OPINION:
During the English Civil War, an obscure puritan sect known as the Fifth Monarchists infiltrated the movement against King Charles I.
A motivating belief of Fifth Monarchists was the idea that the world was years away from the apocalypse.
They were wrong, of course, as has everyone who has cried "apocalypse" since.
The Fifth Monarchy Men were on my mind as I took to Parliament's lawn on Tuesday to mingle with some of the protesters (they resist any simple definition, and are most accurately described as "anti-... something" - maybe anti-anything is nearer the mark) who had decided to march on Parliament.
Is this time different - was this actually it? Things certainly feel vaguely apocalyptic when one brings a noose to your office building, calls you a terrorist, and threatens violence against you and people you work with - and that's before you even get to the actual apocalyptic things like the current plague, and climate change.
When a few thousand people - I'd say 4000-5000 could summon such passion and bile over, a painless and safe method of avoiding an aggressive and deadly virus, one really has to wonder, "are we okay? Or have we gone completely mad".
It certainly appears some of us have: you didn't have to walk far in the march to meet people who had some, shall we say, esoteric views about the level of malign foreign interference in New Zealand politics (and, even more interesting, malign New Zealand interference in the affairs of foreign nations).
It is hard to get a definitive picture of how bad the "infodemic" of fake news and conspiracy theories is in New Zealand. Recent research from the Chief Censor and Te Pūnaha Matatini suggests there's a lot of misinformation and disinformation out there.
According to the Chief Censor, 57 per cent of respondents had seen misinformation in the last six months, and 82 per cent are concerned by it.
Interestingly, after Covid-19, the most common topic of misinformation was US politics, far ahead of vaccine misinformation, and New Zealand politics. That certainly correlates with the sentiment at Parliament, where protesters seemed to have a great deal of opinion about American matters.
According to the Chief Censor's report, just 3 per cent of respondents are sympathetic towards the QAnon conspiracy theory, 15 per cent had sympathetic views towards 5G conspiracy theories. About a fifth of New Zealanders harboured three or more beliefs associated with misinformation.
It appears this problem is accelerating, thanks to the internet, which is certainly where misinformation spreads.
But it's not clear the problem is any worse now than it has always been. In fact, it's difficult to think of anything that's united New Zealanders quite as much as vaccination - 87 per cent of the eligible population (people 12 and over) having taken at least one dose of the vaccine.
It's more popular than voting - only 81.5 per cent of the enrolled population showed up last year to vote. Anything more popular than the combined polling of Labour, National and every political party all the way to Advance NZ and Outdoors must be very popular indeed.
Cranks will always pose a threat - but that threat tends to be in the form of an individual, isolated incident, rather than an organised, dangerous movement.
Comparisons of Tuesday's protest to the storming of the US Capitol completely miss the mark in this case - in the United States, conspiracy theories have infiltrated the leadership of one of the two major parties. There's no threat of that happening here: MMP and party leadership election processes will not allow it.
In fact - if one were to grasp for the silver lining to the whole debacle, it's that even after the mental strain of multiple lockdowns, and the Government taking the extraordinary step to mandate vaccines for 40 per cent of the workforce, this fringe group could only muster a mid-sized protest.
But face-to-face, in the midst of the crowd, my abiding impression wasn't one of fear, or even despair. The crowd were disarmingly friendly up close; it's one thing to hurl threats at a building, quite another to say them to someone standing in front of you. Most people are civil up close, wherever you go.
There's always a danger that we learn the wrong lessons from these episodes - that we fear they're more significant than they actually are. In fact, the real lesson from the march might be just how difficult it will be to get the final 10 per cent of eligible New Zealanders vaccinated.
The Government has waxed lyrical about "hard-to-reach" Kiwis - perhaps people who were naturally distrustful of government officials - think gangs, who the Government drafted in to help with the rollout.
It appears to have come to a surprise to some that people "distrustful of Government" could be rude, obtuse, and apparently violent - it's as if they were imagining groups of scared, but placid people hiding out in caves waiting for a convincing argument to be made to them.
Well, the arrival of a few thousand such people to Parliament on Tuesday should have disabused policymakers of that notion (if their overflowing inboxes had not done so already), although I don't think it's given anyone an idea of how to increase uptake in the group.
The vaccine rollout is nearly done - the political debate will move from anti-vaccination, to what to do as the pandemic subsides, and what to do with continued vaccine mandates - one of the only areas of encouraging vaccine uptake there is still significant disagreement on.
There are legitimate concerns on both sides of this: vulnerable people in schools and hospitals should not have to worry about whether staff in those industries are vaccinated or not.
But continued use of widespread mandates risks locking a small but vulnerable population out of jobs and society at large - something governments of all colours rightly strive to avoid.
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