This year the winter holidays were accompanied by guides on how to react if a loved one ascribes to conspiracy theories. The ones I saw emphasized listening and empathy.
They also operated from the assumption that this loved one had lost their mind, self-evident in that they believed in one or more conspiracy theories.
I have my own theory on why so many people are struggling to accept the narrative — that the common cold mutated into an incredibly deadly (and exponentially transmissible) virus leading countries around the world to shut down their economies to protect the vulnerable — is a true and complete story.
You don't need to "have a screw loose," or whatever euphemism we want to use, to hear this ramped up version of the myth of our love and respect for the elderly and immunocompromised and think it's a load of BS.
Our economic textbooks, and the policies they influence, frame the elderly and disabled as a drain on the economy — or as people outside of its considerations entirely. Yet suddenly we're willing to take dramatic economic actions in order to save these same populations? Our politicians are willing to shut down main street to protect people they view as charity cases?
Most of us have long ago been made painfully aware of the gap between the rhetoric about the value we place on care and family and the actual policies that demonstrate these values.
Most of us get our news from people we trust, be that a friend or a media outlet. Few of us have access or the training required to evaluate things on our own.
That hasn’t stopped several of my friends from acting as if they are personally responsible for exposing themselves to every report and combing through every piece of avaiable data in some sort of ritual to restore their sense of control.
I get my news from them. And from a friend who’s been working in a NYC ICU. And from people I know around the world who swap stories with me about what it’s like where we are. And from a friend whose confirmed case back in early March had contact tracers determining which country he’d caught it in and which countries he’d spread it to before he was hospitalized.
I grew up with the narrative that the US values family and respects our elders. However, the US has a track record of poor houses, farm colonies, forced sterilization, institutionalization, and defunding effective social services.
As a nation, what we say and what we do don’t match.
How many times have we been told there is simply no money to pay for family services? Eldercare? Assistive devices? Accessible housing?
Now we’re protecting the vulnerable at any cost? Of course people have doubts.
If you’ve been living in a country facing the “caregiving crisis” for the past twenty years, it’s understandable that you might be skepitcal that our nations suddenly care so much about vulnerable populations that our leaders would take these drastic actions in order to protect them.
I don’t have any answers.
Perhaps some of the theories sound far-fetched, but so does reality right now. So do a lot of the things we accept as reasonable.
As A. Joan Saab puts it,
“So many individuals are dismissed as silly, foolish, or fake. I’m not arguing that what they believe exists, but that there is a deeper longing for connection and truth. In my most generous moments, I see [believing in the unbelievable] as a way of being in control in an out-of-control world. It’s about finding agency and directing the narrative.”