The Mandela Effect is a paranormal and conspiratorial concept that suggests that things in our history are being changed either by a glitch in existence or a nefarious reason yet to be identified. It was coined by Fiona Broome in 2010 and has since exploded on the internet. It boils down to being a collective misremembering of some item or event that now seems different. This ranges from song lyrics, movie lines and how things are spelled to world events. Broome is a paranormal researcher and writer who was struck by the number of people she encountered who remembered Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s when in fact he lived until 2013 and became President of South Africa after the end of Apartheid. The 80s were a significant time in the global Anti-Apartheid movement and many people became aware of the history of South Africa's racial policies and the oppression of the native population. There were leaders who died in prison in the 70s and 80s, one of which Steven Biko, became famous in part through a song by Peter Gabriel. I has a small role in the anti-apartheid movement when I was in college in the 80s and I know one of the chants was Free Nelson Mandela which is the closing of the song Sun City released in 1985 by Artists United Against Apartheid. But one can understand remembering this differently. News has a way of being a flash in the pan and has the 80s gave way to the 90s the growing internet meant that information overload was common.
Memory is not a static thing. We construct our memories because frankly we construct all of our perceptions. We filter out much of the stimulus in our world and focus on what is either important at the moment or unusual. Driving home from work you probably would not recall all the squirrels you saw running across or near the road but if it were a turtle or a vulture you may pay more attention. But even the retelling of a memory creates not only an opportunity to remember it differently than it happened but when you remember something from your past, you are a different person with more experiences so you perceive your own memory differently. This is why eye witness testimony can be so flawed. Time, retelling and other people's perspective of an event can change your memory of it. A famous experiment had people count the number of times a handful of people bounced a ball to each other. While keeping track of all the balls the subjects didn't notice a person in a gorilla suit walk into the scene, wave and walk out. Once people were told of the gorilla it was easy to see. However, watching knowing about the gorilla has other surprises. Click the link and see what you miss.
Examples some people use for the Mandela Effect are people believing that the comedian Sinbad starred in a movie called Shazam where he played a wizard, he didn't; that the Berenstain Bears were Berenstein Bears, they weren't; and Darth Vader said "Luke, I'm your father", he didn't. While all irrelevant to life in general many will put up quite a fight defending their memory even when you can prove they are wrong. Even more so are those that seek out these so-called glitches in reality sometimes finding them when there is no debate, one Youtuber, All Time Scary, has made a little cottage industry of this. One of the silliest is from the movie E.T. When learning to speak English, the alien character fumbles over a variety of words taught to him by Elliot and his siblings. He learns the name they use for him, E.T., and the words home and phone. At first E.T. says "E.T. Home Phone" and when corrected for syntax by the kids it becomes the iconic "E.T. phone home". Because it was the most often repeated line of the movie we forget his first vocalization. That doesn't mean it was added or changed. It means we remember what created as a memory.
None of this is important except that when people start to believe their memories are being tampered with there can be a problem. We are living at a time when the leaders of our nation and several others are basically telling people what they know to be true is not. There is a wide-ranging movement of conspiracy theorists who create outrageous stories to attack political opponents and insist that any evidence to the contrary is part of the grand conspiracy. Birtherism, which propelled the current President into the political sphere in a real way, for example. Time after time evidence was produced to show President Obama was born in Hawaii, but if you can believe that somehow an entire movie can be made to disappear, then why couldn't it also create a fake past? Believing conspiracies has gone from a group debating how the CIA and the Mob worked together to kill JFK to elaborate discussions of pedophile rings that brought a man with an AR-15 into a local family pizza place in Washington DC demanding to see the non-existent basement. While we can laugh at people who believe their past was altered by some outside forces because they don't remember something correctly, that soft minded thinking can also lead to some terrible outcomes in the real world.
The current administration has for a long time made public statements that are completely and utterly false. One spokesperson said that they were "Alternative Facts". As if reality is a point of view. This week for example, as spikes in at least 30 states in cases of Covid-19 that caused some states to roll back their reopening efforts, both the President and the Vice-President stated we are doing great. That reopening is moving forward well. It leads so many to believe that this virus crisis is over. It isn't and it is getting worse. This is life and death for many. This is one example of many where the President states things that are so far from reality that it is hard to understand how that can be allowed to fly but there is a group of people who will always believe him.
People will always want to remember what fits their narrative, but what is troubling is when evidence is produced to prove them wrong when they are the evidence is ignored. Someone recently told me that a message from the CDC that was on the news has been scrubbed from the internet because it didn't fit the agenda of someone or something. The Mandela Effect may seem silly, and fun. But in the end when people can believe their memories can be scrubbed from the world they can believe their worldview is being manipulated. That is scary.
President Mandela did not die in the 80s. Sinbad didn't do a wizard movie. No one is changing movie lines. And no one is erasing from the internet things you want to believe. So in the end, don't think your memory is a video recording, if challenged research and be willing to accept you are wrong, and please, if you go out, wear a mask.
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