For most of us, when all this started, everything about COVID-19 and the resultant restrictions seemed strange and unsettling, they still do really.
Like, I suspect, most of the experts, many of us had no way of knowing exactly what this was or how to deal with it. Uncertainty was the norm and so we took the directives from our authorities at face value and, though it felt alien and, to some extent, counter-intuitive, we shut down business and we isolated.
There was one group, however, that had a completely different reaction to the situation. In the blink of an eye, they decided with absolute certainty that they knew exactly what was going on. This was no pandemic, they remonstrated, this was a plot, a carefully orchestrated, highly organized plan to take over the world by the very people who… already run it. Umm, okay.
This was the beginning of the new 1984, a global police state where apparently we were all going to spend the rest of our lives locked in our homes and the economy was going to be deliberately trashed so that… well, it all gets a bit hazy at that point.
Bill Gates was going to microchip us and simultaneously kill us with a COVID vaccine to reduce the population. The dastardly plotters needed to be able to keep track of all the dead corpses that never leave their houses, apparently. Brilliantly, they didn’t need to bring in the army for this martial law scenario because we’re all sheep who have agreed to go along with it like, well, sheep.
It does beg two questions, though, if we’re all so compliant and weak-minded, why do they have to do any of this in the first place? And, how exactly will destroying the global economy help any of them?
This level of certainty in unlikely scenarios has only grown, even as the bodies have been piling up in cities like New York and London. We’ve only been living with the awfulness of this virus for around two months but, almost from day one, the ‘certain ones’ have pointed out how few have died compared to six months’ worth of regular flu (what?).
Not for them the caution of the cowardly. No one’s going to tell them what to do. Like the lock-down protestor who cried loudly and widely that the pandemic was fake, taking to the streets unmasked and unafraid and dying of COVID-19 a couple of weeks later. They are going to show us all how to stick it to the man.
I had thought they’d settle down a bit as things got worse but they’ve just become more strident and high-pitched. They now point to the reduced numbers of deaths (a direct result of the very measures they themselves have so vehemently opposed) with triumph as if it’s proof positive that all this is a hoax and that they were right all along.
They are masters of cherry-picking facts to fit their interpretations (amusingly, they only ever seem to read as far through the articles they post as the first statement that confirms their bias. Often, if they’d only bothered to read to the end, they’d discover how little the writer actually supports their thesis).
I do not share the certainty of zealots, I have no magic eight-ball that can tell me if what we are doing here will help or ultimately harm society. I just don’t know. I have no massive ego to guide me and left most of my paranoia behind a long time ago.
I definitely don’t like some of the measures being employed in some places. And I find this level of uncertainty quite threatening and uncomfortable. However, perhaps it’s not always necessary to create a convoluted narrative that attributes moral superiority to some and absolute evil to others in order to explain that which we don’t yet fully understand; that, to me, is letting your fear carry you away.
Those who know me personally are more than aware of my generally sympathetic leanings towards contrarian thinking and what some people choose to call conspiracy theorizing. However, creating conspiracy from whole cloth in real-time is a dangerous game. It will be months, perhaps years before enough facts are known to form an educated opinion about this current crisis. To declare that you know absolutely what is going on right now is just narcissism and ego.
Here’s a conspiracy theory that could equally fit the facts on the ground:
What if the virus is actually not much weaker than we’re being told? What if it is actually some kind of bio-weapon that starts out looking like a bad flu but mutates rapidly? The latest estimate out of China is that it has already mutated 33 times. What if it just builds and builds changing its pathognomonic signature so quickly that doctors can’t keep up with it? What if that’s the real reason for the lock-downs; the government knows exactly how bad it is and doesn’t want to admit it for fear of widespread panic?
Theorizing is fun but if you only have a tiny number of actual facts to work with, it’s ultimately pointless.
You don’t have to trust your government, I sure as hell don’t. You do have to ask, does this conspiracy make sense? What practical power over us do They stand to gain from all this supposed skullduggery that they don’t, to all intents and purpose, already have?
Cui bono, baby, cui bono.
Words and image are my own.
