@Remittancegirl
Agreed. And compared with what could have happened with something that infectious, what we experienced over the last three years was “pandemic light”. Our apparent inability to really learn from that is disturbing, to say the least. But perhaps it really takes something as immediate and visible as the Black Death before people take it seriously. 🙄
@khoji @Remittancegirl That's what I thought at first, but after observing and pondering, I changed my mind. If anything, a worse pandemic would make the conspiracy theorists dig in their heels and be even more intractable. They would see it as even stronger evidence that they were correct all along, and it was created in a lab for nefarious purposes.
The conspiracy type thinking is contagious like a computer virus, and like a virus, it takes over the entire central processor. This not only has the immediate effects like pandemic denial or climate change denial, but it also has long term detrimental effects like voting for the Leopards-Eat-Your-Face Party.
So if we consider the conspiracy thinking as a form of memetic contagion, we can see that logic and reason won't have any more effect than they would on an actual pathogen. So to follow the analogy, what we need is to "vaccinate" the vulnerable against conspiracy theeories, and cure those already infected by constructing a contagious, self-replicating counter- meme.
#AttitudeInoculation #DeepCanvassing
#StreeEpistemology
https://cognitiveimmunology.net/
