation of truth incompatible with your own.
  • Page 78 Perhaps, I thought, as the conversation turned to conspiracy theories about school shootings, we were experiencing a disconnect on a level that simply could not have happened during the Johnsons' lifetime. This six-hundred-person Flat Earth festival, this president who doled out fictions via his Twitter account, this whole choose-your-own-reality moment, was a product of the internet.
  • Page 79 Early users predicted that the internet would democratize knowledge and lead to radical equality across the globe. What they got instead was a World Wide Web as flawed and brilliant as the spectrum of grifters and do-gooders and trolls who inhabit
  • Page 79 It also made it easier than ever to sow the seeds of a hoax or find like-minded individuals who share your suspicions.
  • Page 80 In 1983, neo-Nazi (and former regular Nazi) George Dietz launched a message board for antisemitic conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial. ... Conspiratorial cults also used the internet for recruiting. In 1996, a set of rambling essays about an alien religion began appearing on offbeat discussion boards, like those for militias and libertarians. ... The posts directed readers to a website for Heaven's Gate, a California-based cult that would achieve infamy the following year when thirty-nine of its forty-one members put on matching tracksuits, placed $5.75 in their pockets, then died together in a chillingly tidy suicide ritual.
  • Page 81 The group believed its internet legacy was more important than letting all its members board the spaceship to salvation. ... The early internet wasn't all white supremacists and alien cults. But its subculture status meant conspiracy theories flourished online. By the mid-1990s, the internet was "a fertile garden for conspiracy theories because of the hidden nature of it," Jessie Daniels, a City University of New York professor of sociology focusing on inequality on the internet, told the idea that you have special knowledge, that you know things other people don't, and that if people would just pay attention to the signs, then they would make sense of it."
  • Page 82 a new school of truthers took up the mantle of the internet's most outrageous. This new conspiratorial clique was typified by two men: Mike Adams and Alex Jones. Though neither was a Flat Earther, both would help build an internet that rewarded the most outlandish movements -- especially Flat Earth.
  • Page 84 While Adams was using conspiracy theories to warp the inner workings of the internet, his sometimes colleague Alex Jones was using the internet to turn them into a formidable political force. Since 1999, Jones has presided over Infowars, one of the web's premier conspiracy sites.
  • Page 85 Jones got lucky. In July 2001, amid ramblings about the New World Order, he claimed the US government would orchestrate a terror attack as a pretense to enslave the masses. The White House would probably blame Osama bin Laden, leader of the terror group al-Qaeda, Jones speculated. Two months later, al-Qaeda militants crashed planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field on September 11, 2001, in one of the most paranoia-provoking events in US history. Jones cried vindication. "I'll tell you the bottom line," Jones told listeners to his show after the attack. "98 percent chance this was a government-orchestrated controlled bombing."
  • Page 85 The 9/11 attacks would popularize a new strain of conspiracy culture, with Infowars at the forefront.
  • Page 89 In 2007, historian Christine Garwood published the book Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea, which traced the movement from Rowbotham to the Johnsons.
  • Page 91 ‘No way. That thing can't actually exist. What are they on about?'" he told me. "So I joined out of curiosity, just to kind of find out what's going on. That's how I got hooked.
  • Page 93 Conspiracy theorists who couldn't keep up with the scene's most bombastic personalities found themselves getting trampled. In 2005, a young man named Dylan Avery struck internet gold when he released Loose Change, an amateurish documentary claiming the US government had arranged the 9/11 attacks as a pretext for the Iraq War. Loose Change became perhaps "the first Internet blockbuster," Vanity Fair wrote the following year.
  • Page 94 Jones would go on to apply Loose Change logic to virtually every traumatic event. He accused an escalating series of horrors of being "false flags," a conspiracy term for a staged event designed to further some nefarious aim.

