It leads to a logical question - what makes it possible for so many people to mistakenly remember the same event? Surely, if so many people believe one thing, it's not possible for this to be a coincidence? It's as if a mysterious force has descended onto the planet, infecting our minds one unsuspecting victim at a time, until a necessary critical mass makes it impossible to ignore the illness. But I've been giving this question a bit more thought lately, and I'm starting to think that if you consider the way memory works, then the answer is likely quite mundane.
There are three components to my conclusion. First, as time passes most people seem prone to slowly misremember anything. There is plenty of research that demonstrates this effect, which I often find described as a consequence of storytelling - each time we recall a memory, it's as if we retrieve the moment from storage to relive the moment in conversation or in our own minds, then we restore it for future reference. The problem is that in reliving the memory we subtly alter it, intentionally or otherwise, and it's these changing details that accumulate over time to distinguish the recollection from the original. I've also seen this effect compared to a game of telephone, where an original message is whispered from one person to another until the message iterates into a related but clearly different version of itself.
The second component is the sheer impossibility of using memory to keep track of everything happening in our lives. I am in front of this laptop, half past three on a humid Saturday afternoon, and I cannot tell you with any precision what I was doing exactly twenty-four hours ago (unless "working" suffices as a response). I believe Nelson Mandela is one of the noteworthy world figures in my lifetime, but I don't expect anyone to carve out space in their own minds to store away the easily searchable facts about his life. What I am saying is not that I understand why people believe Mandela died in the 1980s, but rather that I would understand if someone had no clue about his death. This brings me to my point - whenever I'm not exactly sure about a memory detail, I will consider deferring to someone else; we must help each other remember certain things. It's not hard to imagine a person with a hazy recollection of Mandela's death being prone to misinformation, particularly in the days before everyone had Google on their phones.
The final factor here is scale, particularly in the context of the human race. Reader, we are approaching eight billion people, a figure some project we will reach by 2030. The idea that someone might learn the wrong information from someone else in the way I described above is admittedly a rare hypothetical, but even if it applies to just one in a million people then there will be thousands of cases. I don't toss this number around by accident - the Wikipedia entry suggests the same. It's a lot like how the lottery works, I suppose, in that each time I lose someone else has won. And all along, I live with the truth - I will never win, even though I'm just like the winners. On this crowded little planet there are just enough people to make anything plausible, and there are almost always thousands of people doing just about any inconceivable thing (except reading TOA). We forget these facts at our own risk, introducing the possibility that certain mundane realities about our existence will seem far more incomprehensible at first sight due to the simple fact that we forget our small place within the huge context of the human race.
My fascination with the Mandela effect, after I thought about it, proved to be nothing more than a passing curiosity. Like most things that once caught my attention, there was far less than met the eye about the phenomenon. It's important to remember that we humans are far from perfect, and that most of what we do is made up as we go along. If we put our minds to it, perhaps we could keep things just the way they are, but it's more important to find ways to tell and retell our stories until we can make the future a better place. It's more important to find ways to work together, to forgive each other for our mistakes and find ways to help each other repair past errors, to fill in the gaps when we don't understand, because with so many of us on this planet even the smallest detail can grow into something out of our control. To do otherwise, I suspect, would put us at-risk of repeating certain age-old mistakes - seeking truth rather than what's right, conflating justice with vengeance, forgetting to forgive. I think Mandela's effect, what made his greatness, is that he understood this - we are flawed beings, doing our best to live our stories, stories that we can hardly understand even as they unfold in front of us. He understood that we rely on each other, more so than we ever acknowledge, to keep from forgetting the most important thing - the only way to move toward a better future, where it's possible to win without someone else having to lose, is to move together.
