Editorial, Letters and Jon Kudelka’s cartoon.

Last Saturday’s lead article by Rick Morton (“How Covid-19 energised conspiracy theorists”, May 16-22) details in disturbing detail the extent of adherence to a variety of conspiracy theories fuelled by Covid-19. Morton is correct in saying, “Transmission functions, then, much like the pathogen itself. When the messaging genome is cracked in just the right way, the mistruths can replicate and spread. There may well be mutations.” This is a perfect illustration of what Richard Dawkins has dubbed “a meme”: an idea that replicates and spreads throughout populations. Such memes readily replicate themselves via suitable “hosts”. These “hosts” described by Morton are people who harbour conspiratorial beliefs, which, if expressed by isolated individuals, would readily be understood to be “delusional”. But when any such belief is held by considerable numbers of people in a given culture, they can’t formally be “diagnosed” as delusions. We do know about folie à deux. But with “folie à very many”, the option of recognising the “madness”, as when individuals present to psychiatric facilities with unshakeable irrational beliefs, cannot be applied. Morton goes on to describe what has been called “a quantum theory of denial”, wherein conflicting positions can be held by conspiracists at the one time, without apparent discomfort – just as in quantum theory particles can “occupy” different positions simultaneously. In psychoanalytic theory, this wellknown phenomenon is called “splitting ”. Both delusions and splitting phenomena occur when reality itself is too threatening. The current Covid-19 threat is indeed very threatening to us all, but to have to deal with conspiracy theorists in addition is costly to the wellbeing of us all.

– Ron Spielman, Paddington, NSW