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Following up on a discussion with @drmanhattan16 downthread:
I think the answer is usually going to be "yes."
A couple months ago, during some meta-discussion of disappearing threads, I wrote up my thoughts on conspiracy theories as countersignaling. As long as there's incentive to appear cool, independent, unique, there is incentive to push the boundaries of acceptability. It's called "edgy" for a reason.
One of the common cultural touchstones for edge is forbidden knowledge. As a result, anywhere you find edgy status games, you'll find someone claiming to know whatever it is They don't want you to know. Except...if one can just say it out loud, how cool and secret can it really be? The theorist is incentivized to play up their edge, a rebel who won't be cowed rather than an attention-seeker. As an aside, antisemitism is past its heyday because it's not very good for this. Enough people pattern-match it to "attention-seeker" that it loses its edge. This is the result of decades of memetic immune response to those status games. Of course, given that one very definitely can get banned for it, it retains edgy credentials...sometimes.
(Note that I'm not claiming the antisemites here are just edgy. I understand you're pretty serious about the subject. The motte is a weird place and has other status games; personally, I think that COVID skepticism has a grip on more of the edgelords.)
In the end, some people will find themselves drawn to signal their edge. Those who do so overtly will usually end up banned, unless they signal something really milquetoast, in which case they're probably "cringe." Those with a little more tact, though...they are incentivized to find something under the radar. To maintain that sweet, sweet plausible deniability while still getting a rise out of the opposition. They need something that will prove their status as an independent free-thinker who doesn't fall for the party line.
And they take the black pill.
COVID skepticism does not neatly map to "edge" for a few reasons.
If it comes to "conspiracy" or "forbidden knowledge" then it instantly runs into the problem of equal and opposite conspiracy theories. Take someone living in Sweden. That person is a trusting, humble person who believes everything their government says. They do not care for forbidden knowledge The exact opposite, therefore, of an archetypical covid skeptic. Except... Their government IS covid skeptic, and thus they are too. They think all the countries doing lockdowns and forcing masks on people's faces are somewhere between silly and tyrannical, because this is the consensus in Sweden. And, like the rest of the world, Sweden has it's "conspiracy theorists", except in Sweden that means supporters of the mainstream narrative on covid, or zero covid advocates, who accuse the Swedish government of, approximately, a conspiracy theory to kill Swedes.
Are Swedes edgelords? Quite the opposite, in my experience.
No matter what position you hold on Covid, you almost necessarily must believe at least some conspiracy theory. Either Sweden's government is engaged in a conspiracy to kill people with covid, or another pro-lockdown regime is engaged in a conspiracy to needlessly perform lockdowns. Either Fauci conspired to stop people wearing masks, or conspired to make people wear masks.
As for aesthetics, the policy of... doing nothing, lacks a distinct, sharp edge to it. Far less cool than throwing everyone into lockdown and making them wear apocalyptic symbols. If you wanted a world of edge, the aesthetics of lockdownism certainly have a sci-fi evil supervillain edge to them. The contrasting aesthetic is usually middle-aged casual wear and when covid skeptics want to go edgy they do so by adopting the aesthetics of their opponents.
If my goal was edgy, I'd know where I'd plant my flag.
People can come to the same conclusion for normal or for conspiratorial reasons.
I don’t even think that the lockdown conversation is particularly conspiratorial in America! It seems like a straightforward extension of other mainstream personal-liberty narratives. “Fauci told people not to wear masks” is an observation, not a conspiracy. Neither Sweden nor the US has to be conspiring—one of them just has to be wrong.
The Motte has a giant soft spot for vigilante science. Before COVID that meant talking about the replication crisis, maybe nootropics sometimes. But now there’s a whole world of Ivermectin, long COVID, lab leak proof, etc. The budding countersignaller gets to pick and choose his point of attack. Given the chaotic state of COVID research, he may well be right. Given the sorry state of COVID tribalism...it doesn’t really matter whether he is.
