The Useful Idiots

My parents had terrible stories about polio. They saw one too many friend and family fall victim to the disease. Quite fortunate for the following generation, science quickly found a way to help eradicate the nightmare. Jonas Salk was the scientist, to be precise. But two generations later, false equivalence and couch-baked correlations are attacking the science, pegging autism to vaccines. They're not actually questioning the science, mind you. Questioning science is a good thing, in fact welcomed by true scientists. They are attacking it without real research or credible peer review.

Unqualified attacks are fueled in part by faded memory. When children are born in disconnected families with little or no memory passed on down from grandparents, and when home schooling intercepts any chance a child may have to hear about science, the recurring nightmare of ignorance emerges all over again.

During the pandemic I started an informal poll of my own: every time I would meet an anti-vaxxer I would ask them if they knew what an iron lung was. Not only did none of them know it had anything to do with polio, more than one thought it had to do with scuba diving equipment. 

For whatever it’s worth here’s the thing about conspiracies: unfortunately they do exist, in the form of a LOBBY. Powerful, political lobbies. They have small empires to protect, and a lot of money to throw at defending their existence. But in every case, science is the David against the lobby Goliath. It is NEVER the other way around. Conspiracists become the useful idiots of competing lobbies when they buy into their strategic distortions of science. 

The perception that science can be corrupted or bought is a gross misunderstanding of how science works. When people of science are corrupted they cease to be scientists. The ONLY purpose of science is seeking the truth, not hiding it. It’s no different than bad cops, bad generals, bad teachers, etc. In a relatively free and democratic society you do not shut down the institutions of teaching, police, or military because of corruption. Not unless you’re hell bent on wiping out freedom and democracy.

The tragic flaw of the useful idiot is that when they become fixated with an irregularity they can't explain they don't follow the science. They follow the noise and convince themselves that their "no one's gonna fuck with me" swagger is their claim to a noble survivalist crusade. The mother of all ironies of course is that fuck with them is exactly what lobby overlords do to and with them.

When I step into a car, or an airplane, I actually understand the science behind them. You don't have to be a scientist to do so, and I don't claim to be as smart as the scientists who developed those technologies. Pioneering scientists are amazing humans: they are super-intelligent, relentless students of science, highly respectful of the scientific method and process. Entire generations enjoy amazing improvements to quality of life thanks to scientists. But ultimately it is not the scientist I follow, it is the science.

The exact same logic applies to vaccines.

The Goliath lobbies manipulate the credibility of science, as long as they can get away with it. Examples are too many to list, but the most infamous ones include the tobacco lobby, the coal lobby, gun lobby, segregationist lobbies, etc. Only when science overwhelms the lobbies do they die or retreat. The death of a toxic lobby is a good thing. But when they  on't die and simply retreat it poses a major problem for evolution. They become sleeper cells. A generation or two later the cells are awoken as memory fades, and it’s anti-science movements, fascism, etc. all over again. The classic definition of insanity on a planetary scale.

If you ever find yourself fighting the science as opposed to the lobby that’s smearing the science, it gives me no pleasure to inform you that you have become a useful idiot. The larger tragedy being, your behavior and choices do not merely impact a pandemic, as terrible as that is by itself. Next time you are watching the news about war or insurrection "crimes", know that the leaders of those actions are NOTHING without their armies of useful idiots.