Saturday night, the cafes are already closed, a woman jumps in front of my bike. “Can we borrow your phone for a second? We have lost our friends and my battery is dead.” She calls some numbers on my phone. When she is assured that she and her boyfriend will be picked up, she returns it. “You’re nice,” she says. “I think your name is Iris.”
“My name is Floor”, I say.
“Yes, exactly, Floor, that really suits you. I also think you are not vaccinated.”
“I have been vaccinated.”
“With two pricks?” She looks at me like I said I’m putting chromium-6 in my coffee. “I so hope you don’t get any side effects.”
“Why don’t you get vaccinated?” I ask.
She’s afraid the vaccine will make her infertile, she says. It’s developed too quickly. The flu also makes you sick. She is angry about the corona pass. And the vaccine doesn’t even work, adds her companion: a vaccinated friend of his now has corona. I start in good spirits: “An effectiveness of less than 100 percent means there is a small chance…” But he starts screaming through me: “Where do you get your sources?” They get their information from the internet. There they also read that Bill Gates is behind it. In fact, he designed corona, with the QR society as the end goal.
When I say I don’t believe this, they look at me in astonishment. “Do you have faith in… the state?”
Before I can explain, the car pulls up with their friends. They jump in, the car accelerates. She sticks her head out the window: “Floor, despite our differences about corona, I think you’re a good person!”
‘Our differences about corona’? There is more going on here. She and I don’t just disagree; we live in other worlds. In my world, government, media and science make mistakes, but they act in good faith. In her world, government, media and science are out to mislead and subjugate us.
In his new book truth seekers philosopher Cees Zweistra takes a harsh judgment on conspiracy consumers like this woman. They do not want to accept that life is often incomprehensible, and therefore flee into the ‘online collection world’, ‘where obvious untruths are held to be true’. In doing so, they turn away from the real world, and thus from the possibility of changing something in it.
I can well imagine his anger. The hubris of my nocturnal interlocutor irritates me: how she gathers her own truth, and then doesn’t question it. I blame her, to put it Zweistra-ish, for leaving our shared world. At the same time, I think: maybe she has good reasons not to trust the state. Can she be blamed for going shopping herself in the enormous range of information?
The real evil, Zweistra also acknowledges, lies with the creators and propagators of conspiracies. They pose as allies of the powerless, but are not. They create anger about problems that cannot be solved simply because they do not exist: there is no chip in the vaccine, there are no tunnels with pedophiles. In the meantime, the real problems – a pandemic, inequality, a warming earth – remain real, even for those who deny them.
At least as bad, Zweistra says, is that the conspiracy theorists discredit honest critics. As a result, “any voice that turns against power risks being portrayed as the voice of conspiracy theorist.” And that while far-reaching measures, such as the corona pass, deserve a critical consideration.
I see the woman in the street as a victim of the conspiracy propagators disguised as allies. The funny thing is, she also sees me as a victim: like a sheep that follows the herd. I empathize with her because she doesn’t trust the institutions, and she with me because I do. There is no shortage of empathy – but it does not bring us closer together.
Floor Rusman is editor of NRC
A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad of 30 October 2021
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of October 30, 2021
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