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this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
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I have so many questions about flat earth theory. Many practical questions like you noted but also more general stuff like who benefits from it? Conspiracies usually have some secret order hiding the truth in order to maintain power or enrich themselves. What difference does it make to anyone what shape the earth is? It doesn't seem like it benefits anyone to deceive the world about that. Maybe globe makers since a 3D object is more expensive than a map on a piece of paper?
These questions pop into my head every time the topic gets brought up but I don't make the effort to look into it because at the end of the day it feels like a pointless exercise to peer into the mind of a lunatic looking for rationality.
Governments and other entities start wild conspiracy theories with people who are susceptible to them so that people who discover real conspiracies look crazy.
Sure but they need to be at least a little bit believable and have a clear beneficiary or else they don't serve much of a purpose. It's pretty easy to see why various groups of people would have wanted JFK dead, or to fake the moon landing, or hide the fact that vaccines cause autism, or cover up alien abductions, or any of the other conspiracy theories you normally hear about. Flat earth just seems so benign in comparison.
Oh, you are asking who is supposed to benefit from hiding that the Earth is flat?
I understood your question to mean who benefits from propagating the scam about flat Earth. This one seems to be one of those odd cults with no cult-leader. Those tend to degrade quickly into something with a cult leader or disappear, but the flat Earth keeps defying the rules of social dynamics. (What is incredibly interesting by itself...)
But well, I guess you'll have to ask them who benefits from a spherical Earth. They'll have some name to give you, it will make no sense at all, and if you ask another group you'll get a different nonsensical name. AFAIK flat Earthers come in two main lines, the one that got it from the Bible, and believe it's some version of the Evil trying to deceive people, and one that comes from 18th century propaganda (where flat Earthers were the butt of it), and will have a political enemy propagating globalism.