Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat

by Derek Beres

In its current form, we see it as an online religion that fuses two faith claims: 1) The world is possessed by evil forces, and 2) those who see this clearly are called to foster, in themselves and others, a new spiritual paradigm.

Conspirituality

the current explosion of conspirituality is wedded to the drivers of the wellness economy.

Leaders in the field were often former corporate executives who had left the rat race for the lifestyle race.

The bar for achieving conspirituality influence lowered at the same moment the stakes were rising.

In a moment of peak cultural anxiety, COVID-contrarian gurus could throw off their brick-and-mortar limitations, re-create themselves on Instagram, and get paid through subscriptions as they learned how to use the algorithms of these platforms to spread misinformation.

[Conspirituality] offers a broad politico-spiritual philosophy based on two core convictions, the first traditional to conspiracy theory, the second rooted in the New Age: 1) a secret group covertly controls, or is trying to control, the political and social order, and 2) humanity is undergoing a ‘paradigm shift’ in consciousness. Proponents believe that the best strategy for dealing with the threat of a totalitarian ‘new world order’ is to act in accordance with an awakened ‘new paradigm’ worldview.

Having been embedded in yoga studios and alternative health circles for decades, we began exploring the real-world impact conspirituality was having on the people in our orbit.

as the history of conspirituality will show, it’s naive to the point of negligence to argue that the movement isn’t rife with antisemitic, racist, and fascist themes—and that, like Icke, it tries to present itself as centrist, rather than right-wing.

If someone has spent years training themselves in the basics of modern global Buddhism, yoga, or New Age thought, they may well have calmed their minds and gained some perspective, while also building an on-ramp for the Trojan horse of conspirituality.

People are drawn to both marginal spiritual communities and conspiracism because 1) they are attracted to the idea of knowing something necessary for survival, 2) that no one else knows, and 3) that they can share with other kindred spirits.

It has been rejected by the normies, and this proves it must be revolutionary. It has been forgotten by the sheeple, or falsely debunked by soulless scientists. Above all, it has been suppressed by the State, or Big Pharma—or now, Big Tech.

it’s a form of nostalgia that speaks to their romanticism of the past, a longing for a renewed superego to discipline them, their love for early fascism and premodern medical theories, and their distrust of vaccines.

A community organized around an authoritarian leader who pretends to have secret knowledge that cannot be questioned will never truly meet the epistemic, existential, and social needs of its members. In fact, a cult operates like an embodied conspiracy theory: promising to change the world while delivering nothing beyond broken dreams and its own social reproduction.

“spiritual bypassing,” or “the tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices as a way to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.”

The movement was blissfully unaware that The Matrix creators, the Wachowski sisters, created the mythology of The Matrix movies partly as a metaphor for their own journey into transgender identity.

Reduce the footprint of meat in your diet, Farmer counsels. Learn to meditate; plant wildflowers; turn off the TV; spread love. All very common-sense ideas. No belief in any Cabal required. Bite-sized bits of hope that don’t seem unmanageable—

a key reason why the three of us have been obsessed with deconstructing it. The reason is, conspiritualists are not wrong.

When COVID struck, they were quick to prophesy that whether the virus was real or not, the crisis would exacerbate wealth and class inequality. They were right: the billionaire class padded their net worth by $1 trillion.

In the emergency ward where he was diagnosed, he had a near-spiritual experience watching the staff care for old and young, rich and poor, with a kind of equal diligence that he never experienced in the privileged yogaworld.

All three of us have been lucky with positive medical experiences that actually drove us away from alternative medicine, after brief enchantments. That’s a problem. There’s no moral universe in which luck should determine whether a person is driven to seek out and buy empty promises.

For Americans, the allure of alternative medicine unfolds against the backdrop of possible medical bankruptcy. In an economy that demands underinsured or uninsured patients keep themselves healthy, their credentialed doctors are not simply bearers of unlucky news. These medical practitioners voice the accusing question posed by the culture at large: What have you done to yourself?

Mikki Willis became a conspirituality celebrity through his COVIDsploitation short film Plandemic, released in May of 2020, which claimed that pandemic mitigation measures were part of a totalitarian plan. But his political backstory is complicated.

He cut his pseudo-activist teeth as a videographer, first documenting the campaign of America’s openly socialist presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, and then ostensibly supporting the Standing Rock pipeline protests of 2016.

