Pandemics, Power, and Conspiracy Theories – Costantini – 2020 – Critical Quarterly
‘Our culture is awash in conspiracy theories’, Joseph Uscinski recently observed to emphasise the crucial role the Internet plays in circulating a deluge of information and conjectures – including fake news – around the world.1 Sometimes created by powerful elites as parts of top‐down processes of mass control, other times developed by the weak in bottom‐up rebellions that ‘encourage transparency and good behavior by the powerful’, conspiracy theories may fulfil both dangerous and useful functions.2 For this reason, they should be considered in their complexity rather than be easily dismissed as irrational or delusive.3 The epistemic problems we face in determining whether these theories could be warranted are manifold. They include evaluating the risks of a priori dismissal or denialism, choosing between a generalist and a particularist approach, and dealing with the question of ‘secrecy’ – a basic condition of any conspiracy. This latter challenges us by definition: if conspirators manage to keep their activities properly secret, how could we come to believe in their existence?4 These issues suggest that we should be cautious in approaching the current proliferation of theories which, widely disseminated by social media, produce a large variety of responses ranging from total disbelief to blind support.
If grouping all theories into a homogeneous class is certainly misleading, detecting some recurrent elements in specific kinds of theories can help us understand their social triggers and the reasons for their wide appeal. This is the case of conspiracy theories about infectious disease outbreaks and pandemics, based on suspicions and conjectures that easily spread among the population. Suffice it to consider the bulk of theories surrounding HIV/AIDS which, in addition to denialism, include a wide range of plots allegedly hatched to wipe out whole communities or nations.5 Such theories not only involve politicians in the role of conspirators; they also cast a dark shadow on the reliability and ethicality of science. In some cases, scientists are supposed to cover up the truth; in others they are accused of manufacturing and willingly spreading pathogens.
Distrust in science is driven by a variety of factors, but, like the human tendency to believe in rumours, it often feeds on anxieties caused by inexplicable or scary events: ‘These states are a natural response to circumstances that groups have difficulty interpreting or that they interpret as threatening’.6 Stories of evil human plotting are often envisaged to counterbalance such anxieties. Unlike a supernatural or religious explanation, ‘a conspiracy theory positing humans doing human things […] cleaves to a natural approach’, thereby challenging any prospect of transcendental entities influencing mankind.7 What is more, such a theory evidences a human wish to control, instead of being dominated by, the realm of nature – even though this implies a deviant use of knowledge (and science). The proliferation of these theories throughout the centuries suggest that people prefer conspiracy plots involving human agents rather than come to terms with their own vulnerability to lethal pathogens of unknown origins, which spread uncontrollably around.
We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose or constitute at the same time power relations. These ‘power‐knowledge relations’ are to be analysed, therefore, not on the basis of a subject of knowledge who is or is not free in relation to the power system, but on the contrary, the subject, who knows, the objects to be known and the modalities of knowledge must be regarded as so many effects of these fundamental implications of power‐knowledge and their historical transformations.8
Widely explored in his works, primarily in Discipline and Punish (1975), the insidious correlation of power and knowledge here established by Foucault explains why control, which is strongly related to power, tends to be considered a basic component of human life and a guarantee for the progress of our species.
Even when control acquires Gothic connotations, as in wars, genocides, and other cases of people using knowledge to persecute others (including conspiracies), we tend to be less scared than when we face uncontrollable natural catastrophes, such as the spread of an unknown disease or an asteroid impact. A mode that always gives voice to the cultural anxieties of its age, the Gothic interrogates human concerns also in postmodern times, when growing fears of science and its practitioners are raised by ‘[n]ew biotechnological innovations need[ing] new Frankensteins’.9 Frightful though they are, these concerns are less disorienting than the prospect of natural forces which, besides endangering people’s lives, question the human illusions of understanding and controlling the world.
These cultural mechanisms are fully evident in the current coronavirus pandemic, which, more than previous epidemic phenomena, has generated a network of conspiracy theories pivoting around the idea of a lab‐manufactured virus. The compulsive use of social media of our age has animated the development of these theories which, in ways similar to the virus, proliferate and circulate worldwide. Prominent among conspiracy theories are those involving Bill Gates as the supposed mastermind of the coronavirus pandemic, the man who created (or commissioned the creation of) the virus in order to commercialise a vaccine. The reasons for Gates’s assumed agency are manifold, spanning from simple money making to will to power.10 Other theories circulating in the Internet blend political with economic aims. A case in point are the mutual accusations between the US and the Chinese governments, which have charged each other with the misdeed of producing the virus in their respective laboratories and of spreading it to weaken their competitors. More confused but appealing to many is the global conspiracy theory that connects coronavirus with 5G Networks which, championed by people like David Icke, supposes that the combined use of virus and electromagnetic radiation aims at culling the world’s population.11 Other popular theories impute the pandemic to an accidental leak from a laboratory (generally located in Wuhan) where scientists were conducting researches on a biological weapon or simply searching for an antidote against new potential diseases. Although these latter theories are not strictly classifiable as ‘conspiracy’, they nonetheless involve human responsibility in manipulating pathogens that had not affected mankind before.
