Opinion Article on Covid-19

Opinion Article on Covid-19

Conspiranoia: that pandemic within the pandemic

The internet at home stopped working, a serious thing in these times of "home office". The company The provider told me that the modem needed a replacement, so the next day she sent a technician to do the job: a chatty, friendly guy, who during the forty-five minutes After his visit, he did not manage to put on the mask (he left his nose out), and that before my clear discomfort in this regard he insisted that there was no need to worry: Covid-19 actually did not existed. It was all an invention of the media, a facade to try to implement a new world order.

For the same reason, as he explained to me, he had not been vaccinated nor did he plan to do so, nor would he allow members of his family to do so. Naturally, I tried to offer him arguments sensible against it, like the hundreds of thousands who died, but their reasons were not open to debate. Instead, he told me to take advantage of the recently recovered internet to "investigate" - a word he used to refer to watching videos of dubious provenance on YouTube.

Unfortunately, my technician is not an isolated case these days. There are many and from different sources who are infected with what seems to be the pandemic within the pandemic: conspiracy theories. People pregnant with such mistrust for the system, for the media and by the government, which is capable of putting everything in one bag and openly maintaining that fanatically irreconcilable sectors of the Society actually work together to impose a "health dictatorship" through a "plandemic" and thus achieve a "new order world". The latter at times translates into a reduction in the population, and in others in less obvious objectives, such as implanting microchips for individual tracking or imposing a global business of eternal vaccinations.

The sad thing is that one might think that it is a matter of sects, of a few lunatics, of ignorant people or that suffer from a cultural retardation. But it is not true. I have found more or less similar versions in the mouths of people of all strata, people who went to university and people who never stepped foot in a school, because in truth the conspiracy is not the result of intellectual work but of a condition proper to the condition postmodern.

Let's start from something reasonable: reality is complex and there is not always a point of view that allows us to understand it in a satisfactory way. In other words, there is much in the world that is difficult to understand. That is why human history has always been so conflictive, so full of outrages, arbitrariness and unusual massacres in the name of a transcendent ideal.

Our existence is an orphan: we do not know why we are here, there is no one to explain it to us. We only have the knowledge that we have accumulated over the centuries, a knowledge that each We must review with a critical eye for some time to make sure that new findings are not contradict. For that we invented the academy: to review, update, question and verify said knowledge, which may well be of a nature scientific, philosophical, artistic, or whatever.

But that necessary intellectual activity has clearly been moving away from the general public. What incredible principles drive Science and technology, what debates take place regarding contemporary art or what are the urgent dilemmas of our era seem to be matters known to a minority. The rest are immersed in obscurantism, which as we well know is fertile ground for superstition, paranoia, manipulation and, above all, the lack of critical and informed thinking.

That is why someone can be incredulous at what they see on television, because they intuit that there is always a political agenda behind it (as there usually is) and, at the same time, blindly trusting the information provided by an anonymous YouTube channel, without wondering who produces that material, what its sources are, and why it is disseminated on that platform massive. And the latter, it seems to me, is key: free content on the internet.

Social networks are a business between the company that governs them and their advertising advertisers, that is, they are a business that does not involve its users, since the attention of the masses is precisely the product offered. There is, therefore, no regulation on the junk content they offer: no legitimation strategy, no critical value.

But while this explains why irresponsible content is being sold on social media, it doesn't explain why my internet technician prefers to believe those wild explanations about the pandemic. And the answer, in my view, points to the affective, the spiritual, the intimate.

Faced with an increasingly complex and overwhelming reality, being part of the anti-vaccine sect gives a simple meaning to existence, organized in elementary terms and incidentally reinforces this point of view with a sense of moral superiority: “I understand what the masses ignore ”.

Like flat-earthers and those who believe that the world is ruled by an elite of reptiles, the Covid conspiranoids are people eager for meaning, for guiding, for an ethical and political code to abide by. They suffer from an existential void that these theories can fill, just as a packet of potato chips fills an empty stomach. But if the conspiranoids are not something, it is an exception: in reality they are a reflection of a profound lack of our time.

References:

• "Opinion journalism" in Wikipedia.
• "Covid-19" in Wikipedia.
• "What is a coronavirus?" on The vanguard (Spain).
• "Coronavirus disease outbreak" in the World Health Organization.

What is an opinion piece?

A opinion piece it's a kind of journalistic text in which the author exposes to the reader his personal position on a specific topic. It is essentially about argumentative textsThey use the information to promote a perspective, that is, to convince the reader to take their point of view. For this reason, they are usually signed and of a personal nature (with the exception of press editorials, in which reflects the institutional position of the newspaper), since the reader may agree or disagree with what is stated in them. it states.

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