Anti-vaxxers and the (un)healthy distrust of authority
This week, as millions of Facebook users updated their profile pictures to be encircled by the legend “I have a healthy distrust of authority and I’m vaccinated”, it was hard not to wonder if some Banksy-esque hacker had turned the site into a satirical artwork about people who celebrate their status as freethinkers on a platform designed to turn its users into battery chickens.
Still, echoes of Monty Python notwithstanding (“We are all individuals!”), I understand the basic idea behind the new feature, and concede that its cold, dead heart is probably in the right place.
Many of the people delaying, resisting or rejecting Covid-19 vaccines seem to share a deep distrust of any information that comes from power centres they’ve decided are disdainful of them, and the new whatsit on Facebook is an attempt to sing them a lullaby in their own mother tongue; to tell the nervous swimmer that yes, the sea can be dangerous and should always be treated with caution, but look how lovely it is to go wading in the shallows.
At first glance it seems a more effective way of winning hearts and minds than telling the hearts they are wicked and the minds that they are made of mashed potato. But I must admit to having doubts.
In SA, the vaccine-hesitant are a shrinking minority, with research suggesting logistics and confused messaging play a bigger role than ideology.
Certainly, the introduction of vaccine mandates abroad has revealed that when people have to choose between paper-thin principles and being allowed into their local bar, the former tend to dissolve almost immediately in a pint of lager.
As for the die-hards — or the die-quite-easily, as they’re turning out to be — it’s clear that no approach from outside their silos can shift them, a reality that still seems to be evading the many journalists and doctors who continue to hurl facts at a wall specifically designed to be fact-resistant.
At the weekend, for example, as a small group of fantasists stood outside Groote Schuur hospital in Cape Town and shrieked that Covid-19 was a hoax, many angry commentators on social media suggested the protesters should be taken inside and led past the beds in which people are fighting for their lives.
It sounded like a sensible prescription, and yet, once again, believers in medical consensus were fundamentally misunderstanding the arbitrarily curated chaos in which hardcore Covid-19 deniers and antivaxxers drift. Once again, wellmeaning scientists were persisting with their delusion that if you can just show people one and one, they will add them together and arrive at two instead of three ... or 5G or a plot to depopulate the planet.
If they understood how the people outside Groote Schuur see the world they would have known what a terrible idea it would have been to lead the protesters through the Covid-19 ward, where it’s not inconceivable that one of them might have tried to yank out a ventilator or yell at unconscious patients to stop faking.
REVOLUTIONISED
Extremism isn’t cured by evidence and debate. It’s changed by normalising the alternative; in this case, by detaching the Covid-19 vaccine from cold, distant laboratories — from “authority”—and reframing it as an unremarkable fixture in the family home.
So far, SA has failed to do that: I find it genuinely bizarre that we haven’t yet seen a large media blitz featuring vaccinated celebrities, or the Springboks endlessly repeating the indisputable fact that they all got vaccinated and then promptly thrashed the British & Irish Lions.
All of which is why I don’t believe that announcing on Facebook that you have a healthy distrust of authority is going to get more people vaccinated. I do worry, however, that it might ultimately have the opposite effect.
When I saw the first avatars adorned with the new message, I was confused by how uneasy it made me feel, and not just because it was smugly claiming insight via a website whose users regularly attribute quotes on mindfulness and climate change to Mark Twain.
It was because I couldn’t agree with an apparently intelligent and progressive message. The truth is I don’t distrust all authority, and I certainly don’t think such a distrust is healthy.
That’s because “authority” doesn’t only mean what Facebook says it does.
Yes, it’s the militaryindustrial complex, red in tooth and claw, and jackbooted fascists and Stalinists and kragdadige Big Men and institutional bullies threatening schoolchildren with a cane. But it’s also the judge presiding over a case in the Constitutional Court, and the scientist whose ideas and processes have revolutionised their field and earned them the admiration of the majority of their peers.
It’s the researcher who knows more about their subject than anyone in the country. It is the originator of ideas and fields of knowledge — the author — and the final arbiter of disputes; the calm, supremely informed and fair-minded centre of a functioning society.
I’m sure the people posting “I have a healthy distrust of authority” on Facebook know this. What they mean, I’m certain, is that they have a distrust of illegitimate or repressive authority. But by posting that supremely lazy sound bite I fear they are perpetrating the supremely selfdestructive idea that all authority is tainted simply by virtue of being authoritative.
Right now we need all the true authorities we can get.
EXTREMISM ISN’T CURED BY EVIDENCE AND DEBATE. IT’S CHANGED BY NORMALISING THE ALTERNATIVE
THE TRUTH IS I DON’T DISTRUST ALL AUTHORITY, AND I CERTAINLY DON ’ T THINK SUCH A DISTRUST IS HEALTHY