The Mandela Effect Is Much Sadder Than It Is Funny
Refusing to admit you were wrong doesn’t imply an alternate universe
It was as if the 15 or so teenagers in the room had accidentally had spoken Klingon, and I responded in a befuddled Romulan. They were gathered around a conference table squinting, while I stood before a flimsy paper and easel staring mutely back.
The question I’d asked wasn’t just simple, it was beside the point, part of a larger topic we’d been discussing: If someone admits they were wrong, does it make you more likely to believe them in the future?
The answer had been as obvious to them as it was to me, but we answered differently. That’s how the mutual confusion started. To me, someone who is concerned with getting things right is trustworthy. To them, someone who didn’t have the sense not to point out when they were wrong shouldn’t be trusted on any account.
I realized that we were both right, me technically and them practically.
Truth and Denial
Over the last decade or more, this terror of being wrong fascinated me. I’ve spoken with people who believe it might be related to school testing, where a person’s value is less about understanding or curiosity and more about improving percentages as if the intellect were a publicly-traded company. While that very well may be true, I think it’s more insidious than that.
The internet is an obvious and easy culprit. We seem to get a lot more pleasure in telling people they’re wrong than we ought. Especially when they are wrong.
We’re not concerned about someone’s lack of understanding so much as attached to our own superiority. Knowing we’re for a fact superior to one more person on the planet makes us feel good.
That’s not internet-driven, though. At least, it was something I experienced before the internet.
In addition to standard swearing and blasphemy bans, we weren’t allowed to call someone “stupid” or tell anyone to “shut up” as kids (“shut up” and “stupid” are the only ones that stuck for me). Because I thought of it as a swear word, I was sensitive to it. Because I was sensitive to it, I learned that people used “that’s stupid” as shorthand for “I disagree” and “I would have done it a different way.”
I don’t live in terror of being called stupid any more than I live in terror of being called an asshole. Not because I’m confident that I’m not stupid (and I very well may be an asshole), but because they’re curses rather than critiques.
But for some people, there’s nothing funny at all about being called stupid. For many more, discovering and admitting to stupidity is just not possible. People with a genuine belief in the Mandela Effect have taken this terror to a paranoid extreme.
A Paranoid Extreme
Although psychologists have studied false memories for more than a century, their investigations didn’t address the psycho-supernatural angle, especially in cases of shared false memories.
Shared false memories are phenomena where a group of people all remember the same exact thing that didn’t happen.
One of the most famous examples is that some people seem to remember climbing the stairs to the Statue of Liberty’s torch. They didn’t. It’s been closed since before the first world war, but there’s no lack of documentation of these stories.
CERN messing with physics people didn’t understand and Millenium mayhem made people ripe for believing anything.
I’ve been in the Statue of Liberty and the last leg of the assent is up an absurdly tight spiral staircase. It’s an easy mistake to make and one that’s easily explained. Most people don’t cling to this wrong memory, that’s why it’s not called “The Statue of Liberty Effect.”
People think it’s something science “can’t explain” but it’s probably more the case that it isn’t worth explaining. There are lists all over the internet of this phenomenon, but they read like a list of things people are likely to misremember from their childhood.
“The Mandela Effect” takes its name from adults being embarrassed into what looks like mild psychosis.
Introducing Fiona Broome
Paranormalist Fiona Broome coined the term in 2010, following what to me sounds like an embarrassing mistake. She claimed famed South African leader Nelson Mandela was dead while he was very much alive. Rather than just shrug it off as geopolitical ignorance, she recounted in detail his funeral, which she claimed took place in the 1980s.
After asking around, she discovered many people thought the same thing, which meant that it wasn’t a coincidence.
Broome has been a paranormal writer since the 1970s, and in her professional view, this “shared false memory” wasn’t false at all. It was proof of multiple realities. Others agreed and added that they were becoming more frequent as the decade went on.
But 2010 had more to it than just Broom coining the phrase. First, the scientists at CERN were working on recreating the Big Bang. Second, 2011 was exactly a decade removed from the 9/11 attacks and many people (too, too many people) thought 2010 was significant in that it was going to be the “last” year.
CERN messing with physics people didn’t understand and Millenium mayhem made people ripe for believing anything.
The Mandela Effect gave people permission to believe that this world wasn’t necessarily real, that their circumstances were different than they would have been if CERN and other shadowy meddlers hadn’t thrown the timeline out of whack.
Getting a handle on conspiracy culture requires that you accept the fact of other people’s belief, even if you don’t share it. I have a working understanding of a lot of made-up things.
I understand why people might believe in reptilian overlords, cryptozoological beasts, and secret government death rays. I get that people believe in ghosts.
But the Mandela Effect isn’t a paranormal event, it’s an insidious lie that prevents people from ever being wrong. It is so much worse than kooky. It’s a weapon people use to justify their invented, fervent hope that our shared reality is somehow a sham.
Worse, by that reasoning what happens to people in this alternate timeline is somehow less real than other timelines they prefer.
It’s weird and telling that people are comforted more by the notion that Nelson Mandela died in jail without transforming the South African political landscape than by the apparent hell-scape where he lived and the promise of making America great again was unfulfilled.
Tony Russo is a journalist and author of “Dragged Into the Light: Truthers, Reptilians, Super Soldiers, and Death Inside an Online Cult.” Subscribe to his Bagel Manifesto here.
