Tag: covid

Posted on

What’s the cure for conspiracy theories?

The world seems rife with conspiracy. Never before have we had a population so well educated, yet apparently so vulnerable to believing in vast conspiracy narratives. It seems like a contradiction. Researchers at UCLA have been using AI to work out how such conspiracy theories seem to emerge and subsequently collapse with ever greater velocity. But they struggle to explain why these ideas emerge at all.

The attraction of conspiracy theories is the promise that beneath the apparent chaos of the world is some underlying order and meaning, even if that meaning is negative and the order is destructive. It’s a desire to feel control, to possess agency over one’s own life.

Conspiracy theories • NPC • meme • funny • catchymemes

In an ever more individuated and atomised world, the natural human desire for bonding en masse, for submerging into a gestalt and having a sense of belonging, therefore becomes subverted by such theories. Conspiracy theories are less ideas than they are communities.

The question is not why do conspiracy theories occur. They occur because of the human need for meaning and desire for order. Nor is the question how they may be combated or defeated. They can only be challenged and overcome by implementing transparent order in society. Transparent in this sense includes the underlying principles of fairness and dignity, because people will also strive for alternate explanations when they are treated unfairly or suspect they are being stripped of their human dignity.

The question that remains about conspiracy theories is why certain narratives prosper and others do not. To an extent this is a cui bono question – who benefits? Who makes money from proliferating certain conspiracies? And certainly, there are many who make a healthy living propagating nonsense and half-baked ideas to the masses. They may even be acting in good faith, believing in the attenuated and baroque web of connections they themselves are weaving. But more significantly, it’s an issue of what cultural anxieties are exposed by conspiracy theories.

The current most prolific conspiracy theory – that shadowy cabals of elites operating both in and out of the public eye are attempting to implement population reduction and totalitarian rule – is in this sense a throwback to the unequal and undignified social structures of the laissez-faire 19th century or even earlier, to feudalism. But it also expresses very contemporary anxieties about the Covid pandemic, and deeply held suspicions about the democratic unaccountability of transnational bodies in particular, be they the EU, the IMF, the World Economic Forum or the UN.

There are, in short, no easy answers to conspiracy theories, because conspiracy theories ARE the easy answers. They satisfy the atomised citizen’s need to bond in dignity with fellow citizens and they provide a simple and moralistic order against which to resist, thereby providing meaning.

History suggests that people, no matter how well educated, will be inclined to prefer such easy moralistic explanations of the world in which they live. The attraction of such explanations is as hardwired as the desire for sugar or animal fats, and as difficult to break as a habit.

Only a world which offers its citizenry ever greater fairness and dignity, which entrusts them with agency over their own lives, has any hope of competing with the memetic addiction to conspiracy. Until such a world is in place, people will continue to believe that shadowy forces secretly rule the world and wish them harm, be they demons, or Illuminati, Elders of Zion, or psychotic men in the boardrooms of Brussels and Washington.

Posted on

The Utopian Heresy

So, I was speedreading HG Wells again in advance of teaching him, in the context of his utopianism, and I ended up wondering about utopia’s relationship to societal scale.

In Wells, dystopia is usually us, by default. By contrast to his Modern Utopia, or The Shape of Things to Come, it is existing society which bears the taint, by default comparison, of dystopia.

But there are hidden hints of dystopia too, in the monstrosity of some of his earlier scientific romances – in the Eloi/Morlock symbiosis or on Moreau’s island, for example.

Anyhow, I began wondering whether a wrong turn we’ve made, in the 10,000 years since we expanded our societal size and complexity far beyond the Dunbar number, is in conceiving of utopia as a mass or universally applicable concept, and concomitantly, of dystopia as the plight of the individual in a negatively charged mass society.

Winston Smith undoubtedly lives in a dystopia. But how much of his dystopian encounter related to his individualism, his isolated rebellion against the monolith of Ingsoc? Would it have ever been possible for Smith, like the citizens of the Soviet Union, to somehow accommodate the totalitarianism? Can we, like Camus with Sisyphus, imagine Winston to be happy?

