Novel coronavirus keeps spreading around the globe. By Feb. 25, the number of confirmed cases got closer to 80,000 with over 77,000 cases in China and the rest affecting people in 28 other countries. The number of fatalities was around 2,600, which is about a three per cent mortality rate.
Even though thousands of people successfully recover after being diagnosed with 2019-nCoV, the facts that the disease keeps spreading, that we still don’t know its origin and that there is no vaccine, which all can be summarized in one word – uncertainty, keep feeding endless conspiracy theories that grow like mushrooms after the rain.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time watching terrifying and irritating videos in which Chinese (or often Chinese-looking people) get terrorized and humiliated in different situations and in different countries. These situations made me feel like we are back into the age of the black plague when Jewish people were blamed and ostracized for poisoning Christians.
I understand that people are panicking, and that uncertainty allows paranoia to grow. And while there is a lot of unknowns in the situation that keeps developing, conspiracy becomes not the last, but for many the best resort to find answers.
There are some main flow theories that start in the media (sometimes even mainstream) in different countries and then bloom in comments and on different forums all over the Internet.
Last weekend I came across anything from the virus being a bioweapon that is strategically used by Americans to kill the second largest economy in the world, to it being an experiment that leaked out of the lab in Wuhan, from discussions of existing vaccines being kept away from people (for different reasons) to Clorox and Lysol being sufficient measures to kill the virus. Most of those theories sound racist, anxious and usually quite crazy.
But why is it every time humanity is facing another pandemics, conspiracy theories spread so fast and so bad?
It would be easy to blame the Internet and its capabilities for that but unfortunately it seems that even though rumours spread slower, they did the same job back in the days. When crisis hits, combined with lack of truthful information (which in reality takes more time to gain) blind fear produces explanations, usually based on the core idea of some almighty powers being responsible for the disaster or the disease (in that sense, conspiracy theories to a point are similar to religions). That group is usually pure evil, existing behind the scenes and orchestrating the entire situation to its own, sometimes-unknown benefits.
Conspiracy theories are usually holistic in nature. They are based on the idea that everything is interconnected and everything happens for a reason. Even if that reason is not obvious for us, it is for some conspiratorial group.
Contemporary conspiracy theories are somewhat different from ancient ones. There are a lot of them and each separate one doesn’t gain as many followers, and fortunately that much power. Unlike fake news, they always have an image of an enemy – some great and evil hidden group.
Due to a complicated social and economic organization of society, especially if we don’t have special education, we just can’t explain many processes and social phenomenon. A lot of things are out of our control, but it’s hard to believe that nobody in the world can control them. So conspiracy theories turn into an easy comforting explanation that helps us to get through all the existing controversies, understand the processes and sometimes even feel that we can affect the situation.
Thus, nowadays conspiracy became a new type of worldview, which is an important part of the contemporary global culture.
While conspiracy theories may be intriguing, exciting and quickly formed, the real explanations and actual reasons take time to discover. And in cases of existential events, those that threaten our existence, especially in a scientific way like a virus or an unknown infection, the fear constantly pushes us into the arms of conspiracy theorists who are always ready to offer quick answers to all our questions. But unfortunately, those answers usually belong to the same category as fairy tails.
