I just read at GQ.com an interesting interview with Daniel Clark, who directed the documentary "Behind the Curve" that I mentioned in my first post in this topic. Here are some excerpts:
GQ: What were some of the things you learned by spending so much time with flat earthers?
Daniel Clark: The fascinating thing was there were so many different school of thoughts in the community on what they believe to be true. There’s a dome. There are walls on the edge of the Earth. But do the walls end at some point, or does it just go on forever? There are a lot of questions these people don’t have answers to. They don’t know what’s in the sky, because we’re not allowed to go there. They don’t know what’s on the ends of the Earth because we’re not allowed past the border. So, they start becoming more accepting of theories that are introduced to them.
Because they’re flat earthers, they don’t have to believe anything they don’t have definitive proof of, which means the only thing they know for sure is that the Earth is flat. But it’s a very open and accepting group. As long as your starting point is the Earth is flat, everyone is open to listening.
What was it about flat earthers that interested you?
When we started making the documentary, we realized we had an opportunity to use flat earthers as an extreme example of conspiracy theorists. I had worked with a camera operator who was a huge conspiracy theorist, like he had solved the O.J. Simpson case, and even he said flat earth was a step too far for him. Flat earth is the ultimate conspiracy theory, because most people can agree the Earth is in fact a globe. But you see the same traits and actions from groups who, whether it is political ideologies or religion, will defend themselves and their beliefs and always ignore the evidence. You see the same traits and actions in flat earthers, and hopefully you see those traits within yourself too if you choose to be self reflective.
And there is a danger in believing in things that are not true.
Yeah. There’s a danger in taking your beliefs so far that you’re willing to harm people because of them. If you can’t trust anyone, or trust anything, and everyone is your enemy, that can manifest itself in very dangerous ways, and we’ve seen that all over the world in really horrible ways. It’s great to be skeptical, but you can’t always start from nothing.
And the point of bringing in psychiatrists and psychologists was not to tell them that what they believe in isn’t true.
We didn’t bring psychiatrists and psychologists into the movie to tell us what’s wrong with flat earthers. We wanted them to talk about the cognitive behavior behind it and how someone can believe in something so strongly. What’s going on in their brains, that they won’t accept the evidence that has been presented to them over and over. How can they believe every photo ever from NASA was a lie? It’s tough for people to get to that point. But these people have.
What do you think would have to happen for flat earthers to believe, either 100 percent that they are correct, that the Earth is definitely flat, or to change their mind and be convinced that the Earth isn’t actually flat?
For some people, whatever they believe is never going to change no matter what you show them. If you sent a flat earther to space, even if they saw the globe through the window, they would say they’re in an anti-gravity chamber that the government created, that they had been drugged to believe they walked into a shuttle, and that what was outside their window was a projection. Now, that’s not everybody. There are certain people who are on the fence, and there’s a lot of experiments you can do to test the curvature of the Earth. But to do that, you need a lot of precise equipment and to work with people that you can trust. You also have to be able to believe your own evidence.
Some people just don’t want to believe it.
When people do experiments and get the answers they don’t want, they just ignore it, and they say, let’s try it again. If you’re not willing to set a hypothesis and have the hypothesis disproved, you can say what you want, but you’re just not mentally prepared to have it disproven, then there’s nothing that’s ever going to change.