Online Conspiracies & Virtual Cults Part 2: Celebrity Makes the World Go Flat
June 15, 2021
Do we live in an age where online conspiracies and cults proliferate ever more frequently and powerfully? We continue to explore this question, focusing this episode on the tremendous growth of the flat earth movement in “Online Conspiracies & Virtual Cults, Part 2: Celebrity Makes the World Go Flat.”
Our special guests for this episode, filmmakers Daniel Clark and Nick Andert, gained unprecedented access to the flat earth community for their insightful Netflix documentary, Behind the Curve. The central character in their film is the surprisingly engaging flat earth celebrity, Mark Sargent, whose Youtube videos have had over 19 million views.
Reflecting on this multi-year project, Producer/Editor Nick Andert feels the internet has enabled “confirmation bias to such a degree” that anyone with an unusual belief can immediately find support for that view online. We see that dynamic at work in Behind the Curve and discuss with Daniel and Nick whether all flat earthers are equally committed to the ideology, and whether any scientists have been able to gain their trust and attention.
In addition to our discussion, this Purple Principle episode features numerous audio highlights from Behind the Curve, including interplay between Mark and his ever-tolerant Mom, other flat earth celebrities, and scientists commenting on the challenges of combating conspiratorial thinking, such as astronaut Mark Kelly, who first heard of the flat earth movement while on a space mission.
Tune in to learn more about the making of Behind the Curve and the window it offers onto conspiratorial thinking and cultic identities, including Qanon and other polarizing ideologies, along our political and social fault lines.
Original Music by Ryan Adair Rooney
Show Notes
Behind the Curve. International Documentary Association
Rachel Brazil (7/14/20). “Fighting flat-Earth theory.” Physics World
Rhett Herman (10/26/98). “How fast is the earth moving?” Scientific American.
Transcript
Mark Sargent, Behind the Curve
So, where are you right now? You think you’re in a globe, spinning at a thousand miles an hour. That globe is spinning around the sun at 60,000 plus miles an hour. That solar system is flying sideways through the galaxy at half a million miles an hour. And that galaxy is going through the rest of the universe at millions of miles per hour. And you feel nothing.
Robert Pease (host)
That’s Mark Sargent. Articulate. Charismatic. And an all around nice guy. He’s nice to his Mom.
Mark Sargent, Behind the Curve
I don’t deserve you.
Emily Crocetti (host)
And she is really tolerant of his...excesses.
Mark Sargent’s mother, Behind the Curve
And I said, “Oh Mark, what are you on to now?”
Robert Pease (host)
And Mark is also a really big critical thinker.
Mark Sargent, Behind the Curve
In reality, you are actually in a giant planetarium/terrarium/soundstage/Hollywood backlot that is so big that you and everyone you know, and everyone you've ever known, never figured it out.
Robert Pease (host)
This is the Purple Principle, a podcast about the perils of polarization. I’m Robert Pease.
Emily Crocetti (host)
And I’m Emily Crocetti. And our featured guests today are not flat earth celebrity Mark Sargent and his good-natured mom. It’s the two exceptional young filmmakers, Director Daniel Clark and Producer/Editor Nick Andert. They feature Mark and several other engaging flat earthers in their totally worth watching documentary, Behind the Curve.
Robert Pease (host)
Join us today as we continue to explore the social psychology of conspiracy theories and cults, this time a distorted view of our planet that Greek philosophers first corrected back in the 5th century BC.
Emily Crocetti (host)
And you might think that believing the earth is flat is just another wacky conspiracy theory gone viral, soon to be replaced by another.
Robert Pease (host)
But anything viral can become social in our digital age. Such as the many conspiracy theories poisoning our politics in recent times. In the case of flat earth thinking, that community has been growing steadily now for years, possibly decades.
Emily Crocetti (host)
In fact, one of the great insights from Behind the Curve is how important that social dimension can be for believing just about anything – even that a NASA led conspiracy has the whole world falling for things like gravity.
Robert Pease (host)
This documentary builds towards a social big bang, if you will, for the flat earthers, their first international conference with over a thousand attendees. But let’s kick off our interview with Daniel and Nick on the very origins of this project.
Emily Crocetti (host)
How did they gain the trust of flat-earthers to pull this off: a documentary on a group that’s so wary of all those round-earthers.
Robert Pease (host)
Beginning with Nick Andert.
