Does Wyoming Exist?

Why can the Socratic method be considered dangerous? That is one of the questions that I and my partner, KH, were tasked with answering in the first action project of our second humanities class of the year, "Forbidden Books". Before I can answer this question, it's first important to explain what the Socratic method is, and how our project relates to it. The Socratic method is a sort of conversation between two people, in which one person is using questions to lead the other person question their reasoning and thoughts on a topic. Socrates was known for forcing the people around him to question even the simplest things, and this is shown in the Socratic method. KH and I's project relates to this, because it is a Socratic dialogue. Socratic dialogues are conversations around a specific open ended question, that use the Socratic method. The question we chose, was "Does Wyoming exist?".

At first glance, this may be confusing, as of course this doesn't seem like an open ended question. We know about Wyoming's existence for a fact, and you may not think of it as up for debate. This is partially why we chose this question. We live in an age of conspiracy theories, and regardless of if they make sense to us, there are people who believe things that seem obviously able to be disproven, and yet people are still able to be convinced of them. We wanted to see from this perspective, and look at how the Socratic method could be used to further an agenda, in this case how it can be used to spread misinformation. The evidence used in our video is technically true, just shown selectively. For example, Representative Zwonitzer really did say that his state didn't exist, but he also was joking. There is a 25k person community of people dedicated to disproving Wyoming's existence online, but that doesn't necessarily make something true. Without further ado, here is our video. We hope it makes you think. We had some sound issues we weren't able to troubleshoot, so the script is also down below.

 

 Sources: https://apnews.com/article/wyoming-coronavirus-pandemic-gillette-d7d2bbf5e2040b4e1e5498c8131bc376, https://www.google.com/amp/s/cowboystatedaily.com/2020/01/28/wisconsin-high-schooler-asks-legislators-does-wyoming-exist/amp/, https://youtu.be/56uSDQECrRQ, https://kingfm.com/funny-film-proves-once-and-for-all-that-wyoming-does-not-exist/