What Would GK Chesterton Have Thought of the Fashionable Fallacies of Our Age?

June 14, 2024, marks the 88th anniversary of Chesterton’s death, but his wit and wisdom lives on.

“When men stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.”

An acquaintance of mine recently took a weekend trip. He mentioned to me a little while later that he’d spent a fair amount of time with a certain gentleman, who’d expressed his own belief that the world is flat, during that trip. My acquaintance didn’t hesitate to laugh while mentioning this to me.

Flat-earthers, as they are labeled, are still uncommon. The spreading of misinformation via social media has helped make them less uncommon in recent years. A few high-profile figures, such as basketball star Kyrie Irving (who’d spent his one year of college at Duke), have publicly expressed their own skepticism about our world’s roundness. And I do wonder about the degree to which such beliefs are fueled by pride, a desperation to “know” that which the bulk of humanity knows not, that a person would readily believe in just about anything in order to have an excuse to consider himself intellectually superior.

The irony of my acquaintance’s ridicule occurred to me a few days later.


This particular acquaintance’s own political beliefs veer left, well into woke territory. The bulk of his friends share similar political sentiments. He constantly surrounds himself with those who’d oblige a man who prefers to be referred to as “she/her,” or perhaps “they/them,” and would apologize profusely in the event of any “misgendering” slip-ups which that delusional man would object to. The kicker is that most all of these friends of his are well-educated, if having degrees from prestigious colleges is considered the measure of education, and many of them are technologically well-versed enough to work in computer-related fields.

Continued below.