It's interesting (if depressing) to speculate how individuals
make this progress. Once you adopt a very non-mainstream opinion, for which there
is, ipso facto, little evidence, you must cast around to find that
evidence and before long every little scrap of overinterpreted information has
to be pressed into service. The world in general isn’t going to endorse your opinion
and you have to come up with an explanation why. As far as covid-sceptics are
concerned, the most egregious manifestation of this is their approach to
medical professionals. There has to be something that explains why the overwhelming
majority of doctors across the world, trained in a wide variety of independent
institutions and operating in very different political and professional
structures, are all saying the same thing: they must have been brainwashed, or
bribed. Following Jasper’s promoted links I have found myself staring on my
computer screen at the most extraordinary statements of rage and hate against
doctors – as the chief promoters of lies, dangerous medicines, and fake diagnoses
and death certificates, it must be infuriating for sceptics to see them taken so seriously
by the rest of the population.
Just in case there was any doubt, I do talk to a great
number of people from day to day and find little evidence of the situation
Jasper believes is prevalent. Most of our congregation, being older folk, have been
vaccinated and a great number double-vaccinated, along with people I meet in
the Co-Op, the cafes, the school, the streets in general. Nobody has had a
reaction worse than a few hours of headaches, while Jasper believes ‘if you don’t
end up blind or dead from your vaccine you’ve been lucky’; technically this may
be true, but not very lucky as it was never all that likely to happen. He reports
that ‘I am overwhelmed with the amount of people I am discovering daily,
cowering in their homes, nervous wrecks as a result of the fear inducement in
order to get onboard a clinical trial [ie, receive a vaccine]’. I, on the other
hand, haven’t heard of a single one. We live in very different worlds, he and
I.
Unless you’re going to do a volte-face and admit you were
wrong, when contrary evidence grows, the only option is to double down, and
that forces you further and further away from the surface. Jasper now seems to
be veering off into climate-change scepticism as well, because anything there
is a consensus over becomes suspect. It’s a strange alternative world, but a
very beguiling one as it provides its residents with a sense of self-worth:
look at the photographs of the last anti-lockdown protest in London and you can
see a woman with a placard reading ‘We R the ones you failed to fool’. Jasper
has been known to make references to sheep and other allegedly unthinking herd
animals when describing the rest of us.
Just like the farther reaches of the climate change movement, there are similarities between covid-scepticism and Christianity, or
at least the brands of it that take you far away from the worldview of most
other people. There, you are also given a sense that you have a privileged insight
into the way things really are beneath the apparent reality the herd accepts,
but at the same cost. If your insight relies on denying the evidence everyone
else accepts, and positing a hidden enemy who directs the deception, you’re
inevitably pulled by the same current, forced to interpret everything you see
in the light of that denial and polarising the entire world into facts which
endorse your view and those which don’t (in short, lies). What a bargain to
make.
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