I came across this article the other day, discussing why Trump's supporters don't care that he lies:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.co...ence-of-blue-lies-may-explain-trumps-support/
The idea is that there's something called "blue lies" -- somewhere between white lies, which are told to help others ("My, what a... lovely tie!") and "black" lies, which are told to hurt others. Blue lies are meant to help members of your own group and hurt members of other groups. Sometimes the political or ideological positions people take are things they know to be untrue, but they assert them as truth anyway because it hurts the other side.
The thing about the flat-Earth theory is that nobody with any observational skills or intelligence at all actually believes it. Anyone who's traveled more than a few kilometers from home has seen familiar landmarks sink below the horizon. As such, intellectuals have long used the alleged belief in a flat Earth as a way of mocking the ignorant. The old legend about Columbus sailing to prove the Earth was round is the most famous example of this. Everyone already knew the Earth was round; the Ancient Greeks proved that two millennia ago. The only debate in Columbus's time was over just how big it was, and Columbus made his voyage because he believed the
wrong answer, thinking that the Earth was smaller than it actually is and that he could therefore sail west and reach Asia before his crews ran out of food and water. The only reason he survived his ignorance is because the Americas happened to be in the way, but he went to his grave believing he'd actually reached the East Indies, which is why the lands he discovered ended up being called the West Indies -- to immortalize the fact that Columbus was an idiot.
But it suited writers like Washington Irving to recast Columbus as a mythic hero of the Enlightenment, whose discovery of the Americas disproved the folly of the hidebound institutions back in Europe. In order to mock those institutions, they invented the myth that they'd actually believed the Earth was flat -- something that was obviously untrue and only an absolute moron would actually believe. It was pure propaganda. Ironically, later generations forgot that and it came to be taught as factual history, even though it makes no sense if you actually think about it.
Anyway, because of the Columbus myth, belief in a flat Earth became a common metaphor for mocking any belief system that's scientifically ignorant or out of touch with objective reality, such as creationism or climate denial. So what I believe is that the anti-intellectual, anti-science faction in America has consciously chosen to embrace the pretense of believing in a flat Earth as a blue lie, a way of expressing their hostility to science and reason and the political causes aligned with them. They know, on some level, that it's not objectively true, but they don't care, because it's not about objectivity, it's about ideology and defiance. If the other side derides it, then they embrace it.
