Conspirituality

April 15, 2023
A sprawling critique of the dangerous promise and politics of the modern wellness industry. Beres, Remski, and Walker--three veterans of New Age wellness and co-hosts of the eponymous podcast--attempt to untangle a web of histories connecting yoga, pseudoscience, toxic individualism, and fascism. The titular term, a portmanteau of conspiracy and spirituality, describes the ideological pathway that ushers many wellness-seekers from innocuous self-improvement to political extremism. Conspiritualists generally come to wellness depoliticized and ideologically vulnerable, and they are often desperate for answers to physical or spiritual problems that traditional religion and medicine have failed to provide. Conspiritualists generally assign more agency to individual impurity than systemic injustice. Their faith in charismatic gurus, who unveil the arbitrary forces (karma, "energy") supposedly governing bodily health, primes them to accept similar myths (Pizzagate, QAnon) about the wider world. This trajectory is bolstered by a lucrative online wellness-influencer industry in which algorithms encourage extremist political content, resulting in "an online religion that strings mysteries together on a compelling narrative arc." The authors couple their firsthand experiences with well-researched accounts of clairvoyants and cult leaders to criticize the cultural appropriation, disaster profiteering, and moral panic scaffolding the conspirituality economy. Their study locates pieces of this formula across time and space, from present-day Hindu nationalism to Nazi racial ideology and the American eugenics movement. "The timeline is chaotic," write the authors, "but cryptic hashtags keep it strung together: #savethechildren, #trusttheplan, #enjoytheshow, #WWG1WGA. It's chilling, because you've heard these terms in a news report about QAnon." If this seems like a lot of threads to weave into a single narrative, it is. The book verges on conspiratorial thinking in trying to neatly connect them all through disparate accounts of sexual, racial, and bodily anxiety. However, the core argument about the contemporary conspirituality pipeline is compelling. Useful, timely revelations about the political underbelly of New Age spiritualism.

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April 24, 2023
The Covid-19 pandemic brought together New Age influencers, alt-health practitioners, and far-right conspiracy theorists in a campaign of fearmongering and antivaccine misinformation, according to this anguished and hard-hitting inquiry. Expanding on their podcast of the same name, the authors characterize “conspirituality” as a synthesis of the female-dominated New Age movement and the male-dominated realm of conspiracy theory, and draw provocative links between conspirituality and fascism, contending, for example, that conspiritualists draw “heavily on old fascist anxieties about sexual potency and deviancy.” Elsewhere, the authors document modern yoga’s “spiritual and shameful obsession with eugenics,” noting the influence of 19th-century eugenicist and bodybuilder Eugen Sandow on the “upper-caste proto-nationalists of India,” who sought to “sculpt a new national body, purged of foreign influences and colonial shame.” Some of the book’s most shocking revelations can be found in profiles of conspirituality influencers like Christiane Northrup, the “grandmother of alt-health gynecology,” who advised her followers to withhold sex from partners who were considering getting the Covid-19 vaccine, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose antivax nonprofit, the Children’s Health Defense Fund, released a film falsely suggesting that “Black people are naturally immune” to Covid-19. Packed with surprising insights and no-holds-barred takedowns, this is a forceful exposé.