Conspiracies in the time of Corona
At the root of every shared conspiracy theory about coronavirus, wearing masks, or the global pandemic in general, is just somebody’s ego fighting against the idea of being asked to think about others as much, or, god forbid, even a little bit more, than they think about themselves. I know that sounds too simple, and I know that me saying it is probably going to trigger a few egos and “well, actually’s”, but that’s the tricky thing with egos — they’re really good at convincing you that everyone/everything else is the problem.
And I get it — thinking more about others goes against everything our consumer driven capitalistic society has installed in us for generations. We’ve been told that “freedom” is no one being allowed to tell us what to do, even if the thing we do negatively affects others and/or ourselves, even if some people are allowed different freedoms than others (just as long as we’re in the preferred group with more freedoms than others, it all seems fair enough to us), and we’ve been sold the idea that real success is having more than others and the best way to achieve more than others is to not think about what life is like for those that have less. “It’s not our problem,” we say, even as all the problems of thinking this way are literally everywhere we look. We’ve been taught to compare and judge and take misplaced pride in always being too busy to realize too late that life doesn’t go on forever and none of these material accomplishments mean all that much in the end. It’s the cycle our parents took part in, it’s the cycle we’ve been taking part in, and it’s the cycle the next generation was being prepped to carry on with too.
And then a super contagious virus comes along and all of the sudden we’re supposed to just stop being so self-absorbed? We’re just supposed to slow down and show kindness and consideration to people outside of our circles? We’re supposed to alter our ego-driven lifestyles for people we’ve never met and probably never will meet? We’re supposed to rethink the way we’ve organized society and how we participate in it? We’re supposed to just believe scientists - the same kinds of scientists that we’ve been ignoring about less-immediate-but-just-as-serious dangers to the planet and ourselves? We’re supposed to just believe stories that come from outside our safely crafted bubbles, stories that make us question things we try so hard not to ever have to think about or consider?
Naturally, this gets the ego’s back up against the wall, and all of the sudden conspiracy theories that conveniently confirm what we would rather believe in instead start sounding like a better solution. And dang it if they aren’t super easy to share — you don’t even have to read the whole article first or do any fact checking, just click a button and have your memes ready for anyone who can be bothered disagreeing or calling you out (often with their own memes and articles they haven’t fully read or fact-checked).
But the thing about all these conspiracy theories is that they are all super shallow and people tend to only stick with them long enough to try and prove a surface-level point that temporarily makes them feel right and justifies them wanting to get back to being able to act selfishly without feeling like they’re acting selfishly. Because if one really believed that this pandemic is all some big world-wide government plot of misinformation, the answer is not to just refuse to wear masks or refuse to believe death counts and then get back to the mindless working & consuming we were all doing before the pandemic. If people really believed the conspiracies you see being shared on social media, well, comrades, let me take you a little further down the rabbit hole, past all the tired left vs right / liberal vs conservative talking points that intentionally keep us arguing in circles, and let’s look at how a small percentage of people have been hoarding all the money and control all of our media and finance all of our politics and own everything and… I mean, if you want to get conspiratorial, let’s not stop digging once you’ve found the conveniently placed article that confirms the surface-level bias you were trying to confirm. Keep going.
And perhaps that’s where the problem lies — if you keep digging, if you really keep digging, you’re going to eventually get to the realization that we’re all having our egos played off of each other, often for the benefit of someone else’s ego, and the only way to fight back is for all of us to put our individual egos in check and start leaning into our collective empathy and compassion. Basically, start doing the things this pandemic has been trying to to tell us we need to start doing in order to beat it — start caring about each other as much, if not more, than we care about ourselves. And the hard part is that nobody can make that change for you - you can’t mandate kindness.
Unfortunately, the thought of that puts most egos off, so, here we are, the same place we always end up going back to after the newness of a tragedy temporarily pulls us all a little bit closer together: sharing theories on why we should hurry up back to thinking more about ourselves and not worrying about people we don’t know again.
Or, at least, that’s the Cornona conspiracy theory that makes the most sense to me.
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* This post was first shared over on the mountain town blog I run called 95EH.CA (partly inspired by the covid conspiracy theories that continue to pop up on my personal Facebook feed) — but since coming up with content for even one site is hard enough, I figured I’d share what I wrote over here on HI54 too \m/
