LogFAQs > #975358405

At best, I think the Mandela Effect is a fancy way of trying to legitimise ignorance, made in good faith but having a negative effect. Like hey, here's a thought experiment, a room full of people didn't know that Nelson Mandela was the president of South Africa - were they simply misinformed/subject to a fit of group hysteria, or did they come from an alternate fucking universe where their version of reality was actually true? Let's give both options equal weight and explore the metaphysics that would render the latter interpretation possible.

At worst, I think the Mandela Effect is a deliberate move to destabilise truth and facts in favour of pushing misinformation and "alternative facts". The Berenstain Bears thing was an internet trend and a real social thing where people genuinely thought it was pronounced Berenstein. It happens. People later claiming that the Mandela Effect was actually always called the MANDALA Effect and redefining what it means is a blatant attempt to manipulate the truth.

Consider the mental gymnastics you've seen from Trumpers and qanon supporters and TERFs and shit, the way they willingly bend the truth to serve a version of reality that makes them a good guy fighting some latent evil because they "connected the dots" right, even if what they're saying is patently untrue or doesn't make sense. I think that has roots in the Mandela Effect.

It's an anti-intellectual viewpoint that legitimises ignorance and encourages conspiratorial thinking, no matter how ridiculous the outcome is - like coming from an alternate universe where a Nobel Prize winner whose struggle helped to end apartheid actually died in prison, and his lasting legacy was mostly posthumous. It's okay to have been misinformed of the truth - it happens every day. But instead of going "well fuck, that's news to me, I suppose I had it all wrong from the start" and researching fucking history, people decided to turn it into a thought exercise where they were from another reality where they were, in fact, right all along. It's a massive crock of shit.