Really Bad Ideas

I really, really, really don't "believe" in conspiracy theories. I think, however, they are not necessarily "wrong". Often they are essentially structural theories that make the mistake of over-specifying actors ("personifying" emergent structural processes). In that sense, they are empirically almost always "wrong," of course, even though they might be theoretically sort-of / strikingly interesting. They are also worth paying attention to because they signal that the human mind produces and processes theories that take the form of stories more easily, even if they are blatantly false in the concrete sense. Narrative stories spread among humans like wildfire, much more easily than the structural theories they simplify / vulgarize. Such theories, which may well be vastly more accurate, we (social scientists, for instance) often find excruciatingly difficult to convey to the broader public.

It is enough to spend 5 minutes on Twitter to realize that the Wuhan coronavirus has set off a veritable tsunami of conspiracy theories. I won't popularize them here, most of them are both dumb and ghastly.

There is something else to this epidemic, and it is relevant to the tsunami of conspiracy theories. A seemingly-as yet-unstoppable epidemic (i.e., it is unstoppable until somebody develops some technology, biological or otherwise, that stops it, until the next similar catastrophe) is, if viewed from the point of view of the geopolitical-economy of global capitalism, a godsend to anyone wishing to forestall the inevitable taking of the reins of global power from the "West." The unthinkable task of managing a potential public health emergency on the scale of ten million?, a hundred million? even greater? bogs down the Chinese political system, as well as the country's vast research, health care and public safety (not to mention law enforcement) infrastructure with a crisis of epic proportion, a crisis no political system is particularly well designed to handle. My point, I'm a little concerned that, even if this epidemic turns out to have been a genuinely natural occurrence, the result of a virus mutating and "jumping" from reptiles or other non-human animals to humans, what-ever, and no foreign agency (in both senses of the word) has played a part in it in its onset, it might give some rogue (or just simply declining?) powers some really, really-really bad ideas, ranging from relatively non-genocidal-but-disastrous, like, oh, I don1t know, canceling domestic elections by reference to a global health emergency, to the potential eradication of humankind (except for the truly isolated hill groups in the Himalayas, inhabitants of the Mongolian plateau, or a few indigenous tribes the Amazon rain forest) by the use of biological disease agents for strategic purposes.