It’s a conspiracy
By: Magnus Allan
Tags: Conspiracy Theories, Soap, Covid 19

Created with Canva

It’s a conspiracy

It’s a conspiracy, growls a voice from one of the internet’s murkier corners, rambling like a tipsy uncle slumped on a chair who shouldn’t have had that third port after lunch. He’s forgotten the sad truth that his alcohol tolerance evaporated as the evening drew in on his glory days. Still he talks.

Look at this, look at this, he says, brandishing a forty year old horror book that predicted that a virus would strike at some point in the near future and it would come from a lab just outside the city where in reality it looks like Covid-19 first emerged. It’s proof, he says, reaching for another glass of port that he really wasn’t invited to take, proof that we are all part of a vast global conspiracy, the British royal family are eight foot tall lizards and what we think of as reality is a gigantic computer experiment put in place by the Aztecs and now controlled by the CIA and their good friends in the FSB.

And of course, he might be right. The world is full of strange coincidences, that bloke down at the chip shop does look disturbingly like Elvis if you squint hard enough, the moon landing shadows are a bit wonky if you ignore the fact that they were taken with 50 year old equipment, and if you look closely enough everything does always seem to go wrong in threes.

No matter what you see, its’s not a mystery but…

Let’s be honest though, if Covid-19 was part of a global conspiracy, the chances are that who ever is behind it would be trying to flog us something off the back of it. A miracle cure, a priceless opportunity to keep your family safe, a timeshare cabin on an ark that will take us away from it all…

But there doesn’t seem too much evidence of a profit motive. Naturally there are people trying to turn this into an opportunity to sell homemade hand-sanitiser, blessed rabbits’ feet and 100% guaranteed effective facemasks, but the main thing that anyone’s trying to sell us is soap. Soap that, at its cheapest and probably most cheerful, retails at around 15p. Soap that very few of us would spend more than £5 on, even when we are in our most benign moods, on holiday before this whole thing started, ambling around a bustling artisan market, the sun’s warm caress on our skins and the taste of recently devoured local pastry lingering on our lips.

…coincidence

In the case of Covid-19, it is certainly an interesting coincidence that someone wrote a book in the 1980s that described a series of events that have eerie echoes of what happened in 2019/20, but if it was a conspiracy, the chances are that the shadowy cabal behind the whole thing would have an ambitious plan to make some more cash off it.

It’s possible that they are playing the long game. Perhaps they have somehow found a way to corner the market in a cleaning product that has been documented to have existed for around 5,000 years. Or maybe they are going to take advantage of the potential chaos that this whole process is going to create… but if they are that clever, it seems unlikely that they’d miss an opportunity to fleece us, if only as a side-hustle.

Conspiracy theories are fun, but they shouldn’t be taken too seriously.