Bruce Bisset says that in less than five minutes browsing the internet you can be told a dozen different ways you have it all wrong. Photo / File
Bruce Bisset says that in less than five minutes browsing the internet you can be told a dozen different ways you have it all wrong. Photo / File
The number of people falling down rabbit-holes and donning tinfoil hats has reached epidemic proportions, such that having half a brain and being able to analyse and reason for yourself is beginning to feel like being on an endangered species list.
Certainly it's made going anywhere near social media morefraught. In less than five minutes browsing you can be told a dozen different ways you have it all wrong, and if only you'd follow the money you'd discover the hidden truth behind any concern.
It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact we now have religions spouting conspiracist rhetoric – though arguably, that's exactly what they've always done – and, worse, whole political parties formed around various conspiracies, or even a whole pastiche bunch of them.
Back when, village idiots were quietly identified and (so long as they didn't get out of hand) politely accepted and excepted as befuddled but harmless. But that was when visiting the next village down the road was a major event.
In today's global village, there are no such easy labels nor mindful ostracisms to apply, because thanks to the internet there are no longer barriers to travel. The lunatics are at large, by the million, and building virtual cities for their kind, where anything goes so long as it's not "normal".
Where mutual amplification builds and reinforces whole new "realities", regardless of science, common sense, or individual reason. Where every crackpot and their nut-bar theory can attract a horde of adherents by the click of a "like".
I wouldn't mind, except for two reasons: they're so "clever" in their bloody-minded beliefs that it's impossible to dissuade them; and en masse, they're dangerous.
Bruce Bisset
Take some members of the Mt Roskill Evangelical Fellowship - fundamentalists who appear to have decided they didn't need to worry about little things like a rampant pandemic.
Have they forgotten that viruses like Covid-19 are God's creatures too; ones that can't read, therefore don't proscribe to the Word, so are free to infect whoever they come in contact with.
Note that I'm not even suggesting they're Covid-deniers, as such - though there are plenty of those around, too.
Which, simply, floors me. I can half-understand people denying climate change, because its effects are hard to notice and slow to develop. But a disease that's laid millions low worldwide in under a year? Deny that and you need professional help.
Far more dangerous is the situation developing in the breeding ground of the conspiracy theory, the USA. Unreason there now holds sway at the very top, encouraging its likeness at the very bottom, so now they have armed militias of all colours confronting each other in the streets.
And no one, from the president to the local police, doing anything to calm or control or stop it. Let alone attempt to reason with it.
But the deniers would rather retreat into their fantasies than address human failings in reality. Would rather die in the ditch of their self-reinforcing bubble than stand up to try to help the world stop burning.
Which is why, oh children, revolution is literally now just a shot away.
Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet. Views expressed are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's.
