Two things I learned from this episode.
The first is that while it's all stupid confabulation, there isn't a lot of lying. There's tons of lying in the other fringe belief episodes, but in this one people's supernatural tales are "I think dogs sat different" or "is water too wet". It feels like there's not much you can gain from lying,. It makes sense: the ideal Mandela Effect experience is a fact you remember wrong that other people also remember wrong., so itrewards relatability more than sensationalism.
The second is that there's no core belief behind the Mandela effect narrative. Even people like the moms from the starchildren episode talked about crystals and vibrational energy as if it was shared knowledge. I could tell there was some kind of canonical set of 'real' Mandela effect events, and true, there were a couple cranks yelling about gangstalkers, but I didn't see any kind of explanation or purpose people believed in. No shadowy organization, no secret plot, no complex dog-whistle language. It's a conspiracy theory without a conspiracy or a theory.
Someone get Umberto Eco on the phone, I have a pitch for Foucault's Pendulum 2.
