Morning Ruminations is a place where I briefly discuss some of the things I think about as I go about my morning routine. These are short posts that contain thoughts, observations, and unrefined ideas, that may go on to be incorporated into full posts.

Animals are well adapted to recognize the natural patterns within their environment, then take the appropriate action based upon their past experience. When the sun sets, it’s time for bed. When the days get short, and the temperature drops, it’s time to hibernate.

Humans, however, are a species driven by curiosity. It is not enough for us to simply know that something happens. We are driven by an incessant need to understand WHY it happens. This works quite well when we have the appropriate tools available to gather the information required to connect the dots.

Today, thanks to telescopes and advanced mathematics, we understand that the sun is a giant fusion reactor, the mass of which is so great that the very fabric of space-time is distorted into an invisible force that we call “gravity”. This leads to a complex balancing of forces, resulting in moons orbiting planets, orbiting stars, leading to the daily and seasonal cycles that we base our lives upon.

Thousands of years ago, this technology did not exist. We knew that the sun comes out in the daytime, the moon at night, and certain constellations at specific times of the year. These bits of observable facts were interspersed among vast swaths of unknowns. This lead us to fill in the gaps with experience from our own day to day lives. The sun and the moon became powerful gods battling for dominance of the sky, not unlike our own territorial disputes with neighbouring tribes. Soon there were gods for everything. Stories of love, and loss, and heroics were created to tell the tale of the constellations, and every culture became enriched with their own unique oral traditions to explain why the world is the way is. Mythology was born.

Few would argue today that the celestial bodies are powerful gods that control every aspect of our lives. Science has allowed us to fill in the missing information with verifiable facts, so that we now understand how planetary movements create the day/night cycle, affect seasonal weather patterns, etc.

But the human brain is still hardwired to try and make sense of things in the absence of information, and this is where conspiracy theories come from.

We know that governments and corporations have been lying to us our whole lives. We’ve watched as smoking has gone from being endorsed as a safe and healthy pastime, to one of the biggest killers in society. We’ve seen the commercials for class action lawsuits against dangerous pharmaceuticals that were approved by the FDA. We’ve witnessed countless chemicals get banned for their dangerous effects on human & animal physiology after being assured for decades that they’re perfectly safe. And to this day, we watch as the food and medical industries desperately cling to the idea that animal fats are unhealthy, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

It’s only natural that when faced with a very real global pandemic, one that even the world’s top scientists are still struggling to understand, we try to make sense of it by filling in the gaps in information with our own personal experience of being lied to our whole lives. We weave together complex webs of how chemtrails, and 5G towers are being used to fake a virus, and create an Orwellian regime to control the population. We come up with pseudoscienctific solutions like burying orgonite around 5G towers to neutralize the signals, or swallowing bleach, goldfish medications, and malaria drugs to cure the virus.

Now, this isn’t to say that there’s nobody trying to use the Covid-19 pandemic to their own advantage. Even in the best of times, there are those who manipulate the system for their own gain. As the covid-19 pandemic plays out before our eyes, we’ve witnessed everything from small-time Amazon sellers to the President of the United States abuse our naturally heightened sense of fear for their own gain.

We must be ever vigilant against businesses and politicians who engage in such practices. However, we must likewise be weary of purveyors of pseudoscienctific beliefs, modern day fairytales, who wish to manipulate our natural fear of the unknown to sew chaos in a time of crisis.