The memory be green, unless the Mandela Effect hits you hard.
Repetition, tangibility, and the war for memory to make you (mis)understand.
“Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death the memory be green.” — King Claudius.
Memory is a funny thing.
It’s less funny when it starts to go, but that’s for another day.
We start with Nelson Mandela, the South African activist who died in prison during the 1980s. You may remember that.
Except he didn’t die. He was released in 1990 and went on to become a national leader, dying in 2013. The problem is that a lot of people have remembered that he died, and they vividly remember it to the point of likely passing a lie detector test on the matter. This is a false memory on a grand scale.
Consider the things we swear happened, but did not.
Darth Vader never said, “Luke, I am your father.”
There is no portrait of Henry VIII eating a turkey leg.
You will not hear “Play it again, Sam” in Casablanca.
The Monopoly Man doesn’t wear a monocle (though Mr. Peanut does).
My sister and I don’t completely agree on whether a particular incident in our childhood happened, though I’ve told the story long enough, she thinks it may have. I will swear that it did.
This is the Mandela effect at work.
It’s where a group of people—sometimes surprisingly large groups—are quite certain something happened even if it did not. How is that possible? How can large groups of people swear they remember the same wrong thing?1 Multiple people with the same shared memories surely are reliable, no?2
This is where our suggestible nature comes into play.
We’ve heard it wrong for so long we can’t outweigh the heaviness of that repetition with the lightness of what’s actually true.
We encoded and grouped certain types of information for easier recall, so that anything remotely similar gets pulled in. For example, Benjamin Franklin is a well-known founding father, but, like Alexander Hamilton, was not president. Yet many will assume they were presidents because they get lumped in (as founding-father types) with so many who were.
We learn something after the fact, and that sticks in our memory as part of the memory we had, even if it’s not. (See also: why eyewitness testimony is kind of crappy.) Or, we are told something about our memory, and we integrate it without questioning it.
“Hey, do you remember that short guy who robbed you?”
“Yeah, I remember getting robbed.” I suppose he was kinda short.
We misremember according to our expectations, whether that’s because of stereotypes or associations with other experiences (or suggested experiences), which is why you’d better be careful about your imbibing of therapy and your choice of therapists; rehashing often creates rather than clears.
Imagine the damage when the master of deception—the devil himself—convinces millions of people who already have a taste for rebellion that there is no God, no creator, no purpose.
We stumble into confabulation, the little problem of our brain disliking memory gaps so much that it adds extra details to make things more cohesive. If you remember A and E, the brain just has to pull a B, C, or D from somewhere—including related memories, the stories others have told us about their memories, or even entertainment—and close the gap.
The Mandela Effect has a real (bad) impact on our ability to recall history, which has a real (bad) effect on the context necessary to grasp reality, which is perhaps why there’s a tendency for history to repeat itself over and over like a frustrated sledgehammer driving the Golden Spike into our thick skulls, hoping this is the Promontory Point that will finally take.
Imagine you’re in a whiny subreddit, lousy Gab thread, or grimy Discord chat, talking about, say, the moon landings or 9/11 or Charlie Kirk’s assassination or Israel or Epstein—standard fare—and pretty soon the entire group is sure they’ve remembered something that Changes Everything, and even more, they’ll swear by it all the more if it’s impossible for it to be an actual memory the whole group can have. The large size of the group becomes the actual proof of truth; it’s too big to fail. Numbers surely carry weight, regardless of what facts, logic, primary sources, or evidence say. There are naked emperors everywhere, and the naysaying voices calling foul in the wilderness will be silenced.
What can be worse than entire swaths of people “remembering” what never happened? The Mandela Effect is about misinformation. Misinformation is different from disinformation. Both deceive, but misinformation does not intend to do so.
Now we get to gaslighting, a technique in which someone manages to convince another that their own memories and experiences are false. If the Mandela Effect has a group impact, gaslighting has an individual impact.
Gaslighting has two points of destruction: your reputation is destroyed because others believe the lies, and your mental state is destroyed because you start believing the lies even as your subconscious screams otherwise.
You can’t control the former, but you can control the latter.
In February 2020, when I was fired from my job at church (and right before the nation and world entered massive pandemic gaslighting), I was, thankfully, already aware of the power of gaslighting thanks to the pipeline protest. What we saw and experienced was not what the news reported. Because of that, I became better versed on North Dakota recording laws (it’s a one-party consent state), documentation, and written reports (even if for my eyes only). I learned the value of creating my own detailed documentation of the facts (who, what, where, when) and then adding how I felt or my theories about why, even if it was for my eyes only, to ward off the impact that gaslighting could have on me.
Maybe it’s a journal or diary. Maybe it’s your personal calendar. Maybe it’s audio recordings. Maybe you’re like me, doing a mix of all of that and also taking random photos that serve as breadcrumbs for my memory. For the memories and sanity you’ve determined are worth preserving, you must have tangible proof to refer back to. The world is full of “good people” who are not trustworthy when certain things—money and power—are on the line. Most of us have a knife-wielding Brutus within striking distance.