Nick Andert
I saw a thread online of people talking about flat earthers in their own life. And until that time, I had thought that flat earth was just a joke, like in the sense that no one actually believed that people just pretended to troll people online or something, but there were so many people coming forward and saying like, Oh my brother is a flat earther, or my coworker is, so on and so forth. And I was like, wait a minute. People actually like, sincerely believe this for real. And I started looking into it and realizing that it was actually a shockingly large community online. And Daniel and I had been looking to do a movie together for some time. We've worked together a lot and we wanted to sort of break out on our own. And we thought this would be an amazing first topic to do for a documentary. And then we brought our colleague Caroline Clark on and the three of us went from there.
Robert Pease (host)
So we’re wondering, was it difficult to get access to people like Mark and the other – let's call them protagonists? How did you describe the project to them, and what kind of a relationship did you have?
Daniel Clark
Early on, it was very easy, because we reached out to Mark first and we told him that we were doing a documentary on the flat earth community and the movement itself. We never claimed to be flat earthers. We never pretended to be anything we weren't. And so he said, if you're willing to come up here, I'll talk to you and give you the time on camera. And so we did that. And then when we finished with him, we knew we wanted to pursue it further. And he offered to introduce us to different people in the community. So he was kind of a gatekeeper for us. And then everybody else kind of fell in from there. And every person we talked to opened a door to talk to more people. So, as we went, people in the community started knowing who we were and what we were doing. They would see us on their YouTube shows that they had, they would see us in the background filming and they would talk about us for a second. And that kind of got the word out that we were making this.
Robert Pease (host)
When you met Mark and you see what a nice guy is, he's kind to his mom, he's very generous seemingly with his time and his energy. Did you have a kind of a eureka moment, like, this is not what we expected. This is not what people will expect. Therefore it makes for great material?
Daniel Clark
In a way, yes. And Nick was the first to really watch the footage back and because he was editing these scenes and I was there in person and I definitely felt like talking to Mark was very easy. We got along very well. He was kind, as you say. He's a kind person in general across the board. And he knew we had a sense of humor. But his mom was definitely a surprise for us, because we didn't really expect her to be part of it. And she was very much part of it.
Robert Pease (host)
Well, it seems like she's a very good mom and she humors him. She's not quite ready to go all the way though. She's probably the only character, correct me if I'm wrong, who's kind of in the middle.
Daniel Clark
You know, she was definitely walking a fine line with Mark, because she doesn't want to say anything against her son. But you know, she doesn't love the fact that he's really known for flat earth. And she was humoring him a bit. But also she felt it better to kind of give into what he was saying, rather than try to push him away for any reason. She felt that their relationship was more important than whether or not his beliefs were true, which is not the case for a lot of flat earthers. A lot of flat earthers push their family away. And there's just this conflict that ends up being disastrous to their personal lives.
Nick Andert
Or vice versa. The families will push the flat earthers away.
Daniel Clark
Yeah.
Nick Andert
And it's worth noting too, that one of the reasons that we were so drawn to flat earth as a story, besides just the obvious, like this wild aspect of it is the fact that it's such a great window into conspiratorial thinking, that most people would be open to considering in the sense of... If you talk about a lot of the conspiracies that are actually widespread, like let's say right now, anti-vaxxer, it's like the anti-vax beliefs are extremely widespread in the U.S. and even worldwide at this point. And if we attacked the topic of conspiratorial thinking from a belief system like that, that it's very widespread, instantly so many people would shut down and refuse to consider the possibility that they were wrong because it's part of their identity. It's just like we talked about in the film. But there are so few flat earthers compared to other belief systems that are conspiratorial that 99.99% of the people can agree, yes, the earth isn't flat. So that allows us to bypass the question of whether or not they're right entirely, because that's a foregone conclusion. And then we can just talk about the why in a much more objective way. And a lot of those same behaviors and underlying reasons that they've come to believe this are relevant across so many different other conspiratorial belief systems that it allows us to sort of get a backdoor into talking about that without pushing people away right up front.
Robert Pease (host)
Well, I would imagine Mark would say that they're going to blow past the anti-vaccine movement any day now.
Nick Andert
Probably.
[Archival audio collage, Behind the Curve]
The number of people who think the world is flat is growing by thousands, if not millions of people...the lie is a lie even if everyone agree it isn’t.
Emily Crocetti (host)
That’s another clip from Behind the Curve, the documentary by our guests Daniel Clark and Nick Andert about the puzzling popularity of the flat earth movement.
Robert Pease (host)
But flat earthers are hardly alone in the universe of misinformation. Two episodes ago on the Purple Principle, we spoke with medical misinformation expert, Dr. Jeanine Guidry of Virginia Commonwealth University. She talked about the critical role social media plays in the anti-vaccine community.
