What Two Very Real National Conspiracies Teach Us about Human Mediocrity
On US-driven anti-vax propaganda, and China's role in the fentanyl crisis
I got hit hard by a flu yesterday, and I’m still riding out the worst of it, so apologies if today’s “deep-dive” is a little more cursory than usual.
And yet, there’s a bit of irony to today’s subject being the one I’m tackling while ill, because after a week of talking about problems with how nationalist conflict is used to drive up economic growth and technological innovation, we’re now going to sit with two very real cases of nationalist sabotage, as they relate to the medical world.
Here on Substack, I sometimes see newsletters boosted in my Notes feed that advance extreme political views. There are MAGA newsletters here. There are COVID-19-deniers, and anti-vaxxers, and QAnon carryovers, and the usual assortment of grand conspiracy theories involving Democrats in office and “woke” media.
It’s an interesting mental exercise to read some of those pieces, too—and not just the main article, but the comments for each. It is so easy to treat people who have different points of views as if they’re from another planet. And yet, putting aside that these authors always have at least one or two premises dead wrong, a lot of the argumentation that extends from their flawed initial premises is itself quite cogent.
But why wouldn’t it be? They’re still human beings, who remain as capable as the rest of us of spinning elaborate arguments to justify their points of view. Just because we might start with the wrong first assumption doesn’t mean we lose the ability to string together a rich series of claims that follow logically from said premise.
We’re also very good at avoiding facts that would require us to question our initial premises—and that, too, shows we’re craftier than we might let on. We’ve seen this behaviour around our latest wars, and climate change, and socioeconomic disparity yielding awful migration outcomes. People by and large will not acknowledge whatever data points might endanger their underlying premises—but they will keep practising whatever arguments allow them to keep those premises strong.
We love to debate, in other words, more than we love to approach the world with a truly curious mindset. We know that “truth” lies with the best debater: the person who can intimidate others either by gish-galloping (dumping so many inaccurate statements at once that it takes the other person too long to respond to every flawed claim) or flinging false equivalences that essentially accuse one’s opponent of discursive insincerity, so as to bypass any real discussion of the facts themselves.
The propagandists in us are powerful. We do not like to be wrong.
And so, we can keep spinning out grand, thoughtful arguments based on flawed premises forever—all while thinking ourselves great thinkers; and all while refusing to engage with the possibility that our first principles might be wrong.
So what are the flawed premises in conspiratorial newsletters?
Two matter most of all, in the context of medical conspiracies:
The idea that manipulation is at all atypical in government action; and
the idea that there was an obvious ‘proper’ response we could easily have implemented in response to fears of a deadly new contagion instead.
To be clear:
There have absolutely been reprehensible, manipulative, and false actions by people who held positions of authority during the height of the pandemic.
The US CDC, for instance, made many grave errors in its delivery of medical recommendations. In part, some of these were considered “noble lies”: to incentivize public action, and to protect limited state resources. But even if done with good intentions, they created a bad-faith relationship with many US citizens, who were already stressed out by the uncertainty of COVID and simply wanted it to go away.
We’re going to talk about another case today, in which the US government operated in bad faith in the early years of the pandemic. But let’s dwell a beat longer, first, on the second flawed premise that guides so many into extremist conspiracy thinking.
Conspiracy theorists reveal a great deal about their broader cosmology when they discuss the elaborate plots built to ruin lives. They don’t allow for incompetent human actors, for one—and there’s no room for someone doing the best they can, yet still contributing to a net negative social result. Everything must be connected… because it’s easier to imagine the universe in this way. Dealing with the everyday chaos of human beings—our smallness, our mess of competing priorities, our fluid relationships with abstracted notions of higher institutions—is terrifying.
What if no one is in charge, and everyone’s just doing the best they can within varying ranges of selfish interest and access to larger seats of power?
No. It’s much easier to imagine that specific examples of institutional failure—of manipulation, of incompetence, of incorrect data for all one’s best efforts to be precise—are a smoking gun for something much larger.
Something ‘they’ don’t want you to know.
I have empathy for these folks, even if they make our world a lot harder to navigate. I see the underlying fear and desperate need for a sense of order in chaos. Don’t we all just want things to be normal again? To not see another round of images of children killed in Gaza, or mass deaths from heat waves, or the torture and murder of POWs in Russia’s war in Ukraine, or word of mass rapes in civil-war-ridden Sudan, or migrants exploited, in agony, and dying along routes in Europe and Central America?
Is it true that a few people in office do have the power to change parts of this equation—to alleviate suffering, and do better by humanity? Absolutely.
But they also belong to broader cultural systems that allow them such outsize power in the first place. We continue to feed into their elevated status every day.
And that’s maybe the hardest part of living in our world.
Conspiracy theorists often rely on the idea that most of us are sheeple, who can’t see how we’re being played by sitting government representatives and secret societies.
And we often are.
But the real “reveal” doesn’t lie with uncovering the mere fact that institutions are imperfect, systematically make egregious choices, and shelter obvious manipulators.
It lies with accepting that there is no perfection possible—no baseline of impeccable conduct—that we can ever expect of human beings or their institutions. When we refuse to put anyone on a pillar just so we can rage against them, we begin the work of regaining a more pragmatic, and actionable, view of institutions and participants.
The world is filled with incompetent, selfish, and cruel actors, along with well-intentioned people who just don’t have all the data needed to make the best calls.
And if we can remember that, rather than indulging in shock and anger at their existence, we can begin to tackle at least some of the damage that they’ve done.
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