Welcome to the edge. This is Brimstone Head on Fogo Island, Newfoundland. Watch your step. According to some, this very spot is poised precariously on the edge of our flat Earth.
For his latest book, professional mischief-maker turned travel writer Dom Joly journeyed to sites associated with mystery, intrigue, cover-ups and conspiracy: Dealey Plaza, Roswell, Finland (enjoy the internet rabbit hole you’ll fall down when you discover that some believe the country doesn’t exist) and Newfoundland.
Fogo Island supposedly marks one of the corners of the flat Earth, the others being Papua New Guinea and the Greek island of Hydra – the line between those two intersecting the site of the Bermuda Triangle, which explains A LOT.
Joly travelled to Brimstone Head with John, a Newfoundlander who believes in square Earth theory (there are different variants of flat Earth theory but since they’re all bananas, it’s not worth going into). The observant visitor to Brimstone Head will notice more land in the distance. But despite this kind of irrefutable evidence, John could not be converted.
It is an extreme example of a prevailing mindset of our age where people disregard facts to believe whatever they like. The consequences of this erupted this summer when thugs started to riot on the streets of the UK in reaction to misinformation and misunderstanding of the world.
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Joly may not have found the edge of the world but he did discover how this way of thinking can take hold and take over. “I think it’s a virus,” he says. “It’s a modern disease. In the same way that Covid was promulgated in the air, conspiracies are promulgated online.”
Flat Earthers may be at the far end of the conspiracy spectrum but most people sit on it somewhere. So how did we get here?
Big Issue: When you were climbing up Brimstone Head, what were your feelings about approaching the edge of the Earth?
Dom Joly: I thought it would be pretty definitive. I would take a flat Earther to, supposedly, the edge of the flat Earth and we would see that there wasn’t a flat Earth or I’d be wrong and fall off – but at least I’d have killed a flat Earther. But he left still believing in it. That’s what’s so strange. It proved how malleable the conspiracy mindset is. There’s always a get-out clause. There is no edge, obviously, then he says, “Well, we’ll get on a boat.” So we get in a boat, go out and we still see nothing. Then he accuses both me and this very confused Newfoundland fisherman of going round and round in circles and being paid by Bill Gates. There’s no point trying to argue with conspiracy theorists. The more you argue, the more they withdraw into their beliefs.
It’s not the theories themselves, but the mindset people have, which is spreading, where evidence isn’t as important as opinion.
I understand why conspiracy theories take hold. Conspiracies tend to kick in when everything is in turmoil, when politics is in disarray, when there’s economic hardship – very much what we have now – and people are alienated from mainstream society and they feel powerless. My favourite quote [from Polish-American diplomat Zbigniew Brzezinski who was on LBJ’s staff] is that “History is much more the product of chaos than of conspiracy.” As humans, we don’t like chaos. We like to have order. And conspiracy theories do give you quite easy answers. A lot of conspiracy theorists I met are not stupid. These are, if anything, overthinkers. They overcomplicate life.
The urge to create order is natural – if you have a garden you mow the lawn – but in our age of 24-hour news and constant phone notifications, is there more chaos than ever and therefore more people than ever trying to create their own order?
There is. I think the real problem started with Kellyanne Conway, who was Donald Trump’s adviser. She used the term ‘alternative facts’. Once that term was used, we were fucked. Really fucked. Because in the old days, we’d all argue around a sort of accepted truth. The moment you have alternative facts, you pick your truth. That’s when things become really dangerous. Conspiracies give you an identity, a community. It becomes what you’re about. So if you want to leave or change your mind, it’s very difficult. In the old days, conspiracies were on the fringe. They were eccentrics. They were mainly harmless. Now conspiracies have infected the body politic. It’s given a get-out clause to a generation of politicians. If they lose or they’re wrong, they say, “I wasn’t wrong, you were lied to”. It’s a perfect storm, what James O’Brien on LBC calls the foot-ballification of life. Basically, you’ve got your team and whatever your team does you just follow them blindly.
Kellyanne Conway. Image: Mike Theiler/UPI/Shutterstock
And these teams have a new place to thrive, online.
In the old days, every village had an idiot, but then they all went on the internet and met up. Most of us are in the middle, most of us are nuanced. Algorithms do not cater for nuance, they cater for polar edges. People get very intent about this stuff, it causes conflict. These things create clicks and that’s what these companies want.
You grew up in Lebanon where the concept of a ‘hidden hand’ felt palpable. How does that compare with what you see today?
I’m not an Arab, I am English, but I grew up in the Middle East, understanding the mindset there. That region has been meddled with by all sorts of outside powers, from Ottomans to French to English, Americans, Russians. So there is a hidden hand. There are people propping up governments.
But that doesn’t mean everyone’s at it. The problem with conspiracy culture in the west is that people tend to end up with the wrong targets. They misunderstand who the real enemy are. They look at people like Boris Johnson as a hero. I went to school with people like Boris Johnson, I can spot a chancer a mile off.
You should rail against the elites; we live in a very inequal society which causes real problems. But then you look at the people who are supposedly the heroes of the anti-elites, Farage and Trump, who are literally living embodiments of the elite.
What is the end game?
My worry about the future is it’s going to get worse. You’ve got AI, deep fakes. You’re not going to be able to believe anything you see. I mean, I’m a man that dressed as a squirrel. I wrote a travel book, I don’t care about this stuff particularly. Some organisation had an afternoon in Huddersfield dedicated to me called “Who is Dom Joly?”, in which they did a deep dive into my background. They discovered, apparently, that I have close ties to the military industrial complex, by which I think they mean my dad fought in World War II, that I’m a spy and a government shill.
Firstly, great material for me and I’ll use that in the tour. But it’s very difficult to persuade people because obviously if I was a spy I would be saying this.
I believe you.
If you want to believe in a conspiracy theory and it doesn’t harm anyone else, brilliant. The ones I really have an issue with are the grifters who know that it’s bollocks but they’re using that to take money off people. Some might say I’m the same, I’m writing a book, but I don’t believe in anything.
I have a suspicion of anyone that believes they’re right about stuff. Frankly, I can’t wait to get out of this world. My next book is on searching for happiness.
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