Over-the-Counter

I find conspiracies fascinating for what they tell us about people. But it turns out, the reactions are also pretty telling. I was listening to the radio a while ago, and one of the presenters really hit on something; conspiracy thinking as a form of self-medication for a pathological world. And so I was kind of surprised when the discussion turned to solutions, and there was no mention of addressing that pathology.

I get that it's difficult when the remedy that people are flocking to seems dangerous, especially to people who aren't taking it. And that's perhaps why so little progress is being made, because it's easy to become caught up in policing people's reactions to their fears and anxieties. But if we want people to stop self-medicating for their feelings of disenfranchisement, powerlessness and social mistrust, the alternatives either have to do a better job of helping people feel better and/or actually ease the underlying causes of their anxiety.

It's sort of like being sick. Let's say that I'm taking a naturopathic remedy, which makes me feel better, but there are some side effects. And then I meet someone who tells me that the remedy is bunk, and I should be taking 50 milligrams of Dystopamine HCL twice a day. When I ask "Oh, does that work?" they say, "No, but it's FDA approved." It's attempting to counter unsafe, but effective, with safe, but ineffective.

The degree to which people sympathize with the plight of the self-medicating depends, I think, on whether they see the diagnosis as genuine, a misdiagnosis, hypochondria or deliberate malingering. And that assessment, as I understand it, is often driven by partisanship or other affinities. Many people in the Black community, for example, are put out by the fact that War on Drugs tended to focus on those drugs that Black people took, while the high levels of opioid abuse were seen as having causes other than weak wills on the part of the White people that became addicted. And while this is likely as much (if not more) a function of the societal distance between White and Black people in the United States as it is overt racism, the difference is still noteworthy.

And while with conspiracy theories, the medications are metaphorical, rather than literal, a similar dynamic is as work, as people give passes to those they identify with, at the expense of those they don't.