    5 | The Rabbit Hole

  • Page 101 Conspiracy theories -- endlessly intriguing, and tailored to our worst suspicions -- became one of the best-performing products in the attention economy. The truth became less profitable than fiction. So Facebook and YouTube, two of the internet's largest empires, let their reality-warping algorithms run for years, flattening the world around them.
  • Page 102 "YouTube positioned itself very early on as alternative media," Kevin Roose, a New York Times technology columnist, told me. "It was not just different from TV in the sense that it was lower-budget, mostly amateur, and not as centralized. It was also seen as more real, more authentic."
  • Page 102 Sixty-one percent of respondents to a December 2018 Pew poll said the media deliberately withholds important stories.
  • Page 103 Far from being discrediting, YouTubers' lack of official media titles can serve as a form of conspiratorial street cred. These are real people willing to say what the media won't, the reasoning goes. Their amateur explanations can override expertise, especially for the many people who make YouTube their primary news source. "YouTube, itself, has cultivated an ecosystem of distrust in official narratives," Roose said. The ideal YouTuber is an obsessive (and likely unwell) person who mainlines videos morning to night, their viewing habits providing YouTube with an increasingly detailed personality profile that the company can use to deliver ever more targeted content.
  • Page 104 Which videos kept people on the website the longest? "Extreme videos are extremely good for watch time,"
  • Page 105 In 2017, Chaslot did an experiment. "Is Earth flat or round?" he typed into Google. Of the first twenty results in the search, 20 percent favored Flat Earth theory, he found. Those results already offered a massively warped reality: far fewer than 20 percent of people are Flat Earthers, and 0 percent of facts support the theory.
  • Page 110 "There was a whisper that was being passed around content creators -- not just ours but other people -- that if you made a Flat Earth video, you would get more hits and you would get five hundred percent more comments, which track into the YouTube algorithm," Sargent told me.
  • Page 115 April 2018, San Diego internet personality Nasim Aghdam packed a semiautomatic pistol in her car, drove overnight to YouTube's San Bruno, California, headquarters, and fired her way into the company's lobby, where she shot three YouTube employees (nonfatally) and herself (fatally). Although she ran a popular YouTube channel for fitness videos and vegan activism, Aghdam had become convinced YouTube was targeting her videos for suppression.
  • Page 119 Facebook's polarizing potential is so well known that multiple nations have used the platform to sow political discord in rival countries.

    6 | Alone in a Flat World

  • Page 126 But almost universal in this community -- more binding even than belief in a flat planet -- is the experience of ridicule and social rejection. Old acquaintances unfriend Flat Earthers on Facebook, and in real life, after seeing one too many posts calling NASA a satanic psyop. Employers question their sanity. Family members find somewhere else to spend Thanksgiving. It's a loss that foregrounds every conversation at Flat Earth meetups, so common that some Flat Earthers describe themselves with the language of persecuted minorities: announcing one's belief in the theory is referred to as "coming out," a term most commonly associated with the LGBTQ community.
  • Page 127 Flat Earthers often wear rejection as a badge of honor. ... The theories, in other words, thrive on antagonism. ... By definition, conspiracy theories imply a coordinated plot by a hostile group.
  • Page 128 But the most successful conspiracy theories also imply the existence of another group: victims. ... Often, groups that have been dealt a bad hand can be more likely to perceive the world in a conspiratorial light due to past suffering, be it the result of a deliberate conspiracy or passive societal failings.
  • Page 128 In their book American Conspiracy Theories, which compiles decades of data, researchers Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent found a trend of conspiratorial thinking among the disenfranchised (minorities, the poor, and people without a college education) and among groups fearful of losing status.
  • Page 129 Jockeying for position as the most absurd conspiracy theory of the moment, QAnon and Flat Earth frequently overlap in membership, to the chagrin of some QAnon believers who think Flat Earth is a step too far.
  • Page 130 A Reddit board for people who've lost friends or family to the theory called QAnonCasualties had more than 150,000 members by April 2021. QAnon Facebook groups double as pity parties. "Happy Thanksgiving everyone!" one member wrote in a popular QAnon group on Thanksgiving 2018. "My children have chosen to not include me in festivities this year bc their minds are not open to the truth, but I am Thankful for PRESIDENT TRUMP and the WW1WGA [a QAnon slogan] family!! If anyone else is spending today by themselvs I would be happy to exchange photos of our meals."
  • Page 131 Rachel Bernstein is a psychologist who has spent decades helping people exit cults and alternative belief movements. Conspiracy theories and cults rely on similar information systems, closing believers into an ideological echo chamber, she told me.
  • Page 133 Thompson promotes "flat-smacking," an aggressive brand of Flat Earth evangelism that involves confronting strangers in public. This usually consists of heckling someone in a parking lot or at an airport baggage claim, and is about as unpersuasive as you'd imagine. But the real victories are the videos: Thompson and his crowd often record their confrontations, in the hopes of upsetting someone so dramatically that the video goes viral.
  • Page 135 "Pretty much, yeah," he told me. "I wouldn't waste time talking to people who don't know where they live. It's pretty basic. As far as being friends and stuff, you're a reporter, you need information, I'll deliver it to you. But if you wanted to go get a drink, I probably wouldn't want to hang out with you, to be honest. You believe in cartoon globes. Like, I'm sorry, but that's like an adult believing in Santa Claus."
  • Page 135 This current of overplayed indignation runs through the conspiracy movement at large. Suffering for one's belief can be a form of street cred among truthers, even among less confrontational Flat Earthers like Wolfe.
  • Page 138 "There is a lot of fear of infiltration. Everyone's looking over their shoulder,"
  • Page 139 "Flat Earth has brought me a sense of purpose I didn't have before."
  • Page 144 Serena joined #DenounceQ, an anti-QAnon movement composed of former believers and people trying to pry their loved ones from the conspiratorial clique. One man in her group lost both his parents to the conspiracy theory, she told me. "He's been trying to tell [QAnon followers] what we know: that Q's just a franchise for profit and entertainment, and it has estranged him from his mom and dad." ... Cultists and the QAnon community both "isolate their followers and turn their followers against all other sources," she told me. "They also create apathy by telling people, ‘Just trust me. Trust the plan. We've got this.' They've created a complete circle: no matter where you go, they have an answer. But all the answers are nonsensical." ... Close-knit conspiracy circles like QAnon and Flat Earth can absolutely "fall under the rubric of cult definition," said Rachel Bernstein, the psychologist who focuses on cult exit.
  • Page 146 For some Flat Earthers whose real-life friends ditch them over their faith, online acquaintances are the closest they'll come to a support group.

