The Interesting question that 5G conspiracy theorists bring up

You may have noticed that there is a very vocal subset of conspiracy theorists believing that the installation of 5G towers across the nation and across the world caused the COVID pandemic as we know it. According to their beliefs, it vibrates at the right frequency to cause people to get the symptoms that they do get when they supposedly get COVID. As a result of this extreme belief, some have burned down towers or even attacked people working for phone companies.

What is interesting about all of this, apart of course from the fact that people are so motivated to act that they actually attack phone workers for the believed good of the people, is where this distrust is coming from. They have made a correlation between the rise of a new mobile network and a pandemic, going so far as to even link the previous SARS outbreak to 4G. There is also a general distrust of the figures and ‘truth’ that is being told to them.

We live in a very difficult time and lots of people are experiencing trauma potentially for the first time. Our politicians often look to massage the data that we get and you can never know what is true or not. For instance, you may have noticed that the amount of deaths related to COVID decreased temporarily around the easing of restrictions. It is therefore very understandable that people may be making correlations like this. It is a trauma response and therefore almost the antithesis of the reaction that some people have had when the lockdown was loosened slightly.

This idea of Collective Trauma is a very interesting one. It is debatable that there has been an event like this in living memory. Normally in order to combat trauma, we band together and work with each other to become stronger but in this case, we have had to isolate, people literally becoming an island in certain situations. This is why people are reacting in such diverse way, there is no consensus to what is actually going on and leadership seems to be floundering and not quite advising of the whole truth (perhaps as they are in fact unaware of the whole truth at this stage).

This therefore is why the 5G conspiracy theorists are so interesting. They are working on diminished information, trying to find links and causes and whilst their outcomes are correct, they are still attempting to make outcomes and working through the trauma together. Therefore, how do we manage this collective trauma in a safe way that does not lead to more phone masts being set alight?