A Quick Note on Conspiracies

A common refrain among liberal punditry is that believing in conspiracies is not only bad but is destroying our country.  This line of thinking is not new, but it has reached a new fever pitch with the coming of the Trump era of politics.  And while I certainly agree that the common perception of "conspiracies" as right-wing fever dreams does describe a pernicious and malign influence on our polity, it is also the established position of this blog that conspiracies are not only real but must be accounted for in any real analysis of power.

As such, I think it is useful to briefly consider what we're really arguing about when we argue about the very idea of conspiracies.  Certainly, it must be true that very few if any liberals think that conspiracies literally do not exist.  Otherwise it's unlikely that they would ever mention things that fit the literal definition of conspiracy, whether it be things that are sorta real or things that are completely made up:

As we can assume that blanket dismissals of "conspiracies" are not literally that, we can instead attempt to understand the real topic of discussion.  Silly as they are, the tweets above actually illuminate the political function that conspiracy theories serve.  Whether it be a leftist critiquing the forces of capital, a right-winger decrying the scourge of "wokeism," or a Democratic Party loyalist speculating that a whistleblower killed himself for funsies, the intended affect is the same.  In each case, the theorist identifies a group or an entity as both powerful and dastardly, and uses the lens of conspiracism to paint them as the enemy.  As such, the true object of these theories is not so much the conspiracy itself but rather who holds power and to what end.  In turn, conspiracies theories inherently posit that those who are powerful wield that power specifically to diminish those who should have power.  This means that conspiracy theories are "bad" in that they mask what is fundamentally a normative statement about political beliefs behind a web of intrigue.  But they're also "good" because the underlying assertion that a group or entity holds power is a testable, falsifiable statement.  So even thought we (hopefully) have the epistemic humility to know that we'll never know the real truth behind many things, conspiracy theories serve a useful political function of not only identifying one's enemy, but also giving a specific reason for such a designation, within an admittedly crude structure of an analysis of power.

Do Not Panic

I don't often experience pride in the profound sense.  One exception to this is how I, a former moderate hypochondriac, navigated the pandemic.  This is not to say that I did not experience anxiety or even occasional panic, but rather that I was able to deal with it and emerge on the other side with a more sustainable approach to managing both my health and my mind.  And while I will never look back at my specific experience of the pandemic as something I would ever want to re-live, I can at least find some solace in knowing that it helped usher in a certain amount of personal growth and maturity.

Unfortunately, it is very apparent that this was not the case for everyone.  To be clear, I am speaking specifically about the doomers, a subset of people who post constantly about ongoing threats from COVID that are exaggerated at best and wholly invented at worst.  I want to also be clear that I am not suggesting that these people are mentally deficient or morally suspect, but simply that their words and actions appear to inspire unneeded panic and angst in others.  As such, that impulse must be pushed back on. 

Of course people have been panicking ever since we first learned of the novel virus in late 2019.  This panic was, to a certain degree, pretty obviously justified.  The prospect of drastically altered lives dotted by sickness and death indeed came to pass, and was every bit as horrible as one might have reasonably expected.  And now we have a new endemic virus that will add to our infectious disease burden for years to come at best and forever at worst.  But the specific panic I am talking about here seems to have arisen in the past couple years, after the worst parts of the pandemic concluded.  My first awareness of this came from this article, which I decried here.  I remarked again on this through this thread and elsewhere, but I never really collected all of my thoughts into once place.  This was partly because I did not want to risk becoming a "crank" over what is ultimately a meta-discourse that is mostly contained to a few corners of Twitter (though there are exceptions).  But it was mostly because I feel like I said all I needed to say right here:

"Actually existing Covid is bad enough...millions dead, billions infected, a new endemic virus to manage in perpetuity, a largely indifferent ruling class facing zero repercussions for their crimes, and a society still feeling every single after-effect possible.  Indeed, it's the sort of event that should inspire a mass movement to address the shortcomings of our political economy and ensure that we're in a place to actually confront the next such challenge, whenever it happens.  But the fear-mongering doesn't just not help with this, it actively works against this.  It creates a reality so perilous, so fraught with certain doom, that fighting for change becomes inherently impossible.  It's effectively a call to inaction.  I still believe that we can use the shared suffering of the past three years as a rallying cry to demand something better, but we're never going to do that if we can't engage with reality as it actually exists.  And that means never, ever resorting to fear-mongering."

That said, it doesn't seem like the worst impulses of the doomer crowd are going away anytime soon.  Just the other day this exact contingent of people casted aspersions over this eminently reasonable article where the author appears to care deeply for and go out of her way to accommodate the needs of her partner.  If even the most milquetoast sentiments presented with nuance and compassion have become cause for suspicion, then we probably need to spend a little extra time understanding the specific social corrosion that has led us here.

Suspicion of Others

A good place to start is with this post about the death of a former polio patient from the misleadingly named newsletter "Do Not Panic."  There's a lot I could address here, but I'll limit myself to a notable contradiction that I feel is illuminating.  Early on he proclaims that "All it would have taken to keep Paul alive was a mask. That’s it."  This seemingly frames the cause of Paul's death as a family member or caretaker who carelessly passed along a deadly disease.  Which is a strange assumption to make in the absence of direct evidence, but we'll come back to that.  What makes this even stranger is that he later walks this back saying "This is not to blame his death on any one individual. We don’t know the details of his interactions or the precautions that were taken."  If we assume he is genuine in this subsequent statement, then it renders the previous statement as nothing more than a naked appeal to suspicion to anyone who may have come into contact with the deceased.