How do you distinguish "edgy countersignaller" from "principled libertarian" in this case, though?
You check if he’s actually talking about state power. Defunding the FDA fits. Complaining about lockdown calculus or the surveillance state, sure. “Do your own research” messaging, not so much. I don’t even know what libertarians say about the lab leak.
If he spends more time smugly asserting that Real science is suppressed, that such-and-such study is flawed, that anyone who believes the mainstream is a sheep, a shill for big pharma, and a bad rationalist to boot? Maybe he’s interested in something other than pure libertarianism.
But libertarians also think that people should be free to do their own research, and should not be mandated into going along with the herd?
There may be a useful distinction to draw between 'wonk-libertarianism' (ie. defund the FDA) and 'folk-libertarianism' (ie. don't tread on me) but I'm not convinced that one is 'edgier' than the other. And 'folk-libertarianism' is extremely common in the USA among people who wouldn't self-identify as libertarians -- so framing those people as edgelords I think is incorrect. Also uncharitable and dismissive, which is really no way to be.
I’m not talking about folk-libertarians or the USA in general. I’m talking about the Motte. Out of the very small set of Mottizens, some subset are lured to the edge; out of that subset, I think more are currently attracted to COVID counter-narrative rather than antisemitism or 9/11 truthing or whatever. I’d expect this theory to hold on other discussion boards, too.
This includes no claims about the principled libertarians, whether here or out in America. I’d like to think I can tell them apart!
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"That's the neat part"
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I think there's a third position- that the elite and decision-makers really just did not know how to handle it, and their various decisions and mistakes were more them running around like chickens with their heads cut off. That would stand in opposition to the more conspiratorial claim of them being strategic about using Covid response for ulterior motives, which I've never bought into. They want people going to work and buying stuff, they don't want to destroy the economy simply because they are evil. These measures, bad and ineffective as they may be, were not motivated by a greater plan for social reform.
I would consider that to be a non-conspiratorial approach to opposing Covid measures.
You said it better than I could.
COVID measures are adequately explained by politics-as-usual. Once the options picked up a political framing, evidence took a backseat.
Conversely, lockdown/mandate skepticism is also down to normal factors. No conspiracy necessary.
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Which still necessitates the conspiracy theory that they falsely claimed certainty to goad the public into going along with their decisions. And still means they conspired to do lockdowns. And that they had an ulterior motive. It just makes the ulterior motive very petty.
The average government official does not personally suffer from damaging the economy, so I don't think they "want" this in any meaningful way.
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It's this. My observations of Finnish decisionmakers, including in some cases direct conversations with them, basically have given me an image of a process where various politicians have, more than anything, just make the problem go away so they can get back to doing what they were planning to do or advance before the pandemic, which typically would be one or several reforms or laws that often were conclusively derailed by the pandemic, either timewise or budget-wise.
However, this then led to varying ideas of what "making the problem go away" meant at various stages; at one stage it was possible to believe that just utilizing restrictions would be sufficient to get back to normalcy, this initially looked promising when Covid numbers dropped low in summer 2020, then when you had new variants you had more restrictions, when those didn't seem to work and looked like harmful for economy (bad! if the economy is bad you can't do your projects and get thrown out!) it was easy to fall for the idea that masks are the trick to keeping people out and about while combatting the virus, when that didn't do the trick it was time to buy into the vaccine hype and believe that would make the problem go away, when the vaccine hype started getting exposed as hype and there was no more willingness for restrictions it was time for more vaccines, then vaccine passports, when that didn't work there were restrictions after all etc.
In the end, the whole process just unravelled, everyone got Omicron, the Ukraine War occupied the national headspace etc. and now there's no masks, restrictions, and almost no new vaccinations, either. Of course they could have done that from the beginning, but once the process got going, it was pretty hard to step off directly - the masks, the vaccines, the passports etc. were all presented as tools for stepping off the hamster wheel softly and indirectly, but of course they then all had their own issues. And as for just doing nothing, well... what if the Long Covid was real? Then the problem would essentially never go away - there would be a permanent constituency of people disabled by Covid and their relatives ready for the blood of the politicians who were to blame, ie. you.