Anyhow, at the risk of assuming a taint of libertarianism, I wonder maybe we might have got it in reverse. Perhaps if utopia was understood as an individuated pursuit to project wellbeing outwards, whether desired or no, and dystopia as an immersion in a mass societal structure in which one size cannot fit all, nor even many, we might be onto something more fruitful.

Implicit in this idea, of course, is the suggestion of scale as an aspect of the issue, alongside the individuation of the Post-Enlightenment, something which itself has fallen subject to gargantuanism too, leading to the atomisation anomie so many people now experience. Is there a sweet spot somewhere between the individual self, thinking therefore being in a Cartesian moment of solipsism, and the uncountable hordes of contemporary existence? Professor Dunbar, as a good evolutionary biologist, suggests there is, hovering around his tribal size scale of approximately 150 individuals, though of course this does get queried.

No doubt, some of the reaction to the Covid pandemic, people seeking to leave cities for the country life in the first twitch of reversing the urbanisation we’ve seen accelerating throughout recent centuries, relates as much to an intuitive desire to rescale existence closer to the Dunbar number. This does not deny the desire for a lockdown garden, nor any of the other insights the world suddenly and collectively experienced in relation to the dystopic existence of modern city living, of course. They go hand in hand, down the pastoral path.

But if we must continue to operate in terms of didactic absolutes like utopia and dystopia, then maybe it would be more useful to envisage attempts to engineer society en masse as inherently dystopian motivations, even when couched, as they always, always are, in utopian and universal terms.

Equally, if we began to conceive of dystopia as a fundamental malaise experienced by the individual in response to the impossible complexities and incomprehensible scale of globalised society, then paradoxically it restores to us some human agency. Dunbar might essentialise this as something hardwired, inherent to our sapiens software. Without necessarily challenging that, I see it coming from both ends at once, both nature and nurture, the contradiction of Dasein in the megacity.

This still leaves us with the challenges that require scaled reaction of course. How to accommodate human liberty in a pandemic, or engage a global response to the climate crisis, just to iterate two particularly pressing examples of how individuated utopic desire might contradict the need to police the dystopic boundaries of global-scale societal infrastructure.

If I had an easy answer to that mode of contradiction I’d say so, but of course I don’t. Nevertheless, it does seem to me more sensible to start understanding utopic desire as an inherently dystopian practice when predicated on a societal level as it always has been to date. Likewise, there is a utopic emancipation inherent within dystopian structure, awaiting each of us as individuals to unleash it.

This is the paradox of the utopia/dystopia framework and paradigm as I see it. This is my utopian heresy.

Posted on

Ten Grand

I was on the BBC this morning discussing, inter alia, the UK government’s decision to implement fines of up to £10,000 for people who fail to quarantine themselves when directed to do so.

It seemed to me that this is yet another example of the government attempting to be seen to be doing something while doing nothing at all. The overwhelmed police, already disgruntled from being told to check how far and for how long people had been walking or jogging last spring now find themselves ordered to snoop on whether people are conscientiously staying at home or not. They don’t have the manpower to solve the vast majority of muggings and burglaries, so how are they expected to achieve this?

Apparently the government want the public to start grassing up their neighbours. This is an intriguing suggestion predicated on a number of unlikelies, including: a) the idea that people know their neighbours; b) that they know where their neighbours have been holidaying or whether they received a message to quarantine; and c) their desire to grass up their neighbours.

Of those three, only the last seems remotely likely, and I still feel that most people are either disinclined or disinterested in reporting their neighbours’ activities. Furthermore, who spends their time twitching the curtains to monitor the rest of the street? Most of us have our own lives to live.

Anyhow, this kind of pointless nonsense is why the UK has suffered one of the worst COVID infection rates in the world. The government are too busy doing stupid shit badly to bother even attempting to do the right things (testing being the main one).

There’s more here, including what put me right out of my comfort zone this morning, if you’re interested. Archived programme available for the next month or so. UK listeners only, alas.