    7 | Mike

  • Page 149 In the mid-1840s, when Samuel Rowbotham popularized Flat Earth as a "zetetic" science, he preached that zetetics should believe only what they could personally observe.
  • Page 169 Mike's path to Flat Earth was "a fine line between two things," Hawkins said. "I'm here to say that it started out as a marketing approach -- and it was my idea. Mike was looking for a way to get out there into the public. And I said, ‘Well, what you need is a controversy. So you should tell everybody that the earth is flat. That would definitely do it.' That's how it started." But after publicly associating his name with the theory, the already-conspiratorial rocket man went looking for more information about Flat Earth, Hawkins said. "Mike actually investigated the truth behind it. He wanted to see it for himself. So we went from an idea to an actual investigation." Hughes began networking with more established Flat Earthers and showing up at conventions. "I think that generated awareness and involvement for him. It just went on its course," Hawkins said. "It became something to him."
  • Page 170 For all their talk of independent thinking and scientific inquiry, most are content to convert based on information they've gleaned secondhand on social media.

    8 | Flat and Fascist

  • Page 171 much of the Nazi chatter comes from well-meaning Flat Earthers who compare everything they dislike to Hitler. According to this crowd, NASA -- which, to be fair, absolutely did hire Nazi scientists in its bid to win the space race -- is an ongoing fascist plot.
  • Page 172 A second faction of Flat Earthers makes mouth noises about disavowing Hitler, but regards the Holocaust as a hoax. ... Belief in conspiracy theories is a unifying feature of extremist groups of every political and religious stripe. "The frequency of conspiracy theories within all these groups suggests that they play an important social and functional role within extremism itself," wrote the authors of a 2010 study. ... Conspiracy theories "hold extremist groups together and push them in a more extreme and sometimes violent direction."
  • Page 178 Conspiracy theories are not all inherently antisemitic, scholar Jovan Byford writes, "but it is also true that discernible within many conspiracy narratives, even those that are not explicitly targeting Jews, are worrying, and often subtle, reminders of the conspiracy theory's earlier, overtly antisemitic incarnations."
  • Page 185 An employee style guide from the neo-Nazi news site The Daily Stormer explains the dynamic well. "The tone of the site should be light," reads the manual, which leaked in 2017. "Most people are not comfortable with material that comes across as vitriolic, raging, nonironic hatred. The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not.
  • Page 186 Historian Paul Hanebrink writes that, in the medieval imagination, the figure of the Jew served as an abstract threat around which Christianity -- then embroiled in messy sectarian infighting -- could rally and solidify. Antisemitic conspiracy theories were a cohesive force.
  • Page 191 "Poisoning the well" is an interesting metaphor. A conspiratorial phrase, it refers to attempts to discredit a movement. I hear it often in truther scenes, usually when one theorist accuses another of selling out or betraying the cause.

