The truth comes out

[Dark Jaguar]

shoutout to the 16% of millenialls who "aren't sure" the world is flat. Somehow that's even worse than those who convinced that flat. "duuuurrrrr idk flat or curved?? never thought about it gimme a min"

That's distressing.  I've been trying to pinpoint just how the education system has failed these people so completely, but frankly they WERE educated on this.  Everyone was, so the failure lies somewhere else.

I suspect it ties into numerous systems sending bad messages to the public at large.  For-profit pharmecudical research and for-profit schooling may just be a factor.  It's become the norm for everyone, left and right, to dismiss certain claims of various industries as "things they'd say to make a quick buck".

Healthcare is one of them.  People have an inherit distrust of "big pharma" because of that profit motive.  Just look at all those movie plotlines involving some evil big wig intentionally hiding the cure for cancer because treating it makes more money.  Thing is, that distrust is well deserved.  Big pharma really is putting profit ahead of the well-being of their customers (that is, mandatory customers IE patients) every time they drastically jack up the price of absolutely necessary medicine and medical equipment.  Frankly, medicine should not even BE a business.  However, at least we have laws requiring that medication actually do what it says on the tin and that side effects be, and thus they DO have to actually perform scientific testing.  We don't live in the wild west where someone sells a bottle of straight cocaine as a miracle cure from a soap box.  However, far too many people distrust vaccines.  The way out of our current pandemic is a vaccine, but the government is going to have to make it MANDATORY here.  Legally binding, EVERYONE will need to get it (barring a doctor advising specific patients not get it yet due to compromised immune systems, and those very exceptions are why everyone ELSE needs to get it).  Will our current government have the leadership will to mandate it?  I'm not so sure.  In the past they did at least, but now we have people putting the country in danger because they distrust an industry to the extent that they dismiss valid scientific data in favor of random gossip on Facebook.

Flat earthers tie into this I believe.  College is for profit- so are charter schools which the current administration seem dead-set on making the ONLY schools we can have.  Not everyone can afford college, so for those that can't they're seen as elitist institutions where people pay to get sheets of paper, and the things they come back from it saying don't make much sense when all you have is "common folk" knowledge like the nonsense they put in movies and TV shows, written by other uneducated people.  This isn't meant as an insult, though it sure sounded like one when I reread it.  The reality is, the masses DON'T know what's best for them right now and that's a failing.  College should become simply the next stage of government sponsered schooling.  However, as people leave high school and dismiss college as unecessary, they get this attitude that rejecting what they learned back in public school is fine too.  They were only in it for the money after all, just teaching from books to the test.  (That is of course not accurate and laughably so.  "Teaching to the test" is a problem many teachers fight, and government jobs are by and large mandate driven, not profit driven.  They have to accomplish their goals above all else, even if it means the teachers spend part of their own paychecks on class supplies.)  That general distrust of authority born of the profit motive simply drifts everywhere else, and it becomes easier to believe in conspiracy.

From there- the investment fallacy takes over.  They're committed, not in money but in thought, and it becomes harder and harder to turn around and admit you're wrong.  You want to know why flat earthers believe so very many other nonsensical things?  It's because while believing the earth is flat is easy when you don't think about it, the moment you DO start to think about it you realize just how much of modern science it contradicts, so piece by piece flat earthers have to reject one thing after another just to make it feel consistent in their minds.  For example, they have to reject that planets and stars exist.  They have to reject how far away the moon and sun are, and thus they have to reject that they are even physical objects by saying they are mysterious heavenly discs illuminated by supernatural law and thus unknowable.  They have to reject gravity itself, the most self-evidenct of facts about our physical world.  They have to reject literally every piece of photography ever made showing that curve, claiming that computer chips "alter" images or that old video is either faked on a sound stage (they become moonlanding deniers) or that satellite video predating CG is CG.  When you realize that every single thing they reject is just a piece of evidence that contradicts a flat earth, you realize just how selective they're being.  They've even had to invent a bizarre conspiratorial explanation behind GPS.

It's sad, but it stems from that initial distrust.  Want to counter the flat earth movement or anti vaccers?  It starts by getting that trust back.  Somehow, some way, I tied this back to universal healthcare and college for all.  That's because everything has to do with everything else.  Our world is connected.  The division between things is an artifact of language.