Last week I met somebody sitting on a terrible secret. His partner knew, but not his friends. What would happen if they found out? He shook his head, unable even to imagine such shame.
His terrible secret? He’d been vaccinated.
Since his bizarre confession, I’ve ventured into parts of social media I usually avoid to try to understand (or at least explore) the world in which being a responsible adult can get you ostracised. And I must report that I’ve found a world of startling diversity.
To float through the Facebook and Twitter feeds of the vaccine-resistant or passionately anti-vax is to encounter wealthy white men who want the Cape to be independent and young black women who are passionate supporters of Radical Economic Transformation (RET).
There are farmers and there are pharmacists, radical atheists and devout followers of all SA’s largest religions.
There are blue-collar blokes demanding rationality and purple-gowned trust-fund hippies preaching love and care as they demonstrate startling contempt for genuine civic-mindedness.
And, of course, there are endless, endless contradictions, insisting Covid-19 is basically a mild flu, but also designed by China to kill its enemies; that “My Body, My Choice” is paramount, except when it involves pregnant women; that the greatest long-term threat to the planet is overpopulation and Big Pharma’s plan to depopulate us.
Their motivations are also fairly varied.
To float through the Facebook and Twitter feeds of the vaccine-resistant or passionately anti-vax is to encounter wealthy white men who want the Cape to be independent and young black women who are passionate supporters of Radical Economic Transformation
Some are clearly in the final stages of an 18-month process of doubling down. Unable to walk back their early claims that Covid-19 isn’t that bad, they have retooled them as sinister questions: after all, why mandate a vaccine for an ailment which (they have to maintain) needs very little treatment beyond your standard veterinary anti-parasitic?
Others are undeniably drawn to the animating energy of so many conspiracy theories: the claim to special knowledge, whereby the initiated know something the rest of us fools don’t.
Mostly, however, I’ve found a third, much more destructive motivation behind much of what I read: contrarian schadenfreude.
An offshoot of the crude notion that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, it seems to have persuaded many South Africans that any fantasy, no matter how fantastical, is transformed into an irrefutable fact the moment it is questioned or criticised by anyone who doesn’t share their politics.
When Dr Susan Vosloo aired her lethal disinformation last week, commentators framed it as a crisis of bad information and perverted education. And yet her video wasn’t an attempt to share information. It was, instead, a political manifesto.
News reports about Vosloo explained she had posted her drivel on BitChute, a site described as “alt-right” or “far right”. These descriptions are too polite. BitChute is a sewer, the online home of InfoWars, whose host, Alex Jones, responded to the Sandy Hook school massacre in the US by claiming it was a hoax, getting sued by bereaved parents and then sending those parents images of child sexual abuse.
I imagine Vosloo and her supporters believe she was forced to post on the site to escape “censorship” by the “Lamestream media”. However, if you have chosen to move into a digital digs with Alex Jones, you have chosen extremist politics above science.
Certainly, this has been borne out in much of the support for Vosloo, her debunked facts apparently much less important to her admirers than her willingness to ride out as a contrarian Joan of Arc.
This is not a new phenomenon. In 2016 many Americans expressed concern about former US president Donald Trump’s patently fake Christian faith, but voted for him anyway because of how furious he made the liberal elite.
In SA we saw a similar thing play out when Tokyo Sexwale fell for the “Spiritual White Boy” hoax involving an alleged quadrillion rand, and when Pretoria News editor Piet Rampedi claimed to have discovered newborn decuplets.
In 2016 many Americans expressed concern about former US president Donald Trump’s patently fake Christian faith, but voted for him anyway because of how furious he made the liberal elite
Both stories were quickly revealed as embarrassingly crude fictions. Importantly, however, both cast President Cyril Ramaphosa as a villain. Ramaphosa, Sexwale implied, had refused to accept free money that would have made all South Africans rich. Likewise, as Rampedi’s story fell apart, he quickly shifted focus, accusing the state of a huge cover-up. Right on cue, the RET faction came roaring out onto Twitter to parrot its absurd lies as gospel.
At the weekend News24 published a careful, clear and thorough refutation of Vosloo’s claims. It joined the mountain of evidence that vaccines are saving lives and that the overwhelming majority of people now getting very sick or dying of Covid-19 are unvaccinated.
But the past few years have shown that refutations, facts and evidence are simply sheet music for singing to the choir. Worse, to the genuinely vaccine-resistant, doctors repeating facts look increasingly like the Mars Attacks aliens yelling “Do not run! We are your friends!” as they vaporise humanity with death rays.
Facts don’t work on people whose politics demand fantasy. This new anti-orthodox orthodoxy will have to be overturned from within.
Which is why the state needs to start wooing the symbolic leadership of this counterfactual movement — clergy, sports stars, business leaders — and persuade them to lead by example; to show rather than to tell.
Because while we keep persuading ourselves that this is a problem of education rather than a display of modern reactionary politics, we’re going to keep taking facts to a knife-fight and my new friend is going to smile, nod and keep absolutely schtum.
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