    9 | Away from the Edge

  • Page 194 I began actively monitoring the Flat Earth community in 2017, half as a joke. Whenever the day's news felt too crazy, I could check back in on the Flat Earth movement and feel a sense of comparative normalcy. At least most of the country had a firmer tether in reality, I consoled myself in those moments. But the ensuing years stripped me of that smugness. Over the course of a wildly conspiratorial Trump presidency, the United States and the world at large had started to embrace Flat Earth–level delusions.
  • Page 195 Flat Earth wasn't the only community being annexed by this movement, which also believed that Trump was on the cusp of executing his opponents for occult sex crimes against children. By the 2020 election, an increasingly comingled conspiracy movement composed of QAnon and Flat Earth believers was converting a paranoid wing of the Republican Party itself. Ninety-seven QAnon supporters ran for Congress in 2020.
  • Page 196 People turn to conspiracy theories in moments of instability. "Conspiracy theories are a natural reaction to social situations that elicit fear and uncertainty," psychologist Jan-Willem van Prooijen writes. "Specifically, the more strongly people experience such aversive emotions, the more likely it is that they assign blame for distressing events to different groups."
  • Page 200 I would like my old neighbors to stop invoking a fictional cannibalism ring when the diner down the road takes basic health precautions during a pandemic. I would like to live through an election devoid of conspiracy theories about vote rigging and racial minorities. But when an increasingly vocal population believes they live on a completely different planet, how can I find common ground for conversation? When some weirdo is sending spittle flying in the direction of my kid while yelling about a hoax he saw on the internet, how am I supposed to politely debunk his premises?
  • Page 203 In short, bans and moderation work -- up to a point.
  • Page 203 But while Silicon Valley giants like YouTube can curb the spread of conspiracy theories by taking away their artificial algorithmic boost, big tech firms are unlikely to deliver us, as a species, from the meaning-making thought processes that misfire when we craft conspiracy theories.
  • Page 208 Robbie Davidson told me his Flat Earth international conferences depend on the crowds of media that attend (that includes me, twice), plus the late-night talk show staffers and the YouTube clowns like Logan Paul who've trolled the events. "We need it. We need it a hundred and ten percent," he told me, "because with YouTube completely doing the things that they're doing, we need the Logan Pauls, we need the late-night. We need all the media. Because, again, every time they do it, they do us favors, because they say two words: ‘Flat Earth.' That's all we need."
  • Page 209 And yet, at the risk of giving Flat Earthers exactly what they want, we need to pay attention to them. Movements at the peripheries do not always stay on the sidelines.
  • Page 209 "The flat earth and pro-Trump movements share strands of the same conspiratorial, counter-factual DNA," I wrote in a 2018 article, when QAnon was still embryonic. I added that the overlap "has resulted in forums and Facebook groups like the 101-member ‘QAnon flat earthers club,' which accuses Hillary Clinton of being a pedophile and German Chancellor Angela Merkel of being Adolf Hitler's daughter. When Earth is flat, other untruths are trivial."
  • Page 210 Rachel Bernstein, the cult-exit psychologist, said cults and conspiratorial movements are cousins, in that their followers form insular sects. Followers of both cults and conspiracy theories often grow fiercely protective of their cliques, she told me; you're either helping the movement, or actively hurting it.
  • Page 210 True, Flat Earth has no king-like figure at its center, unlike the most infamous cults. Instead, Flat Earth's followers keep each other in line, surveilling each other for signs of deviancy, and corralling themselves closer together, away from the outside world.
  • Page 212 If conspiracy theorists are like cult members, maybe it's no surprise that they won't abandon their beliefs over a few inconvenient facts. In order to bring believers back from the edge, maybe we need to approach debunking less like a debate and more like holding a friend's hand as they leave a terrible, dependent relationship.
  • Page 212 Keep in communication with that person. Remind them that another world exists outside of their faith community. This, in itself, can be difficult, especially when the group preaches ideals that are baffling, even immoral, to the person on the outside.
  • Page 214 Conspiracy theories preach suspicion and prey on our fears. Inherently divisive, they thrive when we mistrust others and wall ourselves behind our personal paranoias. Fittingly, one of the best ways out of conspiratorial thinking can be to place our faith in others.
  • Page 214 Trust can be frightening, especially for people steeped in a paranoid theory. It requires vulnerability and the confidence that something new will be ready to catch and support a person when they finally let go of an idea that has carried them for so long.
  • Page 215 Knowing as little as I do -- as little as anyone does -- about the looming future,
  • Page 215 I understand why my Flat Earther friends want to believe they live in a different world, a finite world that does not expand into the endless vacuum of space but ends with a simple answer in the form of a dome or an ice wall. Flat Earth is a bracket on understanding. It narrows the world to a safe frame.