This is my 'written in middle of the night' take on virus conspiracy theories.

After reading several posts written by people with conspiracy theories regarding this virus, I thought to share my own personal experience with conspiracies. To believe that a conspiracy is the whole truth seems to me synonymous with refusing to look at a larger picture — a picture which includes so many people living their lives, making choices at the same time, some honorable, some not. In my opinion, people who get an adrenaline boost from funneling their own collection of ideas and information through a particular lens of conspiracy are lacking the skills necessary to hold multiple contexts at once. 

I learned a lot about conspiracy thinking from growing up with my mother. She was convinced the government had implanted a chip in her brain. She had a ton of evidence to back up this claim and some of it made sense and some of it did not. What made sense is that she'd fallen through the cracks of her own dysfunctional family only to fall through the cracks of society. The complicated web of agencies from nearly every facet of society from social services to health care failed her. Even so, I don't believe anyone was specifically targeting her. Every facet of society has its share of rotten individuals with biases and prejudices who could care less about certain people, but in my personal experience, there’s a big distinction between being treated unfairly and even horribly by flawed systems and being a victim of a deliberate conspiracy. 

Here’s a slogan I like to use: what you focus on is what you see. My mother was focused on all the evidence she was looking for and guess what? She found it. It took some creativity to determine that unmarked cars were following her, but here’s the interesting part: once she began contacting various organizations asking why they were following her, they actually DID begin following her and giving her their attention which then fueled her conspiracy theories. She created a fiasco with police departments along with the FBI and they did actually wind up being involved. 

Conspiracies can be the result of pathologically dysfunctional behavior, but they can also be a lazy person's poor excuse for activism. If you see an injustice, instead of self-righteously determining that what you see is a clear cut conspiracy, maybe it's an opportunity to address the specific problem that impacts you personally and start to share your experiences and your ideas for upgrading the situation. You might be just the voice your demographic has been waiting for, so long as you're understanding the whole picture and all the mechanisms involved. But when a person falls through the cracks and simply turns everyone into the enemy, it's hard to enroll anyone on your team. You become instead just a pissed off person rage-posting injustices on an iPhone.

I could be wrong, but I think a lot of people gravitate to conspiracy theories because they inspire a kind of star-of-the-movie ‘us against them’ hero mentality. But real life isn't like fairy tales, where there are good guys and bad guys. Reality is so much more complicated, with every individual having to deal with themselves, their issues, their families, their goals, dreams, and their basic needs 24 hours a day. I was tortured in some ways by growing up with a paranoid person, but it forced me to practice pushing my perspective aside to make room for many more perspectives, because I saw how small a world can get when it imagines it's the only one. I realized that if you're willing to juggle multiple perspectives, your version of what’s really happening might be more likely to match what’s actually really happening. 

It’s difficult to upgrade conversations and listening. It’s like a game of Tetris where you have to develop the skill to make room for falling pieces of information to be included in your foundation of reality. So many people instead dismiss every new piece that doesn't match their perspective, and then fool themselves into believing their limited perspective is what's real. All human beings are acting and reacting and working and not working together all at the same time and each of us has a different level of thoroughness and also an enormous collection of unchecked personal issues and biases. Together we weave a giant web of consequences. Some of these consequences lead to progress, others, to setbacks. And I find it a big setback when people turn consequences into conspiracies. Just because a big pharmaceutical company doesn't have your personal interests in mind doesn’t make them evil or conspiratorial. They are a business trying to push out medicine that's economically viable and spares the lives of the most people possible, and they may not presently have the listening for demographics who aren't happy with their products. So, if you have an idea to help an unrepresented demographic, be an activist, figure out how to talk about your experiences in a way that doesn’t dismiss the work that is already being done.

When my son had a reaction to his vaccines and his nurse said cavalierly that she didn’t agree his reactions were from the vaccines, I could have decided she worked for big pharma and was given yearly resort vacations to Naples Florida in return for telling me this. Or I could imagine that she'd seen so many others without reactions that she just didn't have the listening for it. Instead of getting mad and labeling her as the enemy, I found someone else to share my experiences with and found our present pediatrician who agreed with me because he'd seen it before, and he's been completely open to figuring out ways to make vaccines safer for him and has also suggested many alternative ways of protecting his immune system since my son also has a severe allergy to two kinds of antibiotics. 

I don’t think of it as a conspiracy that my son had a reaction. I don't believe vaccines cause autism either. But I have learned from many stable-minded parents whose kids had awful reactions after vaccines, that some kids do respond differently. Maybe it's a genetic predisposition that gave their body a cytokine storm after the introduction of substances from vaccines which led to major behavior changes. I have no idea, because I'm not a scientist or a researcher. But I can allow their experiences to settle in my game of of Tetris and join the foundation of what I accept as real. I don’t have to have an either/or. My world will not crack and be invaded by armies of idiotic enemies if I consider another person's experience as valid. In fact, I want to make sure their stories are heard and validated just the same as I'd want to consider anyone's awful experience as valid. Not only because that's how spaces open to shed light on new ways of looking at things, but also because I think many people are more likely to turn to extreme thinking after their most nightmarish experiences have been invalidated so many times. 

The world of either/or is disintegrating. We have to listen to each other’s stories for there to be progress. Oh, your kid had a reaction? I'm so sorry that happened to you. What was that like? 

Instead of hearing words like Soros or Bill Gates or Obama or Reaction To Vaccines and allowing your amygdala to turn them into your lion, tiger or bear du jour, why not look deeper?

When people abandon their conspiracy theories and instead find the courage to share their real stories from a place of no blame, they give others a chance to listen to what they've been through. And if we practice listening, we might learn to actually care.