Over the past 24 hours, one of the top five post on Reddit has been:
“Flat-Earther accidentally proves the earth is round in his own experiment”
It’s a video of a guy, doing an experiment in his back yard, at night, with a lamp and a couple of styrofoam boards.
You don’t need to follow the precise thinking of this modern Galileo. The gist is this:
If the earth is flat, as the guy believes, then the lamp will be visible in one setup with the styrofoam boards.
But if the earth is curved, as the Illuminati want you to believe, then the lamp will be visible in a second, different setup.
Result:
The guy does the experiment with the desired, flat-Earth setup.
Nothing. The lamp is invisible.
The guy moves the lamp, to the control, Illuminati setup.
Suddenly, the bitch lamp becomes visible.
“Interesting,” the flat-earther says. “… interesting…”
Over the past four days, I’ve been talking about denial, and the ways we all do it all the time.
Today I got one more denial strategy for you. It’s the most useful one for marketers. It’s called rationalization.
That’s when we are faced with a fact we cannot or will not stomach, and so we explain it away.
Apparently, the flat earther in the Reddit video explained away his experiment results. Uneven terrain… twigs… branches… possibly a tear in the fabric of time and space.
Rationalizations like this are not particularly interesting. But like I said, they are most useful for marketing.
In fact, there’s a whole powerful school of marketing called reason why. It’s all about rationalization.
But this email is not about reason why marketing or making people believe what they already “know.”
Instead, I just want to point out that, when people fervently explain something away… they are probably denying a deep, uncomfortable truth.
Such as the millions of people on Reddit, upvoting that flat-earther post.
Some of those Reddit users are cackling (see my email yesterday about humor as a denial tactic).
But many are rationalizing. Like Reddit user ringhillsta, who wrote:
“The fact that there are people out there who actually still belives that the Earth is flat is scary and funny at the same time and i feel a bit sorry for them. Must be hard being that dumb lol.”
So what could be the deep and uncomfortable truth that ringhillsta is trying to deny?
Who knows.
Perhaps it’s that we’ve moved into an era where we have almost no direct experience with the “truths” in our lives.
Instead, we get them all second- and third-hand, through college textbooks… Neil deGrasse Tyson… and various mainstream subreddits.
And if anybody ever stands up to question that, there’s a ready-made rationalization to sweep away that person. “Dude what are you some flat earther? I feel sorry for you. Must be hard being that dumb lol.”
Anyways, this denial mini-series has been going on for borderline too long.
So I promise to wrap it up tomorrow, and bring it full circle to where we started from.
Or is that impossible? Maybe it’s all just a straight line… and we will fall off at the end.
Only one way to find out — read my email tomorrow. You can sign up here to get it.