The truth is out there

I lost a friend last week. Not a good friend, mind you. A former classmate. I don't think we've actually spoken in seven years and we were never particularly close to begin with. Still, going to school with somebody is a special relationship. It's part of a shared upbringing that's not meaningless.

And when I say "lost a friend" I really mean "they unfriended me on Facebook." Surprising, since they were rarely active on the site to begin with, but the last few weeks of self-quarantine seem to have gotten to them. They started posting conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and the actions being taken to combat it. You always know these people exist, like Flat Earthers or people that un-ironically watch Alex Jones, but it's always strange to see somebody you know fall down the rabbit hole.

I tried to hold my tongue for a while, but when they posted a YouTube video about how the media can't be trusted I couldn't help but point out how American it had become to shop around for new facts if you don't like the facts you're given.

Unsurprisingly, they apply the same philosophy to their Facebook feed.

I perhaps could have handled it better, but I admit I struggle with confronting the irrational. It is exceptionally difficult to have a conversation with somebody in a closed loop of logic where everything that supports their conclusion must be true and everything that disproves it is just part of the conspiracy.

How do you have a productive discussion with a grown adult that thinks that the novel coronavirus is being transmitted across 5G signals so that Bill Gates can inject people with microchips in the guise of vaccines as part of a decades long conspiracy dating back to the League of Nations?

Yes. Apparently there's a global conspiracy of the most wealthy and powerful people in the world. They are powerful enough to control the governments, the corporations, and the media, and you can learn all about them from an anti-vax blogger making a YouTube video in their kitchen.

And now we have "The Plandemic," the latest car on the crazy train that is so egregious that both YouTube and Facebook have taken action against the video. Anybody that understands what it takes for these slumbering behemoths to be proactive against something would conclude that the "Plandemic" must be a special kind of misinformation. Ironically though, thanks to the Streisand Effect, taking it down only makes it more infamous and serves as validation for the people inclined to believe it.

There's no winning. You can't logic somebody out of a position they didn't logic themselves into.

I don't know what motivates this kind of thinking. Maybe they're grasping on to the illusion that somebody is in control of this crazy world, even as it becomes more apparent every day that is clearly not the case. Maybe they enjoy feeling like they're "in the know," blessed with secret knowledge that the uninformed masses are blind to. Maybe they're just contrarians that get a thrill out of watching people get frustrated when they insist the sky is red and the grass is yellow.

But while it's difficult to pin down the motivation of the believers, those of the instigators are remarkably transparent. Book deals and merchandise bring in big bucks and monetizing people's fear of the unknown is one of humanity's oldest business models.

Which is not to say that we shouldn't have a healthy skepticism of the government and media, particularly these days with a President that has said more 10,000 documented falsehoods and an increasingly wide selection of news organizations that will or won't report them based on which demographic they're trying to attract.

But a healthy skepticism has to be healthy and these conspiracy theories are anything but. Humoring them doesn't lead to a healthy discourse where both sides agree that the truth is somewhere in the middle. It leads to armed men bursting into a pizzeria looking for human-traffickers in a basement that doesn't exist.

Leave this stuff for "The X-Files."

Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and definitely isn't getting paid by a cabal of shadowy masterminds playing puppet master with the world.