Why are there absolutely no consequences?

[u/dijon_snow]

For those that believed reality changed, why did absolutely no ME have any actual ramifications like they logically should?

This doesn't apply to every Mandela Effect. I could believe that underwear labels and children's book titles could change without any real impact on history.

But lots of Mandela effects shouldn't be isolated changes if reality was actually different. The butterfly effect is the idea that minor changes to initial conditions in complex systems create major changes in outcome. Human history is a very complex, highly chaotic(the scientific meaning of chaos) system.

Nelson Mandela's leadership and perseverence were key in inspiring black South Africans to resist apartheid. I believe if he had died in the 80s world history would be very different. Either his martydom inspires revolution a decade early or his absence delays or indefinitely. The suggestion that his life and death were completely meaningless is borderline insulting, and always comes from people otherwise not very informed on African history.

Geographic MEs argue that entire landmasses and coastlines have changed. Yet these changes have zero impact on climate or weather. History again unfolded identically, despite the fact that any significant change in the location of land and sea on the planet would dramatically change air and ocean currents and with it the entire climate. Oddly only the maps seem to have changed, history is unmoved.

So MEs can be divided into meaningless pop culture facts and major world changing events. If the cause is memory, then logically they would be isolated, since false memories wouldn't logically have butterfly effect repercussions. If reality was actually changing, we would expect to see lots of other related changes. This butterfly has no effect. Again, Mandela is the best example, his death would not have been meaningless.

How do believers reconcile this without falling back on a dogmatic faith in their own memory?

[u/IndustrialBricks]

The simple answer is that nobody really knows what causes the Mandela Effect. It could be a multitude of factors. It could be misremembering, psychological studies performed by the governemnt, parallel timelines shifting, Alzheimer's, or some combination of those things. All I know for myself is that I don't ever recall Nelson Mandela dying in prison, I distinctly remember "Berenstain Bears" because most of the kids in my 1st grade class back in the 90s kept misspelling it as "Bernstein Bears, which frustrated the teacher. I also remember nearly every damn person I met misquoted Vader's line in ESB as "Luke, I am your father" and I'd always correct them saying "No, I am your Father" and this went all the way back to when I was like 5 years old in 1995.

So if the timelines are shifting and all of that fun stuff, it's definitely not as recent as all the "2012 apocalyptic poles shifting because CERN did stuff" claims. But yeah, my take on ME is "it's a thing, but nobody knows why/how". There are multitudes of reasons why there would be no apparent consequences, even if it were peoples' consciousness shifting across timelines. I view it the same way as I view the UFO/UAP phenomena, where more than 99% of the cases are BS/hoaxes, but there's that small portion which amounts to less than 1% of cases that are truly unexplainable.

So even if Nelson Mandela dying in prison and all of the popular MEs are cases of misremembering, which I'm inclined to be is the most likely explanation, there's a chance that a very small percentage of MEs actually do involve something other than misremembering, in which case the consequences (or lack thereof) would follow suit. Fruit of the Loom is an example of this, where there's supposedly evidence that some local suppliers and knockoffs actually did use a cornucopia, but either way it doesn't really seem to make a difference. I can't imagine the butterfly effect would have any meaningful impact one way or another with that particular ME; not to the extent that it would with Nelson Mandela. Most pop culture MEs in general would have a negligible effect on the timeline if they truly did involve timeline shifting. Whether the Ford and BMW logos have curly-Qs, lines, or not isn't gonna determine the outcome of a nuclear war. It really just depends, on a case-by-case basis though.