> We should even respect flat earthers
No those people need mental healthcare. They have a very debilitating dysfunction, an inability to see reality.
No those people need mental healthcare. They have a very debilitating dysfunction, an inability to see reality.
I'm struggling to find it, but an article I read and found enlightening explained how there was seemingly a uniform struggle with education in every story the author was told by the people she talked to at a flat earther's convention.
They all had some profoundly negative encounter with the education establishment, and usually as a result of a learning disability that they had.
It's anecdotal and not a complete view, but a mistrust of academia seems requisite for many of these conspiracies to take root in a person's mind, and that seems pathologic to me.
Many flat earthers are illiterate. I can't imagine they put a lot of trust into a system that would not think very highly of them, as a result.
I would have far less reason to believe such populations would be 'more' likely to engage in critical thinking (flawed or otherwise), compared to simply uncritically following mainstream thought.
But, anyway. Doesn't matter either way.
Yes it's speculative, but it's also predictive. If you can engage people who belong to these groups honestly, you will hear, over and over again, stories about how academic establishments have failed them in some traumatic way or another, leaving them mistrustful of what is, in effect, the entire concept of learning. And nearly every one of these stories you will be told originate at some form of mental disorder.
These people aren't just stupid, they're actively anti-learning, which makes them so much worse than stupid; they want to make others stupid too.
What about believing a bizarre idea is debilitating enough to require mental health intervention?
What ends up happening is that these things sooner or later lead to an internal conflict. To fix this, a healthy person realizes that their belief is silly, and over time adjusts to realign more with reality again. This doesn't have to be a conscious process, but it helps to be self aware and open-minded.
In a different group of people, what happens is that they double down. Their belief X conflicts with reality Y, so a new explanation Z is needed. Z also conflicts with reality, so the pile grows. What makes is worse is that the internet created spaces for these people to find each other and provide increasingly absurd extensions to their twisted view of the world.
Someone who starts out thinking the election was rigged may find themselves in a group that claims COVID was part of the election fraud plot, that it will go away when the new president is sworn in. Then it doesn't, so a new explanation is needed: The idea of microchipping/depopulation/etc. solidifies. Someone needs to be blamed and there happens to be a leftover grudge from the elections, and look at them promoting masks and the jab! It's obvious, they're not even hiding it anymore. And on and on it goes. Eventually we arrive at "there are no coincidences" and "symbolism will be their downfall", where Twitter timestamps are somehow proof of a hidden agenda, and words mean whatever the listener wants them to mean.
But at the same time they're step ahead of majority of the population that just believed what they were told as kids and never, once in their life, expressed any doubt in it, or thought about how it was proven, or how they would be able to check that proof themselves.
The whole point of science is that it (in general) does not require faith as it provides evidence. There are some aspects of science where the presentation of hypothesis verges on faith, many aspects of cosmology where falsifiable experiment are not possible, but that is a very small part of science.