On beliefs and truths

Between masticating the bit of food in my mouth and paying attention to whose turn it was to play, I realized that I had never met a conspiracy theorist before, which seemed unlikely considering a news story I had read that put the percentage of Americans who believe in any conspiracy theory at 10%. One in ten. That’s about the same percentage of people who hate cilantro thanks to the gene that makes them taste the soapy-like aldehyde in the herb, and I definitely have met quite a number of cilantro-haters in my life. So I conclude, I must have met a few conspiracy theorists before — some of them might even be my co-workers and friends — I just didn’t know their real thoughts on JFK assassination, or where they think chemtrails come from. Perhaps some conspiracy theorists (I’m going to use the acronym CT from now on, for brevity’s sake) are ‘in the closet’ for fear of being labeled crazy by their social circle.

It must be an isolating experience to be a closeted CT as they simultaneously believe that the government or some super-elite super-secret villainous group is plotting something really evil and yet can’t share this anxiety-inducing reality with people around them. It must feel like the world is a dark sinister place, yet they are the only ones who are enlightened while everyone else goes about their daily lives in an alternate happier universe, like sheep with blinders (or human with VR goggles?).

The out and proud CT naturally don’t have any of the self-restraint or self-censorship that the closeted ones have. They have no qualms sharing their views publicly, firmly believing that they’re right and perhaps feel somewhat responsible for ensuring that everyone sees the conspiracy that is going on. This moral responsibility is how they are able to non-chalantly drop questions like ,”You don’t really believe that al-Qaeda was behind 9/11, do you?” mid-dinner conversation with strangers they’ve just met a few hours before.

“What do you mean?” I asked, genuinely wondering if he had meant to say “Iraq” instead of “al-Qaeda” and that he’s voicing the well-accepted theory that the Bush government had used the 9/11 attack to justify the Iraq invasion even though Saddam’s regime had no ties to al-Qaeda.

“You look at the footage and you can just tell that there’s no way planes can bring down the towers like that. Impossible.”

Then he leaned in closer and said in a slight hush, more for dramatic purpose than secrecy because no one else around us understood English. “It’s an inside job.”

I, upon hearing his answer and deducing that, there’s a very high likelihood that our AirBnB host is a conspiracy theorist, nearly choked on the bite of chicken wing in my mouth.

Now, before you judge us on our choice of company, I must assure you that they had seemed normal enough in the few hours that we knew them. A couple in their forties, he’s originally from Leeds while she grew up in Izmir. They met and lived in the UK until a few years ago, when they decided to move to Antalya to start an AirBnB rental business. She’s an attractive, trim lady with long frizzy hair and a high-pitched nasal but hoarse voice that was probably the result of her smoking habit. There’s no doubt that she’s the one managing the rental because, well let’s just say that she seemed like the more capable one. While she’s busy cleaning and organizing, he “entertained” guests with his silly jokes and impersonations of people. His unfashionable frat boy outfit (polo shirt, cargo shorts, colorful socks that go up to his calves, and suede boat shoes) made him look like a boy in a man’s body. Still we thought they were kind and friendly people. So when they invited us to play Okey (Turkish variation of gin rummy played using tiles instead of a deck of cards) and eat dinner at one of the local bars nearby, we gladly accepted, not knowing that we’d be getting a glimpse of the world through the eyes of a CT.

He must have seen the shocked look on my face because he continued. “I know,” he said. “It’s difficult to believe that a government would be so evil that they could kill their own people. But it’s true.”

He leaned back in his chair and nodded slowly, looking simultaneously smug and sympathetic, like a parent who just revealed the cold, hard truth to his child that Santa Claus is not real, the look that says, “Yup, the whole thing is a lie, my boy. And you better thank me for disabusing you of this foolish scam!

Clearly the ‘oh-shit-these-people-are-batshit-crazy’ look on my face didn’t register as such to him. Instead, like a newly minted professor who is finally given the chance to teach a topic he has done a dissertation on instead of what the university wants him to teach, he jumped on the opportunity to explain why it was physically impossible for the impact of the plane crash to cause the Twin Tower to implode, and therefore 9/11 was an inside job, a carefully orchestrated demolition planted in the towers themselves to create chaos and fear.

I had no idea or actual knowledge about what is and isn’t possible. It just seemed like a far fetched idea for the US government to orchestrate a tragedy that has radically screwed up the world, as anyone who’s had to endure long airport security lines knows well. But this is what’s difficult about talking to a CT. They’ve spent a good chunk of their waking lives scouring the corners of Internet or in CT forums discussing their theories with other CTs (by the way, in a mind-bending irony, they call themselves “truth-seekers”). After a while they become convinced that they are now experts on these topics, while the rest of us couldn’t be bothered. They will tell you the exact model of the plane, who made them, what material they’re made of and how many litres of jet fuel was there during impact and the temperature at the moment of explosion and the melting point of steel, while the rest of us is comfortable resting in the belief that there’s a group of real experts who investigated these matters and had concluded that there was no foul play. Al-Qaeda did it. Osama bin Laden was the mastermind. Case closed.