This feels very paranoid—though maybe once-bitten-twice-shy is a better concept—and could easily launch into a discussion about the value of forgetting, and the danger in being Lot’s wife. Fair enough. I don’t tend to record the typical slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and fair-weather friends in a fallen world just because. I’m more than happy to forget and not record the general travails of life.
But in the weeks following my dismissal from my job at the church, I discovered the pastor was not telling the truth about me or what had happened.
My reputation took a hit, and people I thought were friends disappeared. Some stalked me on Facebook to “report back” to the pastor, and other odd things. I was glad to have audio recordings, photographs, photocopies, and written reports of specific, dated incidents under my belt. Though no church leadership asked to see them, they served me well as a reminder that no, I wasn’t “misremembering” what had gone on. I was not crazy.
It wasn’t about defending myself to others. It was about defending myself to me.
Gaslighting is hard to stand against. We’re already drowning in deception. Having to fight to exist in personal reality is a bridge too far. It’s like being in a submersible, sinking into the pressure of time and the continual insistence that you did not experience what you did. Implosion is likely.
The memory certainly fails us; the tangible helps some. God knew this; why else did he repeatedly have his people build stone memorials to remind them of what he had done? Why would he tell them to be sure to repeatedly teach the next generation? He knew our failing memory.
And we should understand this, too.
It’s why we weep when our possessions are destroyed. It’s not because we are materialistic consumers. We know our ability to remember what grandma looked like or what went on in our lives will quickly fade without the tangible to refer back to.
Gaslighting is wicked simple, wicked effective, and just plain wicked. A gentle, calm voice repeating a lie over and over is all it takes to convince people to doubt themselves. You were the victim. You were unreasonable. You deserved this. You were never harmed. You are at fault. Gaslighting makes a person feel insane until they bend to the weight of the lie, lying to themselves to make the unsettled conscience, that faint whisper of true memory, to be silent.
The result is shame, confusion, guilt, and anger with God.
How do you cement your memory? Have you taken the time to consider what you want to remember, what you want to forget, and how to do either?
Don’t mistake me for advocating that you “make” memories; I am not.
Making memories is the by-product, not the focus. Not all activities make a memory, rightfully delegated to the forgotten realms. When making memories becomes the focus, we start taking photos of our food and are driven by fear of missing out rather than by a desire to embrace life.
Art, writing, and scrapbooks with odd ephemera help me remember the high or important moments. Seeing or touching something tangible unlocks memories I can’t retrieve any other way, like a modified version of the memory palace technique. Incautious throwing of items means, for me, actual disposal of memories. When I get rid of things, the question isn’t “does this spark joy” but “is this a necessary or beneficial memory?”
It’s a fine line, admittedly, functioning like this. Some things God (kindly) has us forget. But tangible items are memory hooks for many of us. It’s one reason ripping the elderly from their home surroundings and dumping them in a nursing home room with too few of their “silly knick-knacks” and other possessions is an insane cruelty. It’s no wonder they lose themselves into a fog and fade away. People who don’t remember who they are soon aren’t.
I don’t want to be a hoarder, but I am not interested in being a minimalist. This is almost sacrilegious in this age, when minimalism is heralded as the epitome of ascended existence. It is (wrongly) placed as the antithesis of consumerism. I have to wonder if the push for minimalism isn’t a push to forget who we are, packaged as prettier psychology. No wonder the identity crisis rages; one EMP and we are blank slates with blank stares.
But let me wind this down before you forget where we started.
We have a sick society, and we’ve pinned it on the lack of moral foundations, abandonment of faith, social media, and digital life—the list is long and likely accurate.
But part of it is that we’ve forgotten who we are, and that was the doorway that let so much of the rest in. We are Gollum, whose loss of memory of being a Hobbit turned him into something else entirely. We’ve either whitewashed the important things or delved so deeply through grudges or therapy, picking scabs over and over, that we unearthed a Balrog. We’ve let the world misinform and disinform us about who we are and what matters.
We don’t know who we are because we don’t remember the journey that got us here. We don’t have to live in the past, but there’s value in keeping the starting point still locked into the GPS. The shortest distance between two points still requires two points, and the line between them is the testimony of your life.
It’s one of the reasons that getting your identity through Jesus is such a welcome relief; it is unmovable, freeing, full of hope, and when anyone tells you a lie about yourself, you only need to go to the Word to remember what is true.
The memory, when recent, is green. It is fresh and intact. But you will move away from it, and it will fade, and it will be untrustworthy. It will lie. It will be twisted against you by those who wish to deceive.
God repeatedly told us who we were, and he wrote it down in his Word. The combination of repetition and the tangible is fierce.
Some say it has to do with parallel universes, in which Mandela really did die in prison, and string theory. This is very elaborate, but probably quite interesting after four beers.
This is actually why the Gospels ring true. They are not exactly the same, like a rehearsed story. The individual, the unique experience, their writing style, and their intent create differences that, though they aren’t in conflict, are easily mistaken for inaccuracy. It is their unalikeness that is proof. Nothing says “lie” like a bunch of people reciting the same talking points.