Hard trolling

The Mandela Effect is a popular conspiracy theory on the web, and many clips on the matter can be found at Youtube. The purported “effect” is named after the fact that many people distinctly remember Nelson Mandela having died in prison at some point during the 1980´s when in reality he survived, was released and became the president of South Africa. (Or rather “many Americans”, since I never heard any Europeans imagining this – let alone South Africans!) This collective false memory is intriguing, of course, but doesn´t prove anything except that low-information Americans don´t know who Mandela is (although that´s rather remarkable in itself). The conspiracy theorists couldn´t let it be, however, and came up with the idea that Mandela really *did* die during the 1980´s, but in an alternate universe. Somehow, this alternate reality has then switched to another timeline, in which Madiba didn´t die but really became the leader of a post-apartheid South Africa. The low-information people, who simply got it all wrong, can now claim to have access to privileged information about alternate realities!

The true believers in the Mandela Effect has discovered countless of other examples of false collective memories, all of them American, and most of them related to pop culture or company logotypes. A well known example is the children´s show “The Berenstain Bears”, which most viewers assume was really called “The Berenstein Bears”. Rather than admitting their mistake, they assume that the erroneous title is really the right one – in the old reality, now somehow replaced by another in which the “absurd” spelling “Berenstain” is suddenly correct. Naturally, many conspiracy believers speculate that something more sinister than simple quantum displacements is at work here. “They” have changed something in the Matrix, “they” being demons headed by the Anti-Christ, who have invaded Earth through a portal at CERN in Switzerland. The most bizarre speculation is that Gabriel (the archangel) has turned and now supports the dark side…

This little book is filled with other examples of the Mandela Effect. I admit that I laughed when I read it – this is simply silly, and I remember most of the “wrong” titles, lines or logos quite correctly (that is, correctly according to Official Reality, which presumably makes me brainwashed by the demons). Thus, I know that the correct spelling of Pete Townsend is really Pete Townshend, that the famous vampire film from 1994 was called “Interview with *the* Vampire”, and that Darth Vader doesn´t really say “Luke, I am your father” in “Star Wars”. I admit that I *do* recall Forrest Gump saying “Life is like a box of chocolate”, which – surprisingly enough – is a false memory. Or maybe it really isn´t, since it´s a well known fact that many films have alternate versions (a rather mundane explanation for many Mandela effects, never considered by the true believers). Try watching “Blade Runner” and see what happens…

Sometimes, the Mandela effects mentioned by this author and others are borderline trollish, such as the claim that Greenland looks larger on new maps than on old ones. Ahem, no, you have simply been looking at a map in Mercator´s projection… A subset of Mandela Effect promoters consist of Christian fundamentalists who claim that the demons have supernaturally changed the King James Version of the Bible. Apparently, some fundie prude has discovered that the KJV contains the word “pisseth” (it really does!) but since the holy of holies of fundie-ism just can´t contain this unholy word, the Devil put it there. For reasons best known to himself, the Evil One has also changed the prophecies of Isaiah, which now says that the wolf will lay down with the lamb, when previously it was the lion. Well, actually the full verse reads: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.” (Isaiah 11:6) Somebody clearly missed Bible class in Sunday school…

It´s rather remarkable (well, not really) that virtually all of these examples are from TV, music or logotypes. Why haven´t Gabriel changed something important, say our memories of World War II, the Vietnam War or the last US presidential election (many people would love to forget that one!). I suppose a supporter of this particular conspiracy theory would respond that he has, and that the brainwashing can be cracked on pop culture level only because the Controllers don´t consider it important…

Personally, I consider the Mandela Effect to be “up there” (or “out there”) with the Flat Earth, or the claim that insects seen on perfectly normal footage are really evil nanobots connected to UFOs and Chemtrails. I´m almost certain *those* Youtube clips were inspired by an outright troll (he trolled people on Amazon forums about 12 years ago), and one cannot rule out that the entire Mandela Effect craze also started out as a joke. I mean, is there any hard evidence that millions of Americans actually assumed Mandela died before the fall of apartheid?

Perhaps it´s suitable that a conspiracy theory about fake memories may have started out as the troll of the decade…