A few months back I was getting a coffee when a man approached me. “How much,” he asked, “were you paid to push the vaccine?”
He meant the Covid-19 vaccine. At the time of the first lockdowns, there was a mini-explosion of online hysteria that this would be a permanent state: that for reasons unexplained, the Government wanted to keep us locked in our homes. When that didn’t happen, the hysteria pivoted towards the vaccine, with the hysterics claiming it was causing mass death or other terrible side effects. That didn’t happen either, but many of the hysterics are convinced that it did: and that the lying mainstream media didn’t report on it.
Afterwards, I did ponder how best I could have replied to this man.
I could have gone with my default sarcasm: I wasn’t paid. But the aliens gave me a spin in their mother ship. I could have tried interrogating the assumptions behind his question, though that might have taken hours. I could have told him he was brainwashed, part of an online cult. But, of course, none of that would have shifted his view, even a little. As far as he was concerned, I was paid to tell lies.
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In much of the reporting on the protests in Coolock, it’s been striking how journalists noted a hostility towards them; and how they too were accused of being professional liars. A reporter friend of mine told me that even though most people there agreed to be interviewed, they all opened with the phrase: I don’t trust the mainstream media. One woman opened with that phrase and then went on to outline her belief in the so-called Great Replacement Theory: that our Government, for reasons unexplained, wants to replace all the white Irish people with immigrants. She was convinced this was true as she’s seen it on TikTok.
There was a time – and it wasn’t too long ago – that we might roll our eyes and even feel a bit superior to Americans, given all the stupid things so many of them believe. Well, we’re all stupid now. Polls commissioned by the Electoral Commission in May, around the time of the European and local elections, found a fifth of Irish people believe in the Great Replacement Theory while about a third believe in a secret cabal making all the important decisions in world politics. A similar number felt that scientists routinely lie and suppress information. No one can be trusted.
Those beliefs didn’t translate into large numbers of fringe candidates being elected, but did seem to engender a distinctly poisonous tone to the campaigning. Candidates from all parties were abused and threatened: and when the general election arrives, we can expect even more of that.
We were, perhaps, a little complacent in this country. When similar trends erupted all over Europe, we told ourselves that we were far too sensible and civilised for that kind of thing. We should have seen it coming.
Yet even if we had, what could we have done about it? No other European country has been immune to it; and none have come up with an effective way to combat disinformation and misinformation. In Ireland, the reaction from the political establishment, Government and Opposition, has been to adjust their stance on migration: to make the process seem more rigorous, and more fair in the distribution of international protection applicants. But the ferment we’re seeing isn’t just about that issue; it’s more profound than that. It’s about a breakdown of trust, of two mutually exclusive versions of reality.
The internet is, of course, responsible for disseminating a lot of this nonsense, but increasingly, I suspect, it’s happening on a face-to-face basis too. A pattern seems to have been established. A building is proposed for asylum seekers, locals raise concerns, and almost immediately the tricolour-waving patriots appear. (A group, ironically, who seem to have nothing good to say about Ireland). These patriots are keen to share the news about what’s really going on. Once minds have been poisoned in this way, it seems extraordinarily difficult, even impossible, to bring them back to anything like reasonableness. Facts don’t work. Feelings have won.
It could be that, as in other countries, a proportion of our population will be permanently lost to this way of thinking; and the best we can do is educate the next generation into thinking for themselves. Because the human mind is far less logical than we might like to admit. All too often our emotions – anger, frustration, fear – propel us to go in search of “facts” to fit with how we are feeling.
Yet logic can be taught as a subject. It’s a branch of philosophy, and it would fit nicely into the Irish school curriculum. It teaches how to assess information, how to compare like with like, how to avoid illogical whataboutery. How to stick to the point.
I learned it in college, a million years ago, and it has helped me. Some of the time. My feelings still get the better of me. When that man approached me about the vaccine, I didn’t react with wisdom or logic. I told him to f**k off.
Brianna Parkins returns next week