I always thought, when I heard anyone mention the Flat Earth Society, that it was put together by a group of people with a great sense of humour. A practical joke. Just for fun.

After all, Greek philosophers told us the world was a globe thousands of years ago.  Columbus knew when he set sail in 1492 that the earth was round, he used that knowledge as his belief he could reach Asia by sailing  westward from Spain.

But I was astounded  recently to read that the members of that society are quite serious. To them the earth really is flat. I checked out their website and shook my head at the endless numbers of books, recorded  interviews, podcasts and maps there. To these people, I suppose,  you and I are the victims of a great conspiracy theory.

Such theories are currently very popular with some folks. Here are a few: 

Below a thin crust our earth is completely hollow. Maybe with a little drilling and digging we’ll have the ideal place to dump our garbage.

Chemicals in our water are making people gay.

Paul McCartney is dead and has been replaced by a double. (A Canadian actually, a talented one, it seems.)

There were no lunar landings. They were faked in a movie studio.

Prince Charles is a vampire. So are all his blood relatives…?

The moon doesn’t exist, it is a hologram.

Now those theories are harmless, good at most for a chance to laugh at the world’s most gullible. But there are others which are very dangerous, fatal and destructive.

The holocaust deniers are among the cruellest fraudsters. Most, if not all who have gone to the remains of the concentration camps in Europe where millions of Jewish men, women and children were tortured and slaughtered, lose any doubts about the scope of these unspeakable atrocities. And they are well documented. What a blow this Anti-Semitic crap is to the families of holocaust victims, victimized all over again.

Mass shootings in the U.S. are staged by the government in order to promote gun control laws. The despicable pushers of this conspiracy theory have gone so far as to claim that the reported 20 children shot and killed at the Sandy Hook school in Connecticut  in 2012 were actors in a fraud. Can you imagine the pain of the parents of those kids hearing that?

Antivax, antimask and “Covid’s-a-fraud” sources in Canada and the U.S., among other countries, would have us believe the pandemic is a conspiracy perpetrated by our governments. The purpose, apparently, is to get us used to being  controlled. Then, in their hunger for communism, they can convert our nations into communist dictatorships. Shame on you Justin Trudeau.  Shame, Joe Biden.  Shame, Scott Moe? Jason Kenny?  

All the doctors and researchers know there’s a cure for cancer. They keep it a secret and use it only on their own families. They do this because treatments for cancer bring in much money for them and the big pharma companies, who are in on the conspiracy.  All the doctors? How many doctors are there in, let’s say, the Western countries?  Millions. And not one has spilled the beans? Very likely for a species--human beings--in which three people can’t keep a secret for a week.

Sometimes I laugh at news of the latest outlandish conspiracy theory.  At the utter stupidity of it. But I stop laughing and feel very sad. Sad that so many are willing to destroy our faith in doctors, medical researchers and climate scientists. On our government institutions--education, law courts, law enforcement, legislatures, MPs, MLAs, government research, elections--all the institutions that have given us  the liberties, protections  and opportunities that have made us the most free, inventive, healthy, long-lived, safe, prosperous people that ever lived on this planet.

Yes, all those  institutions have faults, have made mistakes, make changes as conditions change, have known corruption and foolishness at times (they are run by humans). But without them we would live in a very different world--to see what it would be like check out the countries that don’t have them. You wouldn’t want to live there.

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