Sometimes I feel as though we live in a time where what is “true” doesn’t matter to people. For many, all they seem to care about is what feels true: perceptions that wrap them in the comforting blanket of their self-made reality. For these individuals, what is true is what confirms their pre-existing notions of the world –– or at least does not radically threaten them.
We’ve seen this play out time and again over the past decade, especially the last four years of COVID-19. I’ve heard several conspiracies about the virus from both the left and right sides of the political spectrum. People have downplayed the effects of the virus, belittled masking and other safety measures, and have even claimed that the vaccine is more dangerous than the virus itself. Now that people are experiencing long COVID, some people (both left and right, each with their different beliefs and motivations) are claiming that these harms are not an effect of the virus itself but of the vaccine (despite evidence that the opposite is largely true).
Do you notice the cyclical logic with this line of thinking?
The virus isn’t real or dangerous and measures like masking and vaccination do not work.
People develop often long-term, harmful effects of exposure to COVID-19 even if they’ve been vaccinated against COVID
The vaccines are actually to blame, both “proving” that the virus isn’t that large of a threat and that measures like vaccines do more harm than good
For me, it’s maddening to hear and read. It can feel almost like an Orwellian cliché of “Newspeak,” where every word’s meaning becomes its absolute opposite.
Of course, this way of thinking is not exclusive to COVID-19. We see it in our political discourse, as well. People deny the way the world has changed, whether it be because of the pandemic, climate change, social progress, or any other number of factors. Change is inevitable yet many people would prefer to believe there is a way of winding back the clock to some “golden age,” when things used to be simpler and better. They fail to realize that the world is not any more complex than it used to be but it is their ability to notice and understand the complexity of the world that has grown. They feel as though they’ve stayed the same and yet, suddenly, they can feel the weight of responsibility that comes with human consciousness. They mistake the innocence of their childhood for the simplicity of the world during that period of their lives. By choosing to cling to their nostalgia, they are rejecting the responsibility of adulthood. They would rather try capturing the ghost of a bygone era than accept the complicated and messy problems of our time.
What we’re living through now is an age of passive nihilism: a clinging to static, traditional beliefs even when faced with evidence that they might not be true. For many people, examining their beliefs and potentially discovering they might be flawed or incorrect invites a terror too great for them to bear, so instead, they hold on tightly to the beliefs that provide comfort, even if they know deep down that they may be false.
Mind you, I am not claiming to be the arbiter of what is true! In fact, I would say that my entire perspective is quite the opposite. I do not believe that I understand the capital-T truth more than anyone else but I try to remain open to being proven wrong through experience and evidence. I try to remain fluid in my beliefs with the space to be introduced to new ways of thinking.
I think that is where many people get tripped up.
We want to feel like we can be certain in the knowledge of our lives because it gives us a sense of control. It feels much safer to believe we understand the world and how it operates because it means we have the ability to predict what comes next. I suspect the reason so many people have rejected the events of the pandemic is that it has had so many effects that none of us fully predicted, and that scares us. It scares us to be reminded that there are things outside of our understanding and that we are in fact incredibly vulnerable.
Yet being vulnerable is not a weakness. It is only by accepting the reality of our vulnerability that we can step fully into our power. By embracing our lack of understanding of this world (and universe), we can take inventory of what we can know to be true and make decisions with clear eyes using the best information available to us at any given moment. It may not be the full picture and we may still make the wrong choices, but at least we will be able to accept the scope of our influence and what impact we can actually make at any given moment rather than operating from a place of delusion. If we could just start there, it would be enough.