Here’s a tweet posted by Gemma O’Doherty in April 2020:
@gemmaod1
Psychopath, Bill Gates, whose vaccines have destroyed the lives of millions of children, is embedded in the Irish Deep State. If you consent to #LockdownIreland much longer, you won’t be allowed to leave your home without receiving a syringe of toxins. #COVID2019
Reading slowly, it becomes apparent that it is a very dense message. It’s carefully crafted to push a lot of buttons. There are two important groups who unfortunately will not give it the attention it deserves. Firstly, thinking people are likely to dismiss it out of hand as raving lunacy. Secondly, leftists wedded to the idea that fascism is the ever present threat which it is their mission to oppose will shoehorn it into that simplistic world view. It is of course raving lunacy and fascism continues to lurk in filthy corners but that should not prevent taking such messages seriously.
There is a constituency waiting for that message. They believe its parts, and the whole is familiar and credible to them. They will be encouraged that smart people oppose them and that socialists might think them nazis. Bluntly, the people at whom this message was aimed regard socialism, other thoughtful approaches, education, expertise, science etc. as establishment and they are profoundly anti-establishment.
The temptation is to view them sympathetically as the left-behind, the people whose hopes and ambitions vanished while a management, professional, university-educated elite settled into good jobs. The new elite offered to those left behind little more than a haughty explanation of a changed world to which they must submit – even though they have no future in that world. There’s a twofold problem with this approach. Not all of the left-behind are credulous anti-establishment. Moreover, many who are certainly not left behind are also credulous and anti-establishment (CAE).
If CAE is not explained by social class, there are two other approaches. One comes from psychology; it’s popular and has explanatory force. The idea is to look at what kind of personal satisfaction is gained from being CAE. A number of answers emerge but a popular one is that being CAE makes a person feel special, part of an insider group. There is little point in presenting here an overview of what psychologists have discovered about the satisfactions of being CAE as personal satisfactions reveal nothing about the social or political significance of what has become a political constituency.
A better approach might be to liberate CAE from its current manifestation, its views on present concerns, and look at it instead as a movement which has developed over years. It is difficult to decide on a starting point. There is a temptation to go back to the early days of mass democracy because democrats then were worried about franchise enlargement to include those unable or unwilling to reason and likely to fall victim to manipulators, demagogues.
A second temptation arrives back at the same period but relates to a quite different story. This is the temptation to find the roots of CAE in esoteric or spiritual movements which, though they claim descent from ancient times and practices, seem to blossom in the hey day of theosophy, the likes of Madam Blavatsky and, let’s call it, a romantic mysticism.
It’s possible, however, to locate a more recent starting point. Just a few decades ago the Mind, Body, Spirit (MBS) movement developed. This saw significant numbers of people turning to beliefs, theories, cures, therapies for which there was no conventional explanation or evidence. Indeed the lack of evidence seems to be the main attraction and basic line of defence. As with today’s 5-G conspiracists, their obdurate stronghold is the rejection of all conventional evidence.
Sections of bookshops were set up to present this arrant nonsense and to serve the market for it. Conventional media reported it as if it were true. Health insurers paid for bogus therapies which their medical directors knew provided no medical benefit. (They still do.) State schools opened their doors to evening courses which their management knew or should have known had no educational benefit. Educational awards bodies sacrificed their credibility to recognise bogus disciplines.
What appeared in the 90s was a body of people large enough to support a thriving market. What these people had in common was a willingness to believe in powers, systems and cures for which there is absolutely no evidence or it might have to be said in order to humour them, for which there is no conventional evidence. The list is staggeringly long but includes reflexology, reiki, homeopathy, numerology, angel therapy, magnet therapy and on it goes … A comprehensive list is not essential to the argument here.
The point can be summarised thus. A believer in homeopathy should have no difficulty accepting that 5-G caused the Coronavirus for two reasons. Firstly, the evidential basis for both is equally absent. Secondly, adherents of both are actively promoting lies during this pandemic.
