Reaching for the Razor

I’ve been thinking about razors a lot lately. Not the hair management sort, but rather the metaphorical variety; the principles that cut away the unnecessary in trying to reach understanding. Occam’s razor states "the simplest solution is most likely the right one" and Hanlon’s razor says "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". I think they need to be stropped up and applied now more than ever before.

I have seen people I know succumb to a frightening malaise, and it isn’t covid 19. It’s the bizarre ideas that arise from the baroque intertwining of strands of conspiracy theory. I know otherwise rational, intelligent people who appear to believe that the virus has something to do with 5G, and/or that it’s part of a plan by Bill Gates to implant mind-control chips via vaccines. They point to the “heroes” who dare to speak the truth about the “fake” virus, linking to endless YouTube clips, all of which are about as scientifically sound as the swivel-eyed blathering of a TV evangelist. It saddens me and puzzles me, in roughly equal measures. These are not “bad” people, but when they start sounding like Trump supporters, I have to back away. 

I took a quick look into one of the so-called doctors who were being upheld as voices of The Truth... He claimed to have been a US Army surgeon. Not only had he failed to complete a surgical residency, he was also not actually a medical doctor. He was an osteopath, with a record of appearing before medical boards for quackery. Valiant prophets of his calibre have been springing up like mushrooms after rain, and there’s no shortage of people keen to believe them.

…And that’s what’s really been bothering me. Why do people have to seize on these tissues of horseshit? Why this desperate clutching at threads of addled misinformation?  Why is it so hard to accept the possibility that viruses and other pathogens can emerge without the help of any sinister agency? – Or is that just too simple? In Africa, the bush-meat trade released the Ebola virus into the human population. In the 1920s, conditions in the cage bird industry led to a worldwide psittacosis outbreak. Combinations of the unforeseen consequences of human activity and dumb bad luck, just like today. So why is it so appealing to blame what’s happening now on whichever convoluted chain of improbability rings clearest to the tinfoil beanie brigade? 

Perhaps it all comes down to fear. A pandemic is a frightening thing, and a potent, invisible enemy that spreads by human contact is deeply unsettling. Maybe some of us need stories to help us deal with the existence of such a thing, and some sort of malign agent does the job. A small child hurts its finger in a door, and says “the door hurt me”. A peasant’s goats fall ill, and with no real knowledge of livestock diseases, he blames the cranky old woman down the road for giving them the evil eye. It’s someone else’s fault. Sometimes, apparently, the idea that bad shit can simply, randomly occur is just too hard to accept.

The trouble with fear is that it is so readily manipulated by those with a mind to do so. John Howard won a couple of elections by drumming it up. The current shower of shitheads managed to hang on to power to some extent by scaring the public about the loss of tax concessions that never applied to most of them. In the midst of the current crisis, Lord Protector Dutton is trying to bury the legal principle of presumption of innocence so he can spy on everyone. You can pull any Draconian shit you like, even the most blatantly corrupt, self-seeking bastardry, on a population that’s confused, misinformed and afraid. We don’t need anti-vax, conspiracist bullshit making it easier. (Have I just abandoned Hanlon’s razor there?- no, I think Dutton actually is motivated by malice.) You don't need brain chips to manipulate people who believe Bill Gates wants to brain-chip them.

We keep hearing that the situation we’re dealing with today is “unprecedented”. Not quite. In the past we had plagues – and they were attributed to witches, or the Jews poisoning the wells. 

We need to grow the fuck up.