Dr. Jeanine Guidry (previously recorded)
And I always had an interest in vaccines. It's one of the big public health triumphs over time. So I decided to look at Pinterest and see if there were vaccine-related posts. And if so, how were they framed? How were people talking about those? And to my great surprise, I looked at a sample of 800 pins, randomly selected. More than 75% of all those pins were strongly anti-vaccine.
Emily Crocetti (host)
Social media has also been hugely important for flat earthers who are extremely prolific in their online videos and podcasts and posts. In fact, Mark’s flat earth videos have had more than 19 million views and counting.
Robert Pease (host)
Is the flat earth movement a conspiracy theory or something more like an actual cult? The film explores that question as it builds towards that first international conference.
Emily Crocetti (host)
In a recent episode, we spoke with cult therapist and podcaster Rachel Bernstein, host of IndoctriNation, on the difference she sees between a conspiracy theory, that may be widely shared, and a full fledged cult to which followers devote their entire identity.
Rachel Bernstein (previously recorded)
There are a number of people who believe in conspiracy theories, and there are a lot of people who are prepping for the end times and building their underground bunkers and believing in the lizard people, etc, etc. What I think is important is that for some people, they believe that by buying their generators and their beans that they can use to grow things after the nuclear war happens or the storm comes, that they are doing it for themselves. It makes them feel protected. And you have instead people who say, “I want to be a part of something, I need to connect with other people who feel the same way. I want to go to marches. I need to know that we're all speaking the same language.” Those are the people who join cults. Those are the people who need to be surrounded by it.
Robert Pease (host)
We see both ends of that spectrum within the flat earthers. Moments of individuals at home, alone, spending enormous amounts of time debating, creating and sharing flat earthery in everything from digital media to books and clocks and motorcycles.
Emily Crocetti (host)
But we also see an all-important social dimension that develops online, then moves offline, to meet-ups in cities around the country. And then finally the first big conference in North Carolina, which of course would be at a hotel with a huge spherical globe on its facade.
Robert Pease (host)
I guess what goes around, comes around. So we asked first Nick, then Daniel, whether most flat earthers seem unable to face the social and ego loss that would come from setting their beliefs aside.
Emily Crocetti (host)
Or whether any flat earthers just seemed to be playing along. You know, in an oblong kind of way. First, Nick Andert.
Nick Andert
I think it was a little bit of different extremes for different people. But I think there were seeds of doubt. And a lot of people I would certainly say somewhere deep down, I personally at least feel, that Mark has these seeds of doubt. But I think people watching it ignore the fact that it's extremely easy for people to lie to themselves, to protect themselves from hard truths or, like we said, Mark would lose so much if he admitted this. So his entire mindset becomes this sort of machine whose sole goal is finding a way to justify this.
Daniel Clark
At the conference, we found a few people who were there because they were curious. It wasn't like they were devotees to the flat earth movement, and that's not who the audience was entirely. There were a lot of people who are completely all in. But there were a few people dipping their toes in just to see what it was all about. And I think the community of flat earth is really something else, because it's a very welcoming, fun community. I mean, a lot of their fun comes from talking about different conspiracies and people lying and worldwide sinister activities. But they're nice to each other.
Nick Andert
With the one caveat that they're all nice to each other if they're on the same, or within the same schism of flat earth, because like many conspiracy communities, I think it's very easy for them to sort of schism and fracture. And for that paranoia that they foster to start turning on each other. And that has definitely happened in the flat earth movement to a huge extent. And their hatred for the other sides of their own community is actually almost worse than their anger at everyone else.
Emily Crocetti (host)
Speaking of that kind of attitude we had a previous guest, Robert Elliott Smith, an expert on AI, as in artificial intelligence, and polarizing algorithms. And he spoke to the role of social media fueling this really big disturbing trend of mistrusting science and experts generally.
Robert Elliott Smith (previously recorded)
One of the reasons that I think populism and AI and AI-mediated media fit together so well is because it basically says “don't trust the experts, trust the average of the common man.” And I mean, look, I'm all for democracy, I'm all for people's votes to be counted. But you know, one of the ways that we function as a society is by trusting people who have the time to do or know something we don't have the time to do. And if we don't have that kind of trust in other people, then we weaken our human abilities and that's the situation I think we're in now.
Emily Crocetti (host)
Did you see that kind of mistrust of any and all expertise at work with the flat earthers?
