Recently in Bellingham Washington there has been a spat of tortilla graffiti. Yes, tortilla graffiti. Some person or group has been distributing tortillas in zip-lock bags with various non-repeating messages. They have been found taped to street signs, parking meters, and business windows. Nearly 50 of these tortillas have been documented by the ad-hoc enthusiast group, Bellingham Mystery Tortilla Appreciation Society, on a Google Maps mashup (shown below). If the tortilla graffiti artist or artists are to be believed, 216 tortillas are on the loose in the town. I believe these acts to be the subversive work of a small but dedicated group of radical planoterrestrialist.

I have been studying at the University of New Brunswick (UNB) since 2011 in the Department of Geodesy and Geomatics Engineering. As one would expect, my time at University has greatly enriched my world view. Most recently and most importantly, my eyes have been opened to the tyranny of the sphere. Spheres have been so pervasive in western culture, for more than 24 centuries from Euclid on, so as to enter our subconscious and literally alter our cognition of the world around us. In the past few months I have learned of a small but significant group from UNB, the Flat Earth Society (FES) of Canada. The group was active in the 70’s and 80’s and made honourable attempts to elucidate the globularist hoax that the world is round.

Calling themselves planoterestrialist, the FES had the stated aims of:

1. To restore man’s confidence in the validity of his own perceptions. For more than fifteen hundred years man has been blinded by metaphysics and coerced into denying the evidence of his sense. The Flat Earth Society stands for a renewed faith in the veracity of sense experience. 2. To combat the fallacious deification of the sphere which, ever since Galileo dramatized the heresies of Copernicus, has thwarted Western thought. 3. To spearhead man’s escape from his metaphysical and geometrical prison by asserting unequivocally that all science, like all philosophy and all religion, is essentially sacramental and, therefore, all reality, as man verbalizes it, is ultimately metaphorical.

A growing body of research in the social sciences supports the idea that culture alters cognition. A recent article in the Pacific Standard Magazine, “We Aren’t the World,” discusses the research of Joe Henrich, the man leading the revolution.

If you take a broad look at the social science curriculum of the last few decades, it becomes a little more clear why modern graduates are so unmoored. The last generation or two of undergraduates have largely been taught by a cohort of social scientists busily doing penance for the racism and Eurocentrism of their predecessors, albeit in different ways. Many anthropologists took to the navel gazing of postmodernism and swore off attempts at rationality and science, which were disparaged as weapons of cultural imperialism. Economists and psychologists, for their part, did an end run around the issue with the convenient assumption that their job was to study the human mind stripped of culture. The human brain is genetically comparable around the globe, it was agreed, so human hardwiring for much behavior, perception, and cognition should be similarly universal. No need, in that case, to look beyond the convenient population of undergraduates for test subjects. […] Henrich’s work […] was an example of a small but growing countertrend in the social sciences, one in which researchers look straight at the question of how deeply culture shapes human cognition.

From the planoterrestrialist perspective, with the insight of Henrich’s work, the “racism and Eurocentrism” in academia is no great surprise. Racism is inherent to the belief that the earth is a sphere because it puts the northern hemisphere, and more specifically Europe and North America, on top or above most third world nations. There is an intrinsic hierarchy to the sphere that is to blame for for the inequalities pervasive in Western Culture. Everything from racial inequality to gender inequality would be non-existant in a planoterrestrial society because everyone would be on equal footing if the world was correctly understood to be flat.

The acts of the radical planoterrestrialist group spreading tortillas around Bellingham is a blatant attack on the inequalities of our culture. It is an attempt to reintroduce the flat circle into our subconsciousness to fight the centuries of programming by the sphere worshipping globularist. I pray that these acts of tortilla graffiti do not end here in Bellingham but instead spread to other cities, nations, and eventually the world. A world where we all live on even ground is a world I want to live in.