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The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes. ~ Paul Feyerabend’s most famous aperçu in Against Method
I remember a time before the Mandela effect. ~ Anonymous
It's déjà vu all over again. ~ Yogi Berra
By now, you have probably heard of the Mandela effect. The effect – we will get to it in a minute – takes its name after Nelson Mandela, freedom fighter, Nobel Peace Laureate (1993), and President of the Republic of South Africa from 1994 to 1999. Born in 1918, Mandela died in 2013 from a respiratory tract infection. He was buried in a graveyard bearing his name, a rare and perhaps singular distinction. Such is the official story, the master narrative. I retrieved these “facts” from a wikipedia site dedicated to Mr. Mandela. But was it so? Humans tend to trust their personal memories and the collective memory handed down to them. It is difficult to imagine a coherent culture and society without this bias, or rather, capacity.
Yet, we know as laypeople and even more so as scientists that memory is a reconstructing and not a recording device. It is vulnerable not only to forgetting (a Type II error, i.e., a Miss) but also and more ominously to the intrusion of bogus content (a Type I error, or False Positive). There is ample evidence for the idea that it is easy to induce memories for things that never happened. Elizabeth Loftus’s life’s work is a monument to this important feature of our memory and hence our consciousness (see, for example, Loftus & Palmer, 1974, for a classic demonstration of the malleability of eyewitness testimony).
You would think that I should have little reason to doubt the reporting of the basic facts of Mr. Mandela’s life in a place like wikipedia. Consistent, that is, confirmatory, reports can be found readily in other sources. Such consistency or agreement is a strong cue toward truth, but however strong this cue may be, agreement is ultimately only a proxy for the real thing. Alas, the real thing is in the past. It can never be recovered in its original state, unmediated by social editing and reporting. Yet, in the case of Mr. Mandela, the evidence for his death in 2013 is so strong that it would take a sophisticated conspiracy theory to call it into question. Creating such a conspiracy theory may be difficult, but it can be done. If millions can be persuaded to think that the moon landings were faked, then it ought to be possible to create an alternative narrative in which Mr. Mandela was murdered [update on the lunatic landing theory: there is plenty of third-party evidence confirming the moon landings, but then again, to the liberal believer this can be faked as well].
It would be harder to devise a conspiracy theory according to which Mr. Mandela died in prison and that what we remember as the events finding him in freedom after 1990 is the result of an elaborate cover-up that introduces his double into history. How might one then believe that Mr. Mandela died in prison? This is where Mr. Mandela’s eponymous effect comes in. The Mandela effect emerges when enough (whatever that means) people report that they remember the news of him dying in prison. This would be a memory of an event about 30 years in the past. There is no need for all those who remember it to come together and be counted; it is sufficient for the claim that there are many such people to start circulating in the ever so nimble media and platforms of today. Someone with Mr. Mandela's star power and something so striking as an alternate death are a potent mix. There is little to stop this sort of thing from going viral. Once circulating, the idea easily becomes a meme. More people sign on because ‘now that you mention it I also seem to recall that I heard the news at the time, indeed I remember it clearly now.’ And we’re off to the races.
The problem is that all the other memories we have about Mr. Mandela emerging from prison, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, presiding as first black president over his country, and capturing the world’s attention in so many other ways, are difficult to erase. There is just too much material. What shall be done with it? This is where the Mandela effect shows its true – and nihilistic – ingenuity. Mandela did die in prison, we now learn, but in a parallel universe. In the present universe – the one which I am hoping to post this essay – is the one in which he lived to a ripe old age. How can people now residing in the President Mandela Universe remember the death of Prison Mandela? The answer is that they did reside in the Prison Mandela Universe at the time, but slipped into the President Mandela Universe later. When exactly, we don’t know. If they slipped before President Mandela died, weren’t they distraught to see a dead man walking? [They must have been because the effect was first blogged in 2010].
Why do I call the Mandela effect nihilistic? The label is deserved because if you accept the possibility of the Mandela effect, you have no criterion to reject any kind of memory, or indeed any kind of claim about the past. The criterion of consensus or agreement is weak as it is. How many individuals does it take to validate a parallel universe claim? 1 million? 1,000? 10? 1? If parallel universes chug along where the Berenstain Bears are the Berenstein Bears, or in which Darth Vader says “Luke, I am your father,” there is no reason to believe that personal memories can multiply without contradicting one another because they point to different parallel universes, where one is as real as the next. Back at the level of collective experience, we can contemplate German victories at Verdun and Stalingrad, or – why not? – Hillary Clinton dousing Donald Trump. Remember? She won. She won! She really did. But then, darn, we slipped into the Trumpverse.
The Mandela effect, or rather the psychology of it, is nihilistic because it denies constraints. Reality is full of constraints and that can be rather annoying indeed. We live with bad decisions, missed opportunities, and misfortunes. If the future seems – at least somewhat – open, the past does not. It is what it is, and it was what it was. With the Mandela effect, however, we are seduced to think that the past (and thereby the present and the future) is infinitely malleable. Anything can happen, and everything did happen.
The Mandela effect is nihilistic because it doesn't take itself seriously enough. If it did – or rather if its proponents thought this thing through to the limits of its implications – they would be forced to realize that the effect, and the mindset it represents, completely devalues the reality in which they live. If I concluded that there must be a universe in which I did not write this essay, and that there are infinite universes in which I wrote an infinite number of different versions of this essay, I would have to reach an attitude of perfect disinterest. Yet, in as many other parallel universes I would not even know about parallel universes and not be troubled. Etc. etc.
Note. I consider this short essay on the Mandela effect as sufficient refutation of Feyerabend’s anarchist view of science. The photo of the didgeridoo is an homage to Feyerabend’s call that “we need a dream-world in order to discover the features of the real world we think we inhabit” (Against Method). To me, the didge invokes aboriginal dreamtime. Close enough. Anything goes.
Feyerabend, P. K. (1975). Against method: Outline of an anarchist theory of knowledge. New York: Verso Books.
Loftus, E. F., & Palmer, J. C. (1974). Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13, 585-589.