Daniel Clark
Yeah, a hundred percent. I'll start and then Nick can join in. But any expert – and then you see this with a lot of different things – but with flat earth, specifically, any expert was seen as having a stake in the earth being a globe or perpetuating, in their opinion, a lie that the earth is a globe. So NASA for instance gets a budget to explore space, and to a flat earther that budget is then being used for whatever secret covert various things or to pay all the CGI artists to pretend it is. And so if you start thinking that everyone who has power who is telling you something from a position of authority is out to get you, then there's just no convincing you of anything. Because unless you're experiencing it yourself, you're not going to believe it. And Nick, I'll let you try to make a conclusion from that.
Nick Andert
Thanks. There's an open question about whether there's a rise of conspiratorial thinking right now, or whether we're just noticing it more because of the internet. But I personally feel, at least after working on this project for so long, that the Internet's enabled confirmation bias to such a degree where you can search out an opinion that agrees with you before you have to face or contend with any countervailing information. So let's say if you were in some small town in Nebraska in the 1970s, and you said, “I think the earth is flat.” Chances are everyone around you is going to be like, “it's not.” Now if you come up with an idea or if you see something and you think, Oh, that sounds like that could be true. The first thing you do when you search on the internet, just basic human psychology, you're probably not looking for proofs that it's wrong. You're probably looking for things to prove that it's right. I think one of the – we certainly saw that one of the biggest motivations for believing in conspiracies in the first place is because there's been such a democratization of social interaction via social media and the sense that everyone has the opportunity to have a far reaching voice, right? In a way that they didn't before. Most people are not wildly influential online. I feel like it creates the sense that your life is not living up to the modern expectations set by this social media world. So it creates this deep sense, I think, of isolation and people where they feel like they're not participating in society to the degree that they're expected to. And when you're offered these alternative explanations for why things are wrong. I mean, you see it with Q Anon, obviously that there's this giant cabal that's holding us back or when you can start to create villains and then assign blame to them. Or when you can sort of become someone very important in some sort of fights where you can create a worldview in which you are fighting the good fight, you're important, your purpose is suddenly meaningful, then that's extremely attractive to people.
Daniel Clark
And another thing would be that humans are not rational creatures, no matter how much we want to say we are. Even the most rational person is acting out of an emotional response. And I think a lot of people – and this is not just flat earthers, this is everybody – are trying to make order out of chaos in the world, and flat earth and conspiracy thinking is a way to create an order to otherwise chaotic things.
Emily Crocetti (host)
Speaking of human irrationality, we had a well-known neuroscientist in Season One, Jay Van Bavel of NYU, who talked about what happens to doomsday cults after doomsday passes and nothing happens. And a lot of those people don’t reexamine their lives at that point. Instead, they actually double down on that identity and say that they’ve saved the world. Did you observe that type of response among the flat earth believers?
Daniel Clark
I will say, flat earth is one of the conspiracies that any evidence against it is also evidence for it. So anytime they're proven wrong in, you know, “proven wrong” to them is just evidence that someone's trying to shut them down because maybe they feel like they're too close to the truth or whatever reason you might give. So in that sense I don't think there's necessarily a doomsday version of flat earth. But I do think that people making fun of them or trying to stop them or prove them wrong is just really entrenching them further into their belief.
Nick Andert
I feel like the closest parallel to that sort of doomsday prediction scenario is the fact that when flat earthers choose to set up experiments. And it's happened a couple times in the film, to try to prove their beliefs, there's no allowance for them to be proven wrong. If you're a scientist and you're setting up an experiment, the idea is you want to try to find a way to try to falsify your beliefs, like try to falsify them as best you can. And if you can't, then the hypothesis stands. But the flat earthers are doing the opposite where they're trying to construct any evidence that supports their belief system.
Robert Pease (host)
So it's kind of like fake news but the science version.
Nick Andert
And that's the thing to bring it really quickly back to Behind the Curve. One of the really fascinating things we found with the conspiracy and other things is the fact that all of the flat earthers who didn't meet, especially after the film came out, because after the film came out, they didn't love it. For the most part, even though I think most people would hopefully think that the film is actually quite empathetic towards them, they would view anything less than a full-throat endorsement of their belief system as an attack. And all of the people – there are now dozens and dozens of us online from the five communities – but they're almost exclusively from people who don't know us, who didn't meet us through the course of production and theorizing about whatever motivations we may have had or whatever we might have done, or who we might be working with. Whereas all of the people we actually filmed with, none of them think that we're with the CIA or were some part of some vast conspiracy. They're like, “Oh, they're good people. They're just doing their thing or something, right?” Once you have that personal experience and connection with people, it's very difficult to other them and to assign these sinister motivations to them. And I think that's why I think one of the biggest solutions that we can hope for is getting communities simply to interact, that get siloed off by social media and that the way the internet just siloes off communities is one of the ways that we can sort of start to bridge divides between communities, because they just interact so rarely.
