I always knew I’d be around for the apocalypse. I’m indulging in catastrophic thought, I know, but it honestly feels like that. Firstly, in January, the whole of Australia was on fire. I’d walk through the streets of Elwood, an inner city suburb of Melbourne, and it looked like a disaster movie: red tinged and hazy streets, people darting from their cars to their homes, avoiding breathing in the smoke as much as possible. I caught up with a pregnant friend who lives in Canberra, and she spoke of investing in face masks and oxygen tanks just to make sure she and her unborn baby were okay.

Our government failed us, our Prime Minister going on holiday to Hawaii at the worst possible time, and it made us feel alone and afraid. But we prevailed and overcame, the true nature of Australia – the nature I admire – coming to the fore.

As soon as the bush fires were contained, however, we found ourselves in another crisis, unprecedented since the 1919 pandemic of the “Spanish flu” which killed 15,000 people in Australia before its end. However, unlike the “Spanish influenza”, the novel coronavirus (or in layman’s terms a new strain that has not been previously identified in humans), Covid 19 hasn’t had the same devastating impact on the health of Australia’s citizens. Rather, it’s affected our psyches in profound and possibly equally as devastating ways.

I was talking to my housemate about this just yesterday. The lockdown, the social distancing, the panic buying, and the self isolation are not limited to just us, or our town, or our state, or our country. Unlike the bush fires, that although affected the entirety of this vast continent was contained within Australia, Covid 19 has impacted the entire world. The. Entire. World. Just about every continent on the planet, bar Antartica, has a confirmed case of Coronavirus.

Before you start, yes, I know that the bush fires and Covid 19 are as comparable as cats and penguins, but that’s not my point. The bush fires were something Australia has dealt with before and many times, although perhaps not quite on the scale of January’s crisis. As gauche as this may sound, fires like these are quintessentially Australian. We pull together to fight them, we support our firies and our wildlife workers. We rescue our native animals from the flames and we rescue each other. We know exactly what to do to get through and survive a fire.

A global pandemic, however? We don’t know what the hell to do with this. And the initial response of some Australians was extremely disappointing. From casual racism to out and out violence against our neighbours – over toilet paper, no less – our inability to understand and listen to instruction was eye-opening. But it seemed to be happening all over the world. Everywhere had toilet paper shortages (I still don’t understand why), fights over hand sanitiser, and general panic related entitlement buying which kinda made me stop and have a really good think on human behaviour.

We really suck at this.

Because then the conspiracy theories started. Now look, I love a good conspiracy, and I’ve done my deep dives into the JFK assassination, 9/11, and Epstein didn’t kill himself (or if he did, he was allowed to), but I like to think I can keep a level head on what is likely and possible, and what is unlikely and improbable. What concerns me is that people I know and love, people who I consider to be highly intelligent and rational human beings are buying into absurd, insulting and quite frankly, ridiculous theories that are being spouted on Twitter of all places, by uninformed, shit stirring idiots, some of whom are leaders of powerful nations (I see you Trump, you goon faced twit). The theories range from Covid 19 being an elaborate hoax, or a means for the 1% to gain control of the masses by enforcing lockdowns, to it being a human-made virus deliberately set loose as population control or a foreign attempt to topple the US government. This is all apparently the start of the New World Order that the Reptilians, under the auspices of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, are preparing to unleash on the world and we better be ready, sheeple!!!!

Look, I get it. The response to this virus, which although virulent is certainly not as deadly as the “Spanish flu” (I keep using quotations, because that flu didn’t originate in Spain and terming it as such was a racist act) or even the AIDS epidemic, is seemingly overblown and reactionary. We didn’t have this level of concern over SARS or the swine flu so why Covid 19 and why now? There are reports that the death rate numbers have been fudged, that there is a vaccine that “the government” won’t let us have, or that it is a bioweapon or escaped experiment from a Wuhan lab, or a cash grab by greedy Big Pharma, or is connected to 5G WiFi, the list goes on. There’s no denying that the world governments have spread disinformation in times of crisis for political gain in the past, and certain media like Fox News grab onto this for their own piece of the pie, but here’s why seriously buying into conspiracy theories is dangerous.

They don’t help anyone. The people who tout these theories as facts, people like Alex Jones for example, are, in my opinion, only interested in themselves. Their concern for the truth is negligible. Their concern for their own celebrity and self importance is more than likely what propels them. I stress, this is my own opinion, but having dealt with narcissists like these before, I can now recognise the behaviour.

The theories themselves serve little purpose than to seed distrust, create panic, feed fear and isolate people from one another. The theorists claim that the mainstream media and governments and scientists are lying to us! That may be so, it’s certainly happened in the past, but there is every possibility that these theorists are lying to us too; just because what they say is the opposite of what the gub’ment is telling us does not necessarily mean it is truth. It is just another story.

Theorists claim that the 1% are wanting to divide and conquer us. Let me just say, I believe utterly and absolutely that a large portion of the globe’s wealth belongs to a distressingly small percentage of the world’s population and indeed the class divide exists and is for the benefit of that small percentage. However, this “information” that conspiracy theorists spout is doing more or less the same thing. Dividing us. It’s making us doubt each other. The common person is rarely going to get to vent their spleen at the higher ups of the world. The common person is more likely to come into contact with the police officers and nurses of the world, the civil servants and the teachers and unfortunately, they’re the people who will be adversely affected by an off-kilter conspiracy theorist who believes that anyone who is against them is a part of the conspiracy and then kablammo! Someone is dead. Someone who is not part of the 1%.

So why do we buy into these theories? I really don’t know. Perhaps because we’re trying to find some meaning to this existence. Perhaps we’ve been lied to so much we believe everyone is lying to us. Perhaps we’re lonely and scared and giving control over to all-powerful secret overlords is easier than taking responsibility for ourselves.

But then why is information about Covid 19 so disjointed and variable? Because we’re in the middle of it. There won’t be truly accurate information about this thing until it’s done. And that is perhaps what we’re most scared of. Nobody has all the answers.

Writer and occultist Alan Moore said, “Yes, there is a conspiracy, indeed there are a great number of conspiracies, all tripping each other up … the main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Illuminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Grey Alien Theory. The truth is far more frightening.

Nobody is in control.

The world is rudderless…”

Perhaps we are rudderless. Especially now, with the whole world on tenterhooks. Nobody knows when this will end, nobody knows how we’re going to get through it, nobody knows what the world will be like after it’s done. The only thing we have control over is our own response to it. So let’s make our responses kind, yeah?