The Funeral that started it all
I was over on that other sub, the “society” version of ME, and got banned for questioning someone’s experience - I was genuinely concerned as they appeared to be suffering from spiraling mental health issues and they were seeking confirmation rather than help. (Yeah I know, lesson learned)
But it made me curious about why people get so insistent their experiences couldn’t possibly be the result a faulty memory or malleable perception. I looked into specifically Nelson Mandela and the origins of why people think he died in prison 1986. It was interesting, but it took me all of 10 minutes to research and connect the dots that make it clear why so many people remember him dying/watching his funeral in 1986.
There was a funeral broadcast on tv in 1986. It was for four political activists in South Africa, but not Mandela. It was broadcast on a re-broadcast signal from Africa, so it was very low quality when viewed in most countries, and was not typically on the “primary”local news channel.
At the funeral, Mandela’s wife gave a passionate, fiery speech and mentioned her husband several times. But again, the broadcast was particularly low quality, and it wasn’t always easy to hear the audio clearly.
Most people around the world were not particularly focused on the goings on in South Africa at the time and while it was in the news and apartheid was a common topic of discussion, most info people had would have come almost exclusively from a handful of newspaper snippets, short news segments on the local news channels, and random conversations with friends who were likely also poorly informed/light on in-depth information. Despite apartheid being a “big deal” as far as human rights issues of then or any time, we didn’t have the internet and South Africa wasn’t exactly a big world player. It’d be like hearing something about Nigerian civil unrest today. Do you know a lot about what’s going on in Nigeria? How about the names of the local players?
The people who report “remembering” that the funeral was for Mandela with a fierce surety are quite often people who were very (or at least relatively) young at the time, not exactly the type of person who was nose to the page on world affairs, and typically the context is “I remember it so well because it was the first time I’d ever heard of Nelson Mandela” …so what you’re saying is that at 8 years old, you saw a low quality late-night broadcast of a political funeral where a woman spoke about Nelson Mandela, whom you’d never heard of before, and you don’t believe it’s possible you simply correlated the woman talking about Nelson Mandela with the imagery of a funeral and logged that in your brain as the Mandela funeral?
When pressed with that explanation, they often cite that their parents also corroborated they remember Mandela died in prison or later were surprised he was released from prison because they thought he died in the 80’s. Again, you don’t think a busy parent who was half paying attention to a low resolution re-broadcast of a funeral on another continent that mentioned Mandela, a man they barely knew anything about, in a conflict thousands of miles away that didn’t affect their daily life in any way, may have simply done the same thing - correlated the imagery of a funeral with his wife giving a fiery speech, and turned it into a memory that he died OR that maybe they didn’t even watch the broadcast but simply heard someone at work talk about Mandela dying or “the Mandela funeral” in the following weeks, and didn’t think much of it, logged a brief note that “mandela died” and then were surprised years later to find out he had not?
No, the hypothesis is that it’s much more likely some nefarious cabal or entity is deliberately and [usually] with precision, manipulating timelines, or shifting dimensional realities, or mass-manipulating the minds of an entire population of a country/the world and that’s the most plausible explanation because you don’t want to consider the more reasonable option of “human memory is not just flawed, it’s also piece-mealed together and highly malleable over our lifetimes, and human perception is equally flawed, malleable, and highly subjective”.
To me, this brief research (less time than it took to type this out) gets right to the heart of the problem - it is so easy to draw a rational conclusion from the evidence surrounding the funeral and explain so effortlessly why so many people would have a memory of Mandela dying in prison in the 80s despite his release years later. But it’s not very fun to have your hopes of having dimensional sensitivity dashed, and it means you’re not very special if you just recall a composite memory of an event that didn’t actually happen. And it’s scary to admit you don’t have as much control over your senses, perception, and memory as you think you do.