Robert Pease (host)
We were wondering about that because several of the scientists or psychologists that you interview mentioned how important it would be for the scientific community to reach out in some way to flat earthers and start a dialogue. Are you aware of any efforts, and how they were received?
Nick Andert
So Spiros Mikalakis, who was, I think he was one who actually said that in the film, afterwards had done two online group experiments with some flat earthers, or basically one flat earth group calls with a lot of people and just answer your questions and talk. And I think they were trying to design an experiment. And in the aftermath of that, they all really liked him because I mean, he's a very likable guy. But also he was super friendly with them and he answered whatever questions they had and they had a dialogue, they still kind of didn't believe him. But then became like, “Oh, well, he's okay.”
Spiros Mikalakis, Behind the Curve
The problem I see is actually not from the side of their conspiracy theories. It is actually from our side, from the side of science. Very often, it's difficult not to look down. The worst case scenario is you just completely push these individuals at the fringe of society. And then society just lost them.
Emily Crocetti (host)
That’s another great element of Behind the Curve, interviews with scientists and psychologists on the amazing growth of flat earth ideology and what might be done to address that, including astronaut Scott Kelly, who has observed our planet from afar on four different space flights.
Scott Kelly, Behind the Curve
First time I ever heard about flat earthers I was in space and I saw the stuff on social media. I can’t believe I'm talking about this.
Robert Pease (host)
And we should add that the film follows not only flat earth celebrity Mark Sargent, whose clips we featured in our episode, but also Mark’s possible romantic interest.
Emily Crocetti (host)
We never quite know.
Robert Pease (host)
The articulate and surprisingly thoughtful flat earth podcaster, Patricia Steere.
Patricia Steere, Behind the Curve
I never thought that the name Patricia, which is my birth first name, would be spun into the fact that the last three letters are C-I-A in the word Patricia. Which means I'm in the CIA because the government would be that dumb.
Robert Pease (host)
Like Mark, Patricia is the subject of many conspiracy theories from within the flat earth community.
Patricia Steere, Behind the Curve
It started off with me being called a shill, as if I'm doing this for money. And then I was called a flat earth honeypot to bring men into flat earth and then steer them the wrong way because my last name is Steere.
Emily Crocetti (host)
But let’s not give too much of the film away. Instead we hope you’ll watch Behind the Curve and reflect on some of the less rational things you or someone close to you may have believed at some point, and the motivations behind those views, social or otherwise.
Robert Pease (host)
That allows us to better see the fault lines of our nation’s polarized politics. I’m sure most, maybe all of our Purple Principle listeners have a friend or family member wholly motivated by one political ideology or another, just as Mark is motivativated by flat earthology, even when he’s talking to his Mom.
Mark Sargent’s mother, Behind the Curve
Are there any scientists that are into the flat earth?
Mark Sargent, Behind the Curve
No. And there can’t be.
Robert Pease (host)
Next time on The Purple Principle, we’ll orbit away from conspiracy theories and cult mentalities contributing to hyperpartisanship and look for a way out. Our guest will be Dr. Peter Coleman, Director of the Difficult Conversations Lab at Columbia University. He’s the author of a new book entitled, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization.
Dr. Peter Coleman
Certainty is the collapse of complexity. When you believe without a doubt that they are all idiots, misinformed and trying to harm our country. And you believe without a doubt that we are all victimized by their insanity, that's a problem. Right? And that is ultimately often what our experience is of the other side.
Robert Pease (host)
Things may get a little complex next episode, but for a good cause. We hope you’ll join us then, tell a friend about the podcast and our research-based newsletter, Purple Principle in Print. You can also connect with us through social media or at purpleprinciple.com, which are linked in our show notes. We’d also love for you to review us on Apple podcasts. A Canuck named Krys thanked us for the insightful perspective. As a Canadian in the US, she says it’s difficult to wrap her head around American politics. But Krys, it’s not easy for us more purple, less tribal Americans either. Special thanks to our featured guests today, filmmakers Nick Andert and Daniel J. Clark for allowing use of audio from Behind the Curve. The whole documentary is viewable on Netflix and highly recommended.
This has been Robert Pease and Emily Crocetti for the Purple Principle team: Alison Byrne, Producer; Kevin A. Kline, Sr. Audio Engineer; Emly Holloway, Digital Strategy & Outreach; Dom Scarlett, Research & Fact Checking. Our original music is composed and created by Ryan Adair Rooney. The Purple Principle is a Fluent Knowledge production.
