In Defence of Knowing Nothing.

There was a podcast on the BBC News website tonight covering the fact that an anti-Covid vaccine might be ready for general use early in the New Year. I read the first dozen or so comments, and every one of them came from conspiracy theorists making claims ranging from the assertion that Covid doesn’t even exist, to the fact that any vaccine will be a scam to get us all pumped full of ‘nano technology’ (and that will be the end of us.)

It had me thinking about conspiracy theories again, and it occurred to me that conspiracy theory is virtually indistinguishable from religion. It serves a need within a section of the population to believe that there is something hidden below or beyond the surface reality. That’s fine as far as it goes. I, too, suspect that there is something beyond the surface reality, and my lifelong quest has been to find out what it is. The conspiracy theorists, however take a different road from me.

They take whatever real or imagined evidence they can find and use it as the foundation on which to build a more elaborate belief. And then they begin to see themselves as possessors of arcane knowledge, with the upshot that anyone who fails to agree with them is either naïve, deluded, or even complicit in the conspiracy. Furthermore, if we fail to act on their belief, we’re in for seriously deleterious consequences. Religions – especially the Judaic ones – generally do the same thing. Religion and conspiracy theory are both belief systems (as is atheism in my opinion, but in a slightly different way.)

The problem is, of course, that both belief systems have elements which might actually be true, but there’s no way of knowing which bits – if any – they are. The only way of knowing something is to prove it, and once something is proven it’s no longer a theory and soon becomes the very opposite of arcane.

And so when I hear conspiracy theory invective, I’m reminded of those fire-and-brimstone preachers who rail at us that hell awaits anyone who fails to take Jesus into their hearts precisely as they define the process. I’m also reminded of the old maxim: ‘knowledge is power’, and maybe that’s what it’s all about. Maybe even fake, or at best dubious, knowledge can evoke the sense of having received the gift of omnipotence in the mind of the believer.