By January 6, 2021, he was playing the same role for a different movement, video-documenting white nationalists breaching the Capitol as ...

Conspiritualists are right enough—and enough of the time—to provoke emotional connection, and wield moral gravity. They get aspects of #MeToo right. They are attuned—though often through cosplay—to the oppression of Indigenous peoples. They are rightly suspicious of for-profit medicine, Big Agriculture, and governmental collusion with both.

Levinovitz argues that helplessness and uncertainty can be managed in New Age contexts via simply choosing to believe what feels empowering, regardless of evidence to the contrary.

It could be Jesus, juice fasting, crystals, angels, or alien messages. Talismanic objects and in-group beliefs keep anxiety at bay, while the dangers being denied multiply and fester.

The influencer who made the faux diagnosis is not entirely wrong. Late-stage capitalism is self-polluting. The surveillance state only pretends to care about its constituents.

Corporations sell solutions today for the problems they sold yesterday.

this line of reasoning gets extrapolated by conspiritualists into psychosocial, and ev...

fascism and its antecedents: romanticism and nationalism.

The body can be purified through discipline and focus, as well as dietary and devotional communion with the organic earth.

The body can become a vessel for mystical experiences provoked by meditation, ritual, or psychedelics.

Personal mystical insight gained from astrology, exercise, breathing, meditation, or herbs can produce and nourish a resurrected golden age of supermen and superwomen.

Supermen and superwomen can have superbabies for the dawning of a New Age, if they devote themselves to the smoothies that will nourish their special juices.

The uncultivated body fills up with bio-moral corruption. Without holistic discipline, the body will be poisoned by science and modernity and lose its connection to its ancestral ways of being.

Healthier and more perfect men and women will beget children with better constitutions and more free from hereditary taint. They in their turn, if the principles and the duty of physical culture are early instilled into them, will grow up more perfect types of men and women than were their mothers and fathers. So the happy progression will go on, until, who knows, if in the days to come there will not be a race of mortals walking this earth of ours even surpassing those who, according to the old myth, were the offspring of the union of the sons of the gods with the daughters of men! —Eugen Sandow, Strength and How to Obtain It, 1897

passage, Eugen Sandow, the father of modern bodybuilding, isn’t talking about the “human”

At the root of this belief was the principle of “eugenics”—from a Greek term that means “well-bred”—which held that the health and nobility of human populations could be improved through fitness disciplines for the worthy and selective breeding toward the elimination of the disabled.

Sandow’s values were as clear as his stage name. The ripped Prussian got rid of his birth name and adopted “Eugen”—for eugenics.

Sandow was not wrong about the alienation of urbanized capitalism, and his barbs might have hinted at a rebuke of the excesses of gluttonous colonial lords. But his remedy targeted the people and not the machine.

Prominent yoga scholars today suggest that Sandow might have had more of an influence on the development of modern Indian yoga than any Indian figure.

So at the start of the modern yoga movement—which arguably anchors the entire network of New Age and wellness ideologies we’re exploring in this book—we have a bizarre colonial collision. Europeans, afraid of racial decline as the borders of empire became porous through global trade and increased long-haul travel, concocted an exercise ideology to defend and restore the once-proud national body against corruption. Indian modernizers grabbed hold of this strongman aesthetic, mingled it with Scandinavian gymnastics, and then consecrated it with yoga exercises reconstructed from the medieval period.

Presently, yoga is a cornerstone of Hindu nationalist social policy and religious pride, while also providing genteel cover for its fascist history and impulses.

The ruling Trump-and-Putin-friendly Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been heartily boosted by the billionaire yoga guru Baba Ramdev, who nurtures a frenemy relationship with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, applauding pro-yoga policies, while complaining about his enormous corporation not being granted a monopoly over marketing homespun clothes nationwide.

In the New York, Toronto, and Los Angeles of the early aughts, the three of us had little idea of how history was coursing through our bodies.

We didn’t know that the German-Indian fascist pipeline created a postwar generation of yoga-loving Nazis and Nazi-loving Hindu nationalists.

We did not know that Nazis cherry-picked the superhero themes of Indian yoga gods,

We didn’t know that Heinrich Himmler carried around a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and conceived of the SS as a yogic monastic order.

We didn’t know that when Mein Kampf was republished in India in 2003, it becam...