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I
walked at Burgoyne Bay this morning just before the return of heavy
rains once more and explored some high trails below the peak of Mount
Maxwell, camera in hand. Scattered across the steep tree-covered
slopes were many conglomerate boulders, some bigger than houses, that
had chipped off the cliffs above. I walked under low cloud, a rising
wind sighed in the tree tops and creeks roared in full spate down to the bay far below. Eventually I arrived at the
granite headland at the northern entrance to Burgoyne Bay and then
began to walk back to my car waiting at the head of the bay just as
the first raindrops of the deluge began. To this point it had been a
normal, solitary exploration. Then things began to take a more
technicolour turn.
A
young man, maybe in his thirties, sat beside the trail and asked if
he could walk with me. What I did not understand then was that I had
been seized upon by the Ancient Mariner in Coleridge’s poem who
'stoppeth one of three'. He turned out to be a flat-earther and his
role for the next half hour walk was to convince me that this 3D.
round earth idea that so many of us share was a result of
brainwashing by a massive financial/ governmental conspiracy. Now, I
can be pretty sharp sometimes, so I realized that I needed to tread
carefully as this person was in the grip of a powerful delusion and
would cling to it, perhaps fiercely, if I outright laughed in his
face. Besides, I will talk to anyone and I was interested in his
belief processes. It is not so long ago after all since Galileo came
close to being burned at the stake for saying that the ( round) earth
revolved around the sun. Human beings have shared varied sets of
beliefs over the centuries and have defended them to the death.
OK,
so we got down to the nitty-gritty when I used the example of being
on the open ocean with a circle of tossing waves visible from on deck
of about three miles radius before the curvature of the earth hide
the rest, and the freighter that came up OVER the horizon showed just
its masts and funnels at first. No, no, he argued, it was just the
vanishing point. If I used binoculars or a telescope I would
see the whole boat! Presumably if I looked far enough the rim of the
flat earth would show up - on a clear day you can see forever. And
the sun was small and circled around, sometimes it was even in the
clouds. Well, you can see that either he or I was employing some
pretty creative thinking and I appreciate that in people.
Unfortunately he was also getting more and more excited. He knew that
I and so many others languished in the grip of a powerful delusion
that he had been struggling to correct for a long time, so I backed off
in friendly sort of way and it all ended peacefully as I dropped him
off at the main road.
But
here is the thing, we mostly share a set of common beliefs about the
composition of the world and humankind’s place and function upon
it. As Kenneth Clark says, a civilization falls apart when its
members no longer share a common world view. Most of us presently
accept a round earth, gravity, and so on because it seems to explain
a lot and it works. Once though, that was heresy. So it pays to
listen carefully to seemingly odd ideas, they may simply be an older
order on replay, but on the other hand they may contain the germs of
a future one.
.................................................
Something
I skipped carefully over is the whole issue of mental illness, and I
do not mean to make light of it. Was this man temporarily in the grip
of drugs, an irrational episode..... ? What I thought of was the
internet and the whole area of conspiracy theories. It was more real
for him to believe that the whole space program ( with those
fabricated round earth photos) was a multi-trillion dollar con job.
But whatever his constructed version of reality, it may have been a
last ditch effort to keep his mind from spinning completely away.
Looked at that way, he needed to keep his ship, if not on an even
keel, at least still swimming.
Later.
Listening
to NXNW this morning on CBC radio I was treated to June Goldsmith's
explanations of Chopin. Not only did I receive a deeper
understanding of his music ( and music in general) but perhaps more
importantly it set me off on a thought journey of my own. Since last
weeks encounter with the 'Flat Earth' person on my walk along the
shore of Burgoyne Bay I have been thinking about how our minds get
organized: what gets attention, becomes a dominant way of thinking
and behaving, and what gets dropped through lack of use. We may be
aware that 'genius' personalities are somehow so often very
specialized, but never make the leap to think about what passes as
normal. With the flat earther it was not difficult to recognize
aberrations in his thinking, but what about my own? After all if I
could question his thought processes, then I should become
more aware of my own. That is the value of challenges*, they make us
question and that is the first step in creating something new, in
reality or in thought.
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