Sometimes the real secret is there is no secret, at least not to those who know. Our worldviews could be based on facts that millions of people know are wrong, yet somehow that knowledge doesn’t impact our actual view of the world.
Why do we think that we are somehow going up when we are going North, and down when we are going South? That may seem like common sense to many people, even intuitive to folks. But it’s purely arbitrary and millions of educated people know this and have known this for a very long time. Yet this knowledge doesn’t really impact the public popular imagination.
Every once in a while an obscure morsel of truth bubbles out in pop media.
Do you remember the episode of West Wing, featuring a meeting between White House staffers and members of the Organization of Cartographers for Social Equity?
The conversation is framed in a funny way, but in the humor some interesting points are snuck in:
“The Mercator projection has fostered European imperialist attitudes for centuries and created an ethnic bias against the Third World. The map enlarges areas at the poles to create straight lines of constant bearing or geographic direction. So, it makes it easier to cross an ocean. But .. it distorts the relative size of nations and contents”
Another character listening responds “Are you saying the map is wrong?”
Yes, Really.
The thing is, this is pretty well known in academia. It’s not exactly hidden, many people actually are taught the truth about the Mercator projection as undergrads but promptly forget it because they have had 13 years of K through 12 education feeding them a different image of the world.
So, not only is Africa in reality 14 times larger than depicted and Europe is drawn larger than South America when it’s really half the size of South America and Germany sometimes appears in the middle of the map when it’s really in the Northwest quarter of the Earth, it can actually be flipped.
Now in Australia for quite some time, some published maps have openly put the South on top and the North on Bottom. And in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, all through the Ottoman era maps were also drawn this way. You can find a few historical maps of this kind popping up in The West of Latin Christendom, but in general the habit has long been to put the North on the top and the South on the bottom. But why? It’s purely arbitrary. You can easily put the South on the top of the map and the north on the bottom, there is no top or bottom of the world except in human imaginations.
The character continues,
“When Third World countries are misrepresented they’re likely to be valued less. When Mercator maps exaggerate the importance of Western civilization, when the top of the map is given to the northern hemisphere and the bottom is given to the southern then people will tend to adopt top and bottom attitudes”
The other other character then objects when the map is then turned upside down, but the only reason the character can give for why ‘you can’t do that’ is “because it’s freaking me out.” That’s it. And it’s funny. And it is also really sad.
So often in life the truth is presented to us but we can’t handle it because it, in a phrase, freaks us out. But why?
Why should we freak out when something contradicts what we were long ago taught?
That is the pitfall of conventional thinking. Being trapped in a mental cage whose bars are glass and getting freaked out when a wider view of the world is presented.
Every map is an artifact of culture reflecting the ideas, priorities, and agendas of the mapmakers. If you dig long and hard enough you will find indications that those who represented our world in the way that we see it knew very well what they were doing, and why.
The most liberating thing you can do today is turn your map upside down every time you look at it, it will have the effect of freeing something in your mind.
There is an article in the September 1929 issue of Popular Science, that is almost 90 years ago, page 50, ‘The World Map Corrected,’ talking about “The distorted Mercator projection,” in which “Sizes of countries and geographic relations are grossly inaccurate” Remember this is 90 years ago and it’s a newsstand issue of Popular Science, hardly a recondite source:
The article goes;
“There are so few places which have not been explored that we take it for granted that our maps give us an accurate picture of the world, yet nearly everyone has a very distorted idea of the sizes of most countries and their geographical relations to each other. The blame lies in the map of the world which we studied in school and which children still study.”
This map being of course the Mercator projection, first designed in 1538 CE by a scientist of the name. The article continues;
“The United States appears twice as large as Brazil, although it is smaller. North America is shown as twice as large as South America, though they are approximately equal in area. Greenland is shown as being larger than Australia, and yet Australia is more than three times as large as Greenland. Quite a difference!”
Yep, pretty much. Indeed.