Unfortunately, the hallmark of a CT is that he/she distrusts the system and believes they have to take it upon themselves to investigate things (that are actually far outside their realms of expertise) in order to beat the system and “uncover the truth”. Honestly, it sounds like a lot of work to be a CT. Doesn’t it get exhausting to have to question and investigate everything?

“Why would they do that?” I asked him, honestly trying to understand this cockamamie theory.

“What do you mean?”

“She’s asking you, ‘Why would the US government planned the 9/11 attack?’, darling. What’s the point of all these conspiracies?”

For the most part of the discussion, she had been silent, focused on her Okey game. But this time she perked up and rephrased my question to him in almost a taunting way, as if she’s had this discussion with him many times before and gave up, though this particular question is a new line of questioning that she thought was important to highlight to him.

“They want to create war. Control the people. I don’t know… I’ve got no idea what they’re planning, do I? All I know is that these people are sick in their heads. They’ve got no conscience, and they are pure evil!”

As he continued to rattle off his theories, I was paying attention to her face, trying to read her reaction, to see whether she realized how crazy he was. But hers was the straightest poker face, unfazed by his continued assertion that the world is being controlled by the evil overlords. Either she didn’t care or she had given up a long time ago. I had initially pegged her as the more rational of the two, the intellectual type even, as she was raving about Yuval Noal Harari’s ‘Sapiens’ when we first arrived. But as her own jokes go: ‘Who’s more stupid than the idiot? Answer: The person who’s married to the idiot’ — she knew who she had married.

It’s fair to say that we were both appalled and intrigued. If there’s a list of all conspiracy theories that are out there, he believes them all: 9/11, chemtrails, fake moon landing, climate change hoax. For every big story in the world, he had an alternate version of what actually happened.

“So where do you guys go after Turkey?” he asked us at the end of the night.

We shrugged. “Not sure,” Gabriel said. “We haven’t even decided where we’ll go after Antalya.” 

“Well wherever you end up,” she said, raising her glass for a toast, “I hope you enjoy your round-the-world trip.”

“Cheers.”

“Funny you said ’round’,” he said enigmatically, his pint of beer still up in the air. “You know I don’t believe that the Earth is round…”


Now, how often do you meet someone in the 21st century who publicly admits they think the Earth is flat? Probably not often. And nothing would prepare one for such an encounter either.

The old Selina (the pre-sabbatical Selina) would’ve stormed off or quietly left the table, refusing to deign this anti-science attitude with an intellectual discussion. “If he wants to live under a rock and believe in this medieval bunk, go right ahead. But I refuse to engage.”

Or I would’ve gone into full attack mode and laid facts upon facts on him “so he sees how wrong he is!”, and after being thoroughly frustrated by his thick-headedness, I would’ve shut down and stormed off. Because that’s how I was. I had only two available modes in any conflict: fight or flight, and nothing in between.

Except that I know better now. Shutting down isn’t productive; it leaves a big gap that’s then filled with false assumptions by both sides, and the distance between grows bigger until both sides become aliens to the other. On the other hand, as the never-ending Liberal vs. Democrat, Whigs vs Tories, environmentalists vs. climate-deniers, anti-Trump vs. pro-Trump battles have shown, it’s also an illusion to think that fact-based debates change minds. Maybe they do in some rare cases, but most of the times they just prolong the arguments and sharpen the divide. We seek information that confirm our biases and affirm our identities, and call them facts. The rest are brushed off as outliers, or fake news, or lies spouted by the other side. In the end, each group has their own set of “facts” and “reliable sources” that are missing the point. We are basically in two parallel universe shouting at each other through a wormhole.

CTs are especially resistant to facts as their whole worldview is premised on the system being dodgy. To them, the authority cannot be trusted, and the same mistrust is extended towards the scientific establishments as they’re the very instrument the authority uses to fleece the masses. So it doesn’t matter what facts are out there because to them these facts are lies. In the absence of any faith/trust in the whole system, what is there left to argue?

As far as we were concerned, it didn’t matter what he believed in. It would be different if he was our kids’ science teacher or someone in charge of designing the education curriculum or a Google Maps engineer. So the compulsion to hang out with him the next day was a little more voyeuristic in nature. What is the world like from the viewpoint of a flat Earther?


“How do you explain seasons then?” Gabriel asked as we imbibed on our pink gin.

“Or why it’s completely dark at night and bright during the day?” asked M, a fellow AirBnB guest who I could tell was as perturbed as we were upon finding out that our host believed one could technically fall off the edge of the Earth. She was sitting cross legged on the sofa next to him, her expression a mix of amusement and incredulity.

For hours, we had been trying to understand his views: why he thought the Earth is flat (because on a clear day he said he could observe the peak of a mountain 100km away), how the different continents are organized (like a squished ball with Antarctica as a ring of ice wall around the world that’s guarded by NASA and the Arctic in the center), how day and night works (sun is a spotlight that shines on different part of the Earth at different time), and how he’d explain the picture of the Earth from space (those are fake computer-generated images generated by the government; we actually have never been to space).

