It really is that simple. You can be an award winning writer, a local shop attendant or Bill fricken Gates. You can be Kim Jong-un, or Thanos, or both for that matter (but please dont) but you are still not the exception! You need to stay home unless you are working in essential services. No, pop-ins, no swing-bys, no acts of genocide that require you to emerge from your heavily fortified compound. Every single one of us is way more discriminatory than this virus. The handful of people living in sterilised bubbles around the world are about to become the master race. Let that sink in for a moment while you spread your conspiracy theories about big pharma, China, world governments and the ever maligned health authorities (damn them for trying to keep us all healthy and alive!).

Better still, lets assume whichever convoluted conspiracy you are throwing out is true. Lets say, China is in league with Kim/Thanos and big pharma to throw Chaos loose into the global economy and achieve whatever evil ends are planned. People are still getting very ill. People are still dying. It is very difficult to give the conspirators the proverbial finger from an inert lump of tissue stowed in a makeshift morgue at the local venue for kids iceskating parties and ice cream. In fact, it is difficult to do just about anything when you are an inert lump of tissue in any kind of morgue, because it usually means that you are dead. Even if in your dying moments, you managed to weakly scrawl across a piece of paper “it was Chin…” its going to leave a lot of unanswered questions. In short, whatever theory you support about how a new variant of a reasonably well known type of virus came about, the theory isnt going to do a lot to protect you and will especially do very little to protect the people you care about.

Social media posts promoting virus conspiracies among governments are about as effective as a magician’s act of cutting a man in half by actually really cutting him in half despite a lot of blood and screaming to warn you, and then blaming the maker of the box when the man doesnt become whole again. People still died and common sense could have easily prevailed. Instead it appears that several magicians have decided to replicate the trick, changing nothing and using the easily predictable resulting death as further proof of the box maker plotting against its customers. The thing is, the box maker really needs magicians to stop cutting people in half, however it relied on magicians being cognisant of their own responsibilities to one another, and to possess an ounce of common sense to stop sawing when the blood and screaming happened.

I think it’s fair to say that the rush on purchasing everyday grocery items and America’s current blitz purchasing of guns gives rise to an issue that has been quietly brewing away in the background. While people quite rightly fear common sense is becoming as scarce a commodity as a vegan who likes to keep their dietary preferences out of general conversation, there is another great loss facing our society which I only realised I also lacked when I happened to study it. Critical thinking is something that appears to have declined in exact relativity to its growing necessity. The Information Age ensures it is all but impossible to avoid the insidious and ubiquitous streams of fact, fiction and all of it’s hybrid forms in our everyday lives. As much as the everyday person’s ability to critically examine this influx of words seems to be diminishing, even those well equipped to parse articles and opinions are finding those tasks ever more challenging.

Previously, considerations given to opinions offered as facts involved considering not only the language used, but also who was using that language and more importantly who benefits from the piece. With so many unregulated sources of information (including this one), and the changing mode of communicating facts, figures and opinions, it is understandable that even the experienced among us occasionally decide to simply accept assertions such as ‘not all billionaires have personality disorders’ because sometimes its just not worth the effort. However it’s also less clear these days to figure out who benefits from anything we learn via the media. Global commercial homogeneity makes it difficult to draw a direct line from a single piece of information to the end beneficiary. I cant tell my Barclays from my Legal and General Group (clearly they dont have a strong creative department to assist with their naming decision though) but I do know enough to actually know that. I know that the brand I am buying isnt the multinational entity I am supporting. Hell, if corporate legislators cant keep up with who is doing what and where, I certainly cant be expected to!

It places us in the awkward position of needing to rethink how we apply critical thinking to the information we imbibe. If we cant apply a healthy dose of skepticism to news and opinion articles because the beneficiaries have transcended the usual methods of identification, then we have two options before us: we can either believe virtually everything we read, making adjustments for the hourly updates and corrections, or we can simply lose all faith any readily available public information because it is now just too challenging to work out who benefits and where further research is needed. The first option is the one where we find scammers are thriving. The sensationalisation of the news and tabloid media (not to mention social media which only ever seems to get attention when offering extreme views framed as ‘hot takes) mean that there are a solid chunk of very scared and confused citizens of the world, ripe for manipulation. Its a dangerous combination which is constantly exploited by people in power to further their agenda. The other side of the coin, where people are prone to disbelieve any information from the usual channels is equally problematic. People need information. If people cant trust the public news industry, then their search for reliable intelligence takes them to darker places than that whingeing bastard Frodo ever saw, and the ‘Sauron’ they will find there is far more malicious. Their information sources are nearly always right wing (a pattern there methinks), xenophobic and in support of aggressive bigotry. Rarely do you see an underground network dedicated to promoting acts of compassion and kindness to everyone else regardless of political persuasion, education or race. If in fact they ever did exist, I am sure the cynics of the world would promptly put an end to such clearly subversive activities in the name of the greater good.

So where does this leave us in the current landscape of misinformation, mistrust and maladjustment? It leaves us exactly where we were a week ago and a week before that. Whatever political leaning, education, value system or lifestyle you have, the only thing that should matter is your responsibility to yourself and the people who have to share this world with you. Stockpiling anything will not save you from getting sick. It may mean that you die with a stocked pantry, or that you infect a loved one who then dies while you have a stocked pantry. You might get sick and KNOW that some government/company somewhere caused this, but without access to a ventilator because people didnt stay home, and caused a surge in infections and demand on those ventilators, that knowledge will not save you. You might have seen on social media that a salt water gargle or a home made sanitiser can help you. But if you stay home and have no contact with others, you wont need to find out quite how gullible you were.

We are all in a position to save lives. I know for me that this is likely the closest I will ever get to saving someone’s life, as I dont plan on a frontline medical career. I might never meet the person I save from staying home, and they may never know that but for my self-isolation they are alive and well, but I can absolutely guarantee you that staying home will save lives. The hospital I work at are having to discuss how they will determine priority should medical staff have to choose who gets to be put on ventilation and who doesnt. Im not sure how much clearer it can be for naive among us as well as the cynics: STAY THE FUCK HOME.

And for those of you who like to engage in a little bit of critical thinking and are interested in who benefits from my opinion, the answer is me, you and everyone else.

*This message has been brought to you by Harold J Ethics esq. one of my Magical Unicorns of Existence.