In addition to whetting popular appetites for sensation, these Internet‐blooming theories confirm people’s tendency to find a specious explanation for a phenomenon that, besides killing thousands, is tragically affecting their lives, restricting their movements and forcibly changing their habits. Imputing the pandemic to human agents is not only a way of hoping that those responsible could finally put a stop to it; it is also part of a familiar epistemological approach to reality, which lays all emphasis on the power‐knowledge relations of human societies.
Such an approach has been fed by a variety of cultural products over the centuries. In the literary field, examples are as diverse as the legends of plague spreaders (untori) that were popular in seventeenth‐century Italy and are mentioned in Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (1827), Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death (1842) – which connects a ghastly disease with human agency by personifying the pestilence as one of Prince Prospero’s revellers – and the much‐discussed The Eyes of Darkness (1981), a novel by Dean Koontz, whose reference to a human‐made virus called ‘Wuhan‐400’ is now viewed by many as an ominous prophecy of the coronavirus pandemic.12
Cinema has similarly nourished fantasies of human‐generated epidemics. Although in many films contagion spreads naturally or the story starts in medias res without a hint at the source of the epidemic – examples include apocalyptic horror films like 28 Weeks Later (2007) and Cargo (2017) – in other cases humans are held responsible for experimenting or deliberately spreading pathogens that threaten to annihilate their community or the whole human species. The degree of responsibility varies. In films like 28 Days Later (2003), I Am Legend (2007), and Train to Busan (2016), infections are due to accidental leaks from laboratories where scientists conduct experiments on dangerous viruses. The tendency to concoct a human source of the pestilence is also evident in The Cassandra Crossing (1976), in which the accidental spread of contagion from a laboratory triggers a political conspiracy against the infected who, instead of being killed by bacteria, are persecuted and doomed to annihilation by US army officers. More lethal than the disease, the stubborn determination of the military to kill those potentially infected triggers a Gothic plot of persecution pivoting around power‐knowledge relations. Other films explicitly impute a pandemic to people’s craving for power and to their desire to kill their antagonists. In The Omega Man (1971), for instance, the escalation of a world war into biological warfare leads to the almost complete annihilation of mankind. Human agency is decidedly central in this film: in addition to being the source of the epidemic, it is connected with faint hopes of survival (set on an experimental vaccine) and with the uncanny appearance of the infected, who behave like members of a sect that aims to prevail over its opponents.
Scary and horrific though they are, these films betray the human aspirations to make sense of catastrophes which, instead, remain unaccountable in other films that dramatise people’s efforts to escape a contagion of unknown origins. More food for thought is offered by television series that draw upon cultural anxieties to produce thrillingly addictive stories. In the last twenty years, manifold series dealing with contagion have been released, probably influenced by worldwide concerns over pandemics like the 2009–10 Swine Flu or region‐bounded outbreaks of SARS in China and some other areas (2002–4) and Ebola in West Africa. A number of these series connect the pathogenic outbreak to human actions and knowledge, instead of depicting mankind as prey to uncontrollable natural forces. A comparison between two series released almost one after the other, Helix (2014–15) and Fortitude (2015–18), bears evidence of the aforementioned attempts to concoct forms of human control that might neutralise the disease or, at least, offer some plausible or implausible explanation for its spread. Both set in arctic regions, where natural elements create a hostile environment for human beings, Helix and Fortitude share a large number of Gothic paraphernalia – like persecution, physical aggression, and zombification – and a plot that, though different in several details, revolves around a disease that infects a community and might spread on a larger scale.
