FLAT EARTH IN AN AGE OF DESPAIR

FLAT EARTH IN AN AGE OF DESPAIR

The problem in the now common press reports about Flat Earth believers is that either they treat the opinions of Flat Earthers as respectable - which will mislead people whose science education has not been of high enough standard - or these Flat Earthers are used as a comical material, when they are in reality a severe symptom of a disease that has infected the 'Western' civilization.

Schools and media today don't educate and present science on the level and scale needed, so that these kind of beliefs would stay in the fringe territory of a few isolated crackpots. It's clear from some of the reports in the press that the journalists themselves lack basic scientific knowledge they should have learned in school.

Instead many people in supposedly highly advanced countries are nowadays so scientifically illiterate that they think that a Flat Earth could be a reality. These people have been betrayed by both their states and the media.

Their ignorance is not something to be snickered at, but lamented - and corrected. To some extent the Flat Earth craze also represents the larger turn to illogical beliefs symptomatic of our age, which can be said to be an age of despair.

Strange cults flourish in times like ours, when people no longer feel they can control their own lives or comprehend a world that is quickly changing around them. People long towards simpler world - and in the belief on things like the on about a Flat Earth this longing has become manifest.

Distrust of all authority, state and otherwise, plays a role in this. People have come to distrust authority, which no longer can offer the stable world which they need for plan their lives. If something is official, even the shape of the Earth, it must then be challenged, no matter how illogical it is. Facts are dismissed with what approaches pride.

Today even amateurs can send cameras on balloons high enough up in the atmosphere to record the curvature of the spherical Earth. Yet this and the evidence everyone can see on their own eyes, like the spherical shadow of the Earth on Moon's surface during a lunar eclipse are nothing to Flat Earth believers.

For this is an age of despair and theirs is not really a belief into a Flat Earth, but a way to funnel their disappointment and rage against a world and civilization which they feel has betrayed them.