Invalidity

The tone of the article, and to a certain degree, its purpose, is set just a few sentences in. The author, The Atlantic's Olga Khazan, is relating her reaction to one older woman telling another that wearing a mask could be dangerous.

“OK Boomer,” I thought. I dismissed her as a random neighborhood conspiracist and swam my laps.

This dismissiveness permeates the rest of the article. Possibly because the editors felt that it would play well with the well-educated, somewhat center-left readership of The Atlantic, or maybe because they didn't really see it themselves. Or maybe they feel, as a number of people appear to, that some level of mockery is the best response to apparent nonsense. Lost in the "aren't anti-maskers stupid?" theme of the article, however, is an important point from near the beginning of the piece:

The horror of the idea was apparent even to me: the feds, in their hall-monitor stupidity, forcing you to do something that’s actually bad for you.

When Ms. Khazan lays out the gist of many of the theories that are circulating, the idea seems even worse. The federal government isn't displaying "hall-monitor stupidity;" they're being somewhere between actively callous and openly malevolent. Stories that purport to be an insider's knowledge that some or another piece of conventional wisdom is untrue carry a pretty clear point with them; that insiders have definite knowledge that the information under consideration is false.

And it's this angle that nay better explain the staying power of anti-mask conspiracy theories. The stories continue to circulate because they validate people's belief that they have an accurate understanding of the world around them; that this world is run by powerful people who are both unaccountable to the public at large and happily willing deal out harm, misery and death in pursuit of their narrow, selfish interests. And "government officials," most of whom were never elected by anyone and who only seem to pop up when things are crazy, are little more than the willing mouthpieces of these powerful people.

And the same can be said for the media. At one point in the piece, Ms. Khazan calls out England’s deputy chief medical officer, Jenny Harries, for a claim "that masks could 'actually trap the virus'." (Personally, I thought that this was somewhat the point, but I suspect that the contention here was that airborne viruses from other people would live on in the mask, making the object a reservoir for infection.) Harries, we are informed in a parenthetical, "did not respond to a request for comment." Of course she didn't. What point would there have been? She either a) offers up a mea culpa and abandons or walks back her earlier statement, b) cites changing information and being wrong then but correct now or c) stands by her earlier statement; perhaps with a clarification, perhaps as stated. Are any of these options in Ms. Harries' interests? I'm not sure that they are. After all, if The Atlantic's "request for comment" struck me as having no upside for Ms. Harries, I wouldn't be surprised to find that someone in her office reached the same conclusion. But more to the point here, one can make the case that the intent was to hold Ms. Harries accountable for the current conspiracy situation. To the person who believes that insiders have knowledge that "the élites" don't want getting out, putting people on the spot for information that hints to the suspected malicious activity is simply proof that the powerful people who own media companies are in on the scheming, and Ms. Harries is valiant in her refusal to comment.

Information about the world, whether that's objective fact or subjective experience, may be a lot of things, but it's rarely, if ever, self-evident. In their quest for understanding, people draw connections and create narratives that allow them to feel that they have mastered the environment around them. But it's an imperfect process; the way someone understands the world is may not comport with the way that they understand that it should be. And a lot of people's worlds are not as they should be. Conspiracy theories help bridge that gap. Far more important than the confusing guidance on masks and the earlier u-turn on wearing one versus not wearing one is the simple conviction that the current SARS-2 CoV pandemic is not the unforeseen result of trillions of separate interactions that happened to all come together this way. Rather, things are bad because someone is making them bad, and there are people out there who know the truth.

There is a sense in which conspiracy theories are a form of conspiracy theory themselves. They offer a narrative of stupidity, ignorance and deceit when simple fear and mistrust can explain things just as easily. They allow for clear villains in people who knowingly either spread misinformation or fail to suppress it, and make the lack of social trust into something designed, rather than emergent. But the lack of social trust the United States currently labors under is not an effect of misinformation, it's a cause. And until that's addressed, people can dismissively "OK Boomer," all they want, but the whispers will continue to spread.