In Helix, the conspiracy theory is prominent. The first season of the series revolves around a viral outbreak at an arctic bioresearch station, where forbidden research is conducted.13 The victims of the disease are scientists and other people working at the station, who are infected by two variants of the virus: one lethal, the other dangerous for many but curable in some cases with survivors developing an ability to control the infected. The horrific elements of the disease, which turns people into aggressive zombie‐like creatures, are coupled with a basic ingredient of conspiracy stories: the presence of a sinister group that conspires against other humans driven by greed or hunger for power. After many twists and complications, the viral outbreak is revealed to be part of a programme of secret experiments conducted by the station director, Hiroshi Hatake, and by the company that runs the station, Ilaria Corporation, who are searching for the key to immortality. All survivors of a previous infection, Hatake and the corporation managers have consequently developed a quasi‐immortal nature and aim to control the world by keeping the virus under control. After a while, however, their objectives conflict with one another, adding new counterplots and intricacies to the story. The central plot is disclosed in the episode titled ‘Survivor Zero’, during a violent confrontation between Hatake and Constance Sutton, Ilaria’s Chief Operator Officer. Sutton angrily asks Hatake ‘Where is the cure?’ before explaining that the corporation needs both ‘virus and cure’ as they ‘don’t wanna kill everybody. Just thin the herd a bit’, thereby revealing their pursuit of a typical objective of medical and pharmaceutical conspiracies: violent demographic reduction.14 In successive episodes, we learn that the experiments conducted by Hatake have an additional secret aim: that of activating dormant genes within his daughter, Julia Walker, to make her quasi‐immortal like himself. Disquieting though they are, the multiple human conspiracies gradually revealed to the spectator somehow decrease the frightful sense of being at the mercy of an unknown agent – a sense that, especially in the early episodes, is reinforced by Gothic images of the station as a prison, surrounded by cold and ice to prevent any escape.
An awful idea of confinement is also conveyed by Fortitude. Set in a fictional arctic Norwegian settlement that is easier to reach from the outside world, this series offers numerous images of snowstorms and cold that produce claustrophobic effects, suggesting the partial entrapment of the local community. In ways similar to Helix, the first season of Fortitude describes the spread of a strange disease that infects the inhabitants, turning them into zombie‐like, aggressive creatures.15 What differs, however, is the origin of the disease which is neither human made nor human controlled. In the course of the first season, the pestilence is discovered to derive from primitive parasitic wasps incubated in the body of a mammoth that emerges when the permafrost starts to melt. By stinging people, the insects inject eggs into their bodies, turning them into hosts of larvae and hunters of other hosts. The human‐to‐human transmission is performed through an abject ritual consisting of the violent cutting of the victim’s belly and the aggressor’s vomiting of the larvae into the open wound. Various attempts to explain this reproductive process in terms of human perversion fail, until two locally based scientists discover the natural origin of the infection and manage to destroy most of the wasps.
The discovery of the instinct‐driven, natural source of the disease increases, rather than deflates, the abject connotations of the epidemic, suggesting the possibility of new outbreaks difficult to control. Quite unexpectedly, however, this grim prospect disappears in the two following seasons, which bring human‐hatched conspiracy plots into focus.16 A corrupted researcher, Dr Surinder Khatri, a greedy pharmaceutical company and, in season three, a villainess aspiring to immortality, Elsa Schenthal, acquire central stage as agents of mischief. By performing cruel medical procedures and conducting secret researches on the wasps’ victims, who are experimented upon to find a key to tissue regeneration, these villainous figures associate contagion with human agency, as they infect people deliberately and sometimes kill their victims to pursue personal objectives (i.e. greed for Khatri and the company; self‐preservation for Elsa).
A superlative plot is described in episodes eight and nine of the second season, in which scientist Natalie Yelburton, who has found evidence of Khatri’s corruption, is infected by the pharmaceutical researcher and used as a laboratory guinea pig. By experimenting on one of the scientists who had studied and neutralised the wasps’ power, Khatri performs a relevant symbolic action. She replaces the upsetting prospect of an unknown disease spread by primitive insects with an infection inoculated by skilled people who, though driven by selfish reasons, act in meaningful ways and seem capable of controlling the pathogen. The shift of responsibility from nature to mankind that is dramatised in the second and third seasons of Fortitude sheds light on the audience’s preference for narratives centred on human beings, who perform the main actions and are part of the power mechanisms by which their reality is produced.
The conspiracies fictionalised in these television series confirm the popularity of human‐dominated models of reality which, despite their Gothic connotations, are somehow more reassuring than the prospect of a world governed by uncontrollable natural forces. In a similar way, today’s conspiracy theories on the coronavirus pandemic draw nourishment from the human desire to impute the disease to greedy managers, ambitious politicians, or mad scientists, whose agency would imply a potential control of the disease or, at least, inscribe it within a recognisable frame of power‐knowledge relations.
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