What's more is that this appeal to suspicion barely makes any sense, even taken at face value.  While it's good to mask, especially in specific scenarios where risk of contagion is high, the certainty of his statement ("all it would have taken") belies the fact that masks are a relatively crude tool with variable efficacy against a highly contagious virus.  Ignoring that it's entirely possible the person who transmitted the virus in this instance may have been masked, it's also clear that a person looking to understand the root cause of this specific death should be concerned with several other problems before even considering who was or was not wearing a mask.  Why is vaccine uptake so low?  Was a care worker forced to work while contagious?  Why was money appropriated for ventilation upgrades that would mitigate the overall spread of disease spent on cops?  What unites these questions and others is that they do not scapegoat or focus on individual decisions, but rather seek to address the clear systemic reasons that the majority of people are subject to a power structure that shows little to no concern about their health and well being.  Put another way, if we have a genuine interest in minimizing the death and illness that come with respiratory disease, what purpose does hectoring anyone, let alone a hypothetical person, serve?

Epistemic Neglect

Another frequent source of fear-mongering is Julia Doubleday's The Gauntlet.  A recent post of hers is illustrative of another problem with the doomer set: a default assumption that all problems since March 2020 are a result of COVID.  In this case, it's right there in the title: "COVID is overwhelming hospital systems."  A glance at basically any numbers show that this is not really the case, especially now in March 2024, so what is the cause for this disconnect?  Well if you scroll down her article you will see the culprit: a big long list of tentatively connected articles and studies about overwhelmed hospital systems.  Which is indeed bad and, taken as a whole, intimidating and scary.  I don't even think it's unreasonable to see such a thing and hypothesize that the cause is COVID.  But of course the next logical step is to actually read the articles, where you will see things like this:

"After a dramatic decrease in April 2020, emergency department visits in Canada returned to baseline volumes by the summer of 2022. Despite this return to baseline, the capacity of emergency departments to provide care has been outstripped. Hospital staffing shortages and resulting bed closures have meant admitted patients are subjected to much longer emergency department stays."

And this:

"Emergency departments have a crucial role in the healthcare system, serving as a safety net for uninsured individuals and providing care regardless of their ability to pay. However, the study revealed that California’s population grew by 4.2 percent, while the number of EDs decreased from 339 to 326. Additionally, the number of hospital beds declined by 2.5 percent, further exacerbating the strain on emergency services."

And this:

"The province made progress reducing ER wait times around that time. Between 2014 and 2017, waits in Winnipeg fell to 1.5 hours. More capacity was added to the system and a new electronic bed-mapping system was introduced. That, among other steps, freed up more space on medical wards for ER patients waiting for a bed. It allowed ER physicians and nurses to see more patients quicker because they didn’t have to tend to as many people warehoused on gurneys in their department.

Unfortunately, the gains made during those years were wiped out when the former Progressive Conservative government consolidated hospital operations in 2017 and cut funding for acute-care facilities. The median wait time returned to two hours by early 2018. It fell during the COVID-19 pandemic as patients were reluctant to visit ERs. But it shot up again to two hours by the spring of 2021. It jumped to three hours the following year." 

To be clear, most of the articles in Doubleday's list simply describe the problems and do not attempt to even posit a root cause (something something about the decaying institution of journalism).  This shortcoming makes it easy to point to the sheer scope of them and say something like "maybe everyone is dying of long COVID" without any direct evidence.  While you certainly can do that, this sort of practice reminds me almost exactly of another COVID-related panic: the "died suddenly" trope where rabid anti-vaxxers attribute every random death to the COVID vaccine:

All this is not to say that people who seem to express genuine concerns others are as low and dastardly as anti-vaxxers.  But if you subscribe to some sort of leftist ideology, I do think it is incumbent to base your pleas on robust knowledge and sound epistemology.  Associating collectivist ideals with specious inferences and a questionable understanding of reality will do no one any favors. 

From Denial to Acceptance

To build on the last point, I think the problem with simplistic views and "investigations" in the doomer space is not limited to these isolated examples.  Rather, I think the cart is leading the horse in a sort of existential manner.  In the case of COVID, something spectacular, universal, and deadly happened, and our governments failed us in ways that are not difficult to grasp.  Anyone with any revolutionary consciousness whatsoever should understand the opportunity, and perhaps should have even had some light optimism that things would change during the George Floyd protests.  Since this did not come to pass, I can understand the impulse to hammer away at the one thing that provided a sort of perverse hope in recent memory.  But while I would not abandon the push for better vaccine uptake, improved ventilation, or simply preparing for the next pandemic, I think there needs to be a reckoning that the moment for a COVID-specific mass movement has passed.

To be clear, this is not some sort of cynical defeatism (well, at least, it's mostly not).  Rather, it's an acknowledgment of the simple fact that pandemics end.  Specifically, they end because our immune systems work.  Virtually everyone has immune memory from vaccine(s), infection(s), or both, and it's that memory makes us far less likely to experience damaging effects from the virus going forward.  While I would not frame the enormous cost we were made to pay to get to this point as a "victory," we have arrived at this culmination nonetheless.  Living as though it is still 2020 serves no one, and is most certainly not a prescription to rally people to your cause.  Instead I think it is incumbent on those fighting for the disabled, the vulnerable, and the memories of the deceased to allow themselves at least some respite and relief from this psychic burden.  It's the only way we're going to be able to continue the larger fight.