Reading Danny Wallace’s riotously funny, though highly disturbing, book Somebody Told Me (One man’s unexpected journey down the rabbit hole of lies. trolls and conspiracies) got me to thinking about my own first experiences of conspiracies and the effects they have had on my life. I would like to think that while I do no exactly possess the same amount of grey matter than your average rocket scientist, neither am I the bluntest tool in the box. To that extent, I try to believe in things that are demonstrably true, by way of evidence and even if I do not fully understand the evidence, as if often the case, there are sufficient credible folk who do that I can trust. It all started with JFK.
When John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, I was not one of those who remembered where I was, although it is entirely likely I was playing with my train set. Later, I learned that JFK was murdered by sheet metal worker Lee Harvey Oswald, who in turn was murdered by nightclub owner Jack Ruby. I can’t remember much of what follows, but I was aware of people who believed the whole thing to have been a conspiracy. There was no evidence and there still isn’t, but that didn’t stop people believing that this was not the straightforward murder that it actually was.
And so it went on. No one had ever set foot on the moon, Paul McCartney was murdered in the 1960s and was secretly replaced by a doppelganger who, fortunately enough, just happened to be a stellar composer, singer and bass player just like the real Macca and more recently the MMR hoax, where the disgraced doctor Andrew Wakefield falsely suggested there were links between the vaccine and autism. It was all bollocks but the thing is, some people believed it and from Wakefield onwards things have got worse.
Our own children were born when the Daily Mail – who else? – was promoting Wakefield’s dangerous and inaccurate statements and – guess what? – we were concerned. We are no scientists. Everyone was telling us the vaccines, specifically MMR, were safe, yet here’s this doctor in the biggest selling newspaper in the land telling us that if we arrange for our children to be vaccinated, they will end up with autism. Eventually, we went with the evidence and today, all these years on, they turned out just fine. But not everyone believes the evidence. Wakefield sowed the seeds of doubt and today vaccination rates are falling. If we avoided the rabbit holes of conspiracy theories, not everyone did.
My oldest friend, a woman I truly love, went down the conspiracy rabbit hole years ago. Covid was a hoax, vaccines were more dangerous than Covid, which was still a hoax, Trump won the 2020 US presidential election, David Icke was right when he said that the Illuminati were controlling the world and so on and so on. Our relationship, which had endured since around the time JFK was murdered – or was he? – fizzled out to the extent that we no longer see each other or even speak. A small part of me died when our relationship came to an end. That’s the craziness of it, but when you are considered to be among the sheeple for not believing theories for which there are no evidence, what is left to be said? An even more disturbing aspect to the conspiracy world came to light when a friend of mine developed cancer.
One of his friends had fallen well and truly down the rabbit hole and armed with mountains of misinformation declared that my friend had only contracted cancer because he had taken the Covid vaccine. This was not so much as evidence-free, but completely unhinged. Yet here again a friendship ended because of one person’s insistence that what was patently not true was true.
I place great value upon being told the truth. It may not always what you want to hear but that’s a simple fact of life. I go back to the word evidence again. It is why I don’t do God because there is no evidence a God ever existed and faith alone, no matter how well meaning, is not enough. The conspiracy nonsense, about chem trails, anti-vaxxers, man on the moon nonsense, is far, far worse than religion.
I can honestly say that there is never a time when I wonder if I am among the sheeple, that the conspiracy theorists are all right and that David Icke should not be regarded as a nutjob but as an inspiring leader. I am certain as certain can be that the theories of the conspiracists can be completely disregarded and put in the box marked ‘bollocks’. These people are not just mad, they’re dangerous.
More than anything, it’s sad that people waste their lives by – as I keep putting it – believing in things that aren’t true. Because we are only here once and this isn’t a trial run. I know that in writing this blog, I will convince no one who doesn’t believe the truth and finds solace in the illogical and the untrue. The truth may be boring, but at least it’s true.
