Corona Diaries: PLANdemic
Okay first off, if you're reading this it means I've committed to going with the title 'plandemic' for this blog post which seems like a poor choice on my part. Lord knows who's going to wander upon this post because of said choice. But obviously, despite being aware it’s like a red rag to a bull, I just can’t help myself. So we'll uh…we'll just wait and see what happens here shall we?
Talking of poor decision making: During this past year I've become just a little (a lot) obsessed with the anti-pandemic conspiracy theorist brigade. I think anti-pandemic is the wrong choice actually because, at heart, aren't we all anti-pandemic? I guess I mean anti-vaxxers, anti-lockdowners and so on. I've actually always been intrigued by this sector of society. By people who believe that so much of what we’re presented with as truth and as accessible information by governments, by media, is essentially nonsense. Or worse than nonsense. An actual cover up of the truth perpetrated by the so called free press (MSM amirite guys? IYKYK.). That they’re the only ones who are ‘awake’ while the rest of us are simply gullible sheep. I mean, who are these guys? What makes them so certain they’re right? Are they in fact, in any way whatsoever, right? Jon Ronson and Louis Theroux have done a good job of trying to answer these questions but my desire to know more is unsated.
Before the pandemic started my husband and I began co-writing a play about a motley group of individuals who meet in secret to take on what they believe to be a corrupt government. Their actual logic behind what they each truly believe is, shall we say, unique. To research we read articles, watched documentaries and listened to fascinating podcasts about the ways in which different types of conspiracies/alternative theories are created by or filter through to the people who end up strongly supporting them. We loved learning about and discussing this stuff but so much of it felt theoretical. Yes, obviously it was happening but for the most part it didn’t actively touch our lives on a daily basis. The more extreme cases were often funny to watch rather than frightening and generally, and most importantly, we felt strongly that conspiracy theorists were still very much in the minority. Then COVID-19 hit and that changed.
We’ve now spent a year watching as a movement has sprung up in real time. People who strongly believe things like The pandemic never existed. Or It’s just simply not that bad. Or It was actively created by Chinese government officials. Or We’ve always had the vaccine ready to go. Or The vaccine will kill us. Or Lockdowns are a way of controlling the populous. It’s 5G. It’s Bill Gates. It’s…there’s just so many disparate arguments that don’t fit together and it’s nigh on impossible to work out who believes what and why. There’s a very good (and less meandering) article here about how you simply cannot and should not lump all conspiracy theories, even for the same event, under one banner.
My husband has been concerned at my seemingly insatiable lust for conspiracy drama. Admittedly, at one point, I was delivering him some new theory daily that I wanted to debate or sharing a status update that seemed outrageous. When I finally emerged from an internet rabbit hole terrified that the vaccine might actually make me infertile he suggested I take a social media break. He regularly reminds me that the vast majority of the UK are simply doing their best, listening to the experts and trying to get us out of this mess. He declares that the internet isn’t real life, that some man bashing away on his keyboard about ‘face nappies’ does not represent reality. He’s right. And he’s wrong. Because the truth is, the conspiracies aren’t just buried deep within the dark web and authored by anonymous trolls. I don’t have to go searching for them. They appear when acquaintances share Katie Hopkins’ videos on Instagram or invite me to a group called ‘No to Vaccine Passports’. When people you rate start believing in something that should be easy to dismiss it makes you second guess yourself. The more these arguments are presented to you, the more you consider them, particularly if you’re in a vulnerable state.
Soon after I moved to West London a couple of months ago, a group set up an illegal gathering and handed out pamphlets while saying, “Do you want to know why everything the government and the NHS says is a lie?” People laughed but people also took them, hung about, talked while maskless to a woman who clearly hadn’t been following any sort of social distancing rules. Two days before the demonstration in Hyde Park this past weekend I went to a local flower stall and was interrupted by a man who stopped to talk to the flower seller.
“Mate, I’m off to the pub but can you text me? I don’t have your number anymore. I’m all over the place with this pandemic thing. I call it,” here he paused to puff out his chest. “I call it, the plandemic.”
My heart sank and the flower seller stayed silent. On the right of me a woman who’d been making cutesy faces at my dog suddenly piped up, “I agree with you there.” Keen to start a conversation she raised her voice and repeated, “I do, I agree with you there.”
He grinned proudly, like he’d just been validated. “You do, yeah?”
“Yeah I do. Actually, since you said that.” She walked around me and up to him. Again, neither were masked if that’s something you think is pertinent. “I shouldn’t give you this really but I will since you said that.” She put her bag down and rooted around until she unearthed some sort of alternative newspaper and handed it over to him. I paid quickly for my flowers and walked off, aware that all the worrying I’d done about staying safe may have been pointless in light of being surrounded at close quarters by two people who clearly weren’t respecting any sort of rules.
To me, my concerns are realistic. We’re mid-pandemic, I know people have died, have been sick, are still sick months on. I like to be able to see my family without feeling too anxious and my husband needs to show a negative test result in order to be able to work. I know that plenty of people are totally on the same page as me. In fact, as my husband says, most people probably are. But I’m still intrigued by these people. Look, it’s been an awful year and many don’t have the luxury of working from home or seeing loved ones. I completely appreciate that the harder this year has been for you the more you’re going to scrutinise the government’s actions, the more any red flag is going to stand out to you and become symbolic of something darker.
I know that many of us refer to these people as Covidiots, dismissing entirely everything they stand for. But you cannot diminish a group of people so simply. Many of these people are not stupid. Some are academics, doctors, scientists. Others are willing to put aside hours and hours to collate information, read spreadsheets and delve through history for examples. They’re interacting with others and sharing what they’ve learned. They’re right in saying that that’s a lot more difficult than just believing the government have it in hand and following the guidelines they’ve set out. To further complicate matters, there’s likely a seed of truth in some of what they say if only in the fact that of course governments keep secrets, of course there have been failures and mistakes and cover ups. Nothing is truly black or white. Good or evil. Unfortunately.
I have no issue with engaging sometimes, with trying to learn from others’ perspectives but the problem with that is that these two disparate worldviews are totally incompatible. If you believe the pandemic, the lockdowns, the vaccines are a hoax, if you believe they’re part of a bigger, awful plan then there’s just no way truly for you to align yourself with someone who is taking precautions, trusting the World Health Organisation, doing their best to protect their families from a virus sweeping the globe.
I don’t want to disappoint you but there’s no tidy summary at the end of this whirlwind of a blog post. You’ve basically just accompanied me on a journey through the ideas vying for attention in my brain at the moment. I’m sure it would be healthier to avoid engaging with much of this but that’s impossible for two reasons. One is that it seems unfair to dismiss a whole sector of society’s concerns without at least attempting to understand them and two is that, as I mentioned earlier, I encounter these opinions more often nowadays than ever before without even having to go looking for them. I hate that, by the way. I hate confrontation, I hate uncertainty, I hate the underlying sense of fear regardless of which ‘side’ I choose to agree with. I hate how divided things feel when we should most be coming together. I hate my inability to see the best of society, the people who are doing their best, the vast majority of the country, without also constantly shining a light on a group of people who should probably not be receiving any assistance of that kind from me.
We’re still writing our play. But this year has given it a different flavour, allowed us to reflect more deeply on what it is our characters believe and why. A year ago the play felt funny and mostly pretty lighthearted. Now it’s impossible not to understand the depth of genuine fear and desire for change that underpins the characters’ beliefs and actions. I’m so glad my glacial writing speed means that we now get to play with these ideas, not just to examine those who hold them, but also the impact their vocal opposite has had on the rest of us who are just trying to get through this time without losing faith in the institutions we believe in.