Questions after questions after questions, our brows became more and more furrowed. Nothing made sense. And a lot of our questions were met with: “I don’t know, but a flat earth made more common sense to me than a spherical earth”, to which the three of us looked at each other in bewilderment. It also became obvious that he, probably along with his fellow members of Flat Earth Society (which scarily enough numbers in the thousands), refused to believe in forces that he couldn’t directly observe with his senses. The Earth is flat because as far as he can see, he observes it as flat. Never mind that the curvature of the Earth (8 inches per mile) is too subtle to be observed with naked eyes. Gravity isn’t real either, he contended. We’re all just swimming in a sea of atoms. Things fall down because it’s denser than air, not because there’s an invisible force called gravity.

It sounds funny telling the story now. But I assure you that I wasn’t always amused. There’s something infuriating about a person who grew up in a first world country and had the privilege of a tertiary education to dismiss thousands of years of scientific proofs as a conspiracy. It’s the same anger I felt when, a few months ago, we met a brash, foul-mouthed South African in Saigon who told us, unprovoked, that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by Al Gore. At that time I was furious, foaming at the mouth, short of reaching over to choke the guy to take his statement back. I had taken his worldview, which was antithetical to mine, as a personal offense, as if his directly threatens the sanctity of mine as there can only be one view.

I had thought about this encounter on and off the last few months: why it’s provoked a strong reaction from me and if there is a more productive way to debate these things without either side (mine in particular) becoming emotional. On hindsight it goes to show how sheltered I was socially that I never met a climate denier until then. Everyone around me is a liberal, cares about the environment, reads the same books and subscribes to the same news sources. But what has been the most eye-opening to me is the realization that my belief in science and scientific process is a bit like their beliefs in the conspiracies. There are various scientific theories and assertions that I take by faith, even though I did not run the experiments and see the results for myself, because I assume that the scientists have followed the process. Blind faith that remains solid even though I am well aware of all the scientific lies and statistical obfuscation, both the deliberate and unconscious ones, prevalent in the academic/scientific world. But start any news report with “Scientists at such and such institution reported that…” , and I’m suddenly a little bit more likely to believe the story.

I’m also aware of science’s tendency to dismiss things that are not measurable even though there’s a possibility that science just hasn’t discovered the methods to measure or the understanding of the concept yet. Yet I’m firmly entrenched in this Western scientific tradition of equating ambiguous notions as unscientific. It’s a form of belief that I would have never questioned had I not encountered people like them.


“So what do you think happen after we die?” he asked me after it came out that I neither believed in heaven nor hell.

“Nothing,” I said. “We die. And that’s it.”

He shook his head violently from side to side, pained by the idea that death is a period and not a semi-colon. “So it’s all pointless then.”

“How so?”

“Well, we’re born, we live, we die, and game over?”

I smiled and shrugged. “Pretty much.” 

Did I notice fear in his eyes, a fear that we all share, that human life is but a speck of dust in the big scheme of things?

“Why is that so bad?” I asked him.

“Well, if there’s no heaven or hell and it all ends after we die, then why don’t I just go buy a gun, march up to wherever, and kill some evil dictator?”

“Sure, you can,” I said. “But what good will it do? Do you really think that will stop all the evil in the world?”

“Probably not, but I’ll reduce it by some.” I wondered if he just recently watched Michael Bay’s new movie “6 Underground” as this hypothetical plan of his sounded very much like the plot of the movie.

“There will be other evil people doing evil things and you’ll probably just get killed and make your family and wife very sad.”

“So what’s the point then?”

“The point is that we should stop worrying about the point and just focus on what we can do, right now,” I jabbed the table between us for emphasis, “to improve things right now. To hell with what happen after we die.” We don’t need the specters of an afterlife to guide our morality.

I hadn’t meant to proselytize but I figured it was only fair that I shared my viewpoint after he shared his for the last three hours.

He was silent for a moment, processing my reply. “Huh. I never saw it that way.” 

“I never thought buying a gun and killing a dictator was ever an option for me either.”


I’ve always wondered where the word “eye-opening” comes from, as in ‘This experience has been eye-opening to me’. It assumes that you had your eyes closed previously and now that your eyes are opened, you are able to see reality for what it is. “I was blind but now I see” (John 9:25). But what if your eyes are already open and all eye-opening does is let more light in, so bright that it blinds you? Because that’s sometime how I feel about our travel, wondering if I’m any closer to the truth or if I’m actually becoming more blind that it no longer matters if my eyes are open or closed. We’re all merely feeling around the edges anyway.

3 Comments

    • Thanks for sharing, Merle. That’s very similar to our experience, and it’s not easy to exchange opinion / talk to someone with a view so radically different from ours. I find the bit about the FlatEarth dating site very amusing.

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