Combine them with an endless amount of Parks & Rec style bureaucracy turf wars (litres of ink have been spilled in the local media about territorial struggles inside the Finnish equivalent of CDC and between the CDC-equivalent and the Ministry of Health, etc., and I've also heard stories about ministers pushing for whatever measures they have that don't affect the operations of their ministry, or alternatively might keep their people safe from Covid) and what you get is less a conspiracy and more a SNAFU.
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This gets into there being a very fine line between malice and extreme recklessness. If they instituted useless and harmful lockdowns because their ideology led them to believe that they knew better than the people and that the harm caused by lockdowns is very unimportant and should be heavily discounted when considering whether to do lockdowns, they aren't "deliberately evil". But indifference to how badly the people are harmed as long as the cause is good, is itself a type of evil.
Only if you are a consequentialist surely? If not, then doing the (edit - what you think to be the) right thing regardless of the outcome is often seen to be good in and of itself.
I'd also add that often it was the people who were asking or even demanding lockdowns. The UK for example was explicitly against lockdowns early on and only changed when MPs were inundated with thousands of emails, calls and letters demanding that they take the same actions that other nations were taking. At which point responding to demand from the public even if it is stupid is arguably at least part of what they should do.
There's also a fairly well establish strain of though that holds (among other things) that bodily autonomy and freedom of movement are terminal goods, and infringing them is (deontologically) evil?
Seems like the covid response loses either way.
Then we're grappling with what to do if one (supposed) good conflicts with another (supposed) good, which is a difficult problem definitely!
But it's a different issue as to whether people who hold to non-consequentialist beliefs are doing evil if the outcome is bad. That depends on whether good is judged on intentions, actions or outcomes which is entirely subjective (and highly contested).
I'm not specifically a consequentialist for example, but I think it's a mix of all three, trying to do the right thing can result in bad outcomes, but you're still reasonably a good person if the issue was big enough that the bad outcomes are worth the risk, or were not reasonably foreseeable, or all your choices were bad and you are trying to pick the best among them.
Being a moral deontologist means never having to
say you're sorrygrapple with greater goods. "Violating a person's bodily autonomy is wrong" can pretty well stand alone; cf. "The Golden Rule".But you can guarantee that they are not evil within their moral framework despite the bad outcome.
Conflicting moral frameworks tend to cause bad outcomes as well, of course -- which is why one of the principles of liberal governance is to ensure that the moral framework of government be as anodyne (and unyielding) as possible, so as not to be incompatible with that of large swathes of the citizenry.
Seems fair to say that the covid response taken in it's entirety runs counter to the deontological framework of (for instance) the founding of the United States -- and thus is evil by that standard.
The theoretical deontological framework of the founding of the US or the as practiced deontological framework? Given slavery was widely accepted you could argue it is perfectly in line with how it was practiced but not with it's optimistic theory. If you can justify slavery you can certainly justify vaccination mandates after all.
Just to be clear I much prefer the optimistic theory of the founding framework and prefer that as to what founding myth should be lived up to. But I think there are enough differences that we do need to specify, as I think the founders certainly could have justified mandates and more pretty easily under the deontological framework they actually demonstrated in practice.
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There are covid skeptics in Sweden, of course, concentrating on Covid vaccines, which Sweden has distributed just like any other Western countries (quite a bit moreso than in the most).
However, the point about equal and opposite conspiracy theories stands currently in most Western countries, since even the mainstream media now regularly refers to the zero-covid remnant as a force in at least some ways equal to vaxx skeptics as a source of conspiracy theories and general wackiness.
Of course, in mainstream discourses, neither is considered to have cool aesthetics - the vaxx skeptics are portrayed as raving tinfoil hat wearing far-right hippies and zero-covidists as perpetually-scaredy-cat double maskers afraid to leave their building in fear of catching Covid.
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