Nothing about QAnon or Anti-Vaxxing or Climate Denialism is new. Society's just 'evolved' itself into new variants self-reinforcing, logic-twisting, factually-adjacent claptrap. It's been happening since time immemorial. It used to be witches, phrenology, communists, horoscopes, or thousands of other fallacious ideologies. It used to be nationalism, and it still is. Even religion, despite most religions having concepts like altruism, love and grace at their core, have all too readily and all-too-often been weaponised into incendiary hate-speak.
The collective knowledge of humanity has grown exponentially; and whilst individual human capacity to access it has grown with it, our ability to cognitively process it has not. None of us can digest decades of complex research via a few months of online browsing, let alone a few hours. Whether you're standing in a library with a thousand books in it or a million, it comes down to the quality and quantity of what you read. The selection on offer is overwhelming. The overwhelmed can make very poor choices by failing to confront their feelings on inferiority and the need for collective human interdependence. And if you have a librarian with an agenda, the risks and costs become manifestly greater.
It's all about trying to feel empowered, I think. For many who seek to feel this way, facts are often baffling, inconvenient, or both, and as a result, are deemed superfluous. Alternative 'theories' allow collective, consensus opinions - that require a level of knowledge and understanding beyond the ordinary to create and comprehend - to be conveniently set aside in favour of digestible bollocks.
It's why it's so dangerous, and why it is such an alluring weapon for the unscrupulous to wield, either as a sociocultural manipulator or a stock-in-trade moneymaker. Exploitation dressed up as empowerment. Anti-knowledge turned into a drug as addictive as all the other drugs, with the same ability to bend reality.
In the end, the variables that turn one into an anti-vaxxer are comparable (totally different, yes, but comparable) to those that turn one into a suicide bomber. Fear, weakness, doubt and resentment. Anti-knowledge is one of society's great evils because it feeds on human frailty. And we're not going to run out of that stuff any time soon.
Comments