It has to be said that not all believers subscribe to the full range of beliefs. Many a believer in, say, Reiki or the power of orgonite might reject the notion of the deep state, the Illuminati and the Lizard People along with 5-G myths but that doesn’t change the fact that they believe something for which there is no evidence or, oops, no conventional evidence. These limited believers (LB) therefore actively contribute to the acceptance or normalisation of beliefs which have no foundation.
It’s important not to exaggerate the influence of light-hearted, entertaining interests in MBS but it has to be said that it just isn’t like an interest in science fiction or dragons, which participants know perfectly well doesn’t make truth claims. Belief in forces beyond discussion, however, does nothing to promote the ordinary conversations which are basic to society. This then is the LBs’ small contribution; they’ve helped normalise a refusal to engage in ordinary debate. Bluntly, they’ve helped make it acceptable to treat seriously views for which there is no justification.
There is now worldwide, accepted in local schools, bookshops, libraries, crossing socio-economic divides from poor to rich, from little education to highly educated, from menial employment to prosperous professionals, a huge constituency waiting to be addressed. They are the CAE. To gain the support of a fraction of them would make all the difference to a political candidate, movement or party.
The existence of this constituency is not a secret. They are real people; they have votes. They are there to be addressed but not in any conventional sense, for they are not amenable to argument. Apart from the possibility of a leader who shares their beliefs, they are there to hear lies. In truth it’s not unlike a lot of political campaigning in which a charlatan identifies people’s issues and concerns, tells them they share their concerns and asks for their vote or offers to lead them. It’s simple political marketing.
The tweet at the top of this piece is an all-out play for their support by pushing a lot of buttons at once but also in Ireland there has been a softer approach, a mere signalling to them that they are not being dismissed, that at least some politicians have what the CAE call an “open mind”, that they might be prepared to do their “own research”, i.e. believe something beyond what the scientific “establishment” treats as evidence. This softly, softly approach is in evidence when SF representatives and uncharacteristically one of the leaders of the Social Democrats show themselves open to the possibility that there really is a 5-G conspiracy.
Journalism and the political establishment have belatedly woken up to the dangers of lies, conspiracy theories and mass delusions. It was recognised as a problem to be tackled firstly after the Cambridge Analytica scandal illustrated that the GAE could be mobilised and secondly, when coping with the Covid-19 pandemic was being undermined by widespread beliefs. It wasn’t simply that communication masts were vandalised and workers threatened by activists opposed to radio waves but people groomed on anti-vax, anti-government plots were prepared to believe that there is no virus, that it is all a grand plot by the “establishment” to control the “people”.
What is to be done? Assuming it is not too late, democrats must resist but democrats have not been forthright against un-reason. Journalism is at last seeing the danger, talking about fact-checking and discussing their role in support of the public sphere but they are not being entirely frank and there is no sign of change. They do not acknowledge the part they’ve played in popularising, normalising crazy beliefs and practices. Suffice it to mention Andrew Wakefield and the platform later given to those opposed to HPV vaccination. Mention too should be made of impartial reporting of nonsense or even conferring normality by way of presenting it as balance to conventional science. The covid epidemic has led RTE, the Irish state broadcaster, to say explicitly that the 5-G myth is untrue. However, there is no intention to say that of anything else – no matter how bizarre.
If journalism is not prepared to stand against unreason, that leaves just ordinary participant citizens; there’s no one else. They are thus required to question not merely in social media but in everyday life, to be prepared to ask a family member to stop pushing nonsense. Moreover, they are to be asked to speak up in this way not only when their relative, friend, neighbour or acquaintance is coming on strong with fantastic and dangerous conspiracy theories but when they talk of a recreational interest in the likes of reiki, chakras, energy channels etc. because that’s where the LB support lies. That’s a lot of – perhaps far too much – activism and courage to ask of ordinary citizens but then the context is that pompous guff despises their ordinary discussions and needs to be chased away.
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