Conspiracy theories

There are a few things I can be ashamed of in my life. One of them is an episode of fascination with conspiracy I went through on the verge of adolescence and adulthood. Countless theories of other than official course of events in 9/11 terrorist attacks and climate change denialism were my focus for a while around 2007. For a grown-up, yet immature lad the uncanny explanations were compelling and fortunately, meaningless in the long run.

Then came the tenth day of April in 2010 when a Polish plane carrying 96 people tragically crashed in Smolensk. Circumstances of the accident have immediately become a fertile ground for conspiracy theories, which for years continued to mark a divide line in the Polish politics. I was three years older and much wiser, not to fall for stories of assassination, artificial fog, metal-hard birch, explosives found in the wreck and other stuff.

A year and a half ago an epidemic caused by a novel coronavirus broke out in China. The peril was shrugged off and covered up by the local authorities who acted belatedly. The virus, which could have been kept at bay, spilled all over the world and turned lives of virtually everyone upside down.

Now go back in time to July 2019 and imagine somebody telling you about lockdowns, overwhelmed health service, major increase in mortality, economy and social life running into a standstill, shut down industries, compulsory mask-wearing. You would laugh them off. The unimaginable has become a reality.

Here is what underlies each single conspiracy theory – an event so complex, so improbable, so hardly imaginable, going beyond people’s comprehension, that it calls for a simple clarification. A human mind does not like to make too much effort. It yearns for quick solutions instead of uphill and mind-bending pursuit of intricate truth.

People are sick of isolation, remote learning and working, restrictions. They hanker after normalcy. No wonder some of them, less intelligent and more gullible, fall for simple explanations, telling them the virus is a hoax, the pandemic had been planned in advance and under its guise a new order of the world is brought in. Such people have always been, yet in pre-Internet times just a handful of them were indulging in their vision of the world. With social media giving everybody a chance to share their thoughts, their visions are spread far too far and wide. They take fancy of (usually) poorly educated people who, having gotten familiar with shady articles, memes or video, claim to have knowledge superior to epidemiologists and virologists. 9/11 or Smolensk conspiracy theories referred to past events and were relatively harmless. Today, the narration of a false pandemic and bleating of the anti-vax movement can cost health and lives of millions of people. Disturbingly.