Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat

by Derek Beres

An increasingly anti-social media

Okay Green Day

The pandemic had inflamed an obsession with health. Not the public type of health—now caricatured by tedious messages about social distancing and masks—but an impassioned, moralizing fetish for personal health that is preoccupied with low body fat, supplements, positive thinking, sugar elimination, and focus on the soul.

What we didn’t realize until years later was that this whirlwind of marketing techniques and sales funnels functioned as a delivery system for the pieces of a disturbing historical puzzle we can now identify as “soft eugenics.” Modern yoga and wellness, which echoed with a kind of (now-depoliticized) body fascism that was over a century old, was being laundered through aspirational consumerism so that its sexist, racist, and violent implications were almost invisible.

In Ward’s formulation, what connects these two seemingly opposing groups—New Agers and conspiracists—is a penchant for seeking patterns, and a belief that hidden truths can be discovered through alternative methods by those who truly want to wake up.

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.

Spiritual bypassing can also flatten and erase the nuance and tension of sociopolitical awareness. We see this when an influencer’s prophetic narrative sees current events as signs of cosmic religious meaning—rather than a result of political and policy decisions.

These good-faith yearnings in a burning world point to a core reason that conspirituality is so stressful to the communities it enchants—and a key reason why the three of us have been obsessed with deconstructing it. The reason is, conspiritualists are not wrong. They are attuned to systemic problems. They have felt their existential angst insulted by lifestyle marketing, and their humanity reduced to consumer data. They have felt the cold neglect of the state, the vacant stare of the medical gaze, and the brutal rise of rents. 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. Conspiritualists know that most citizens of the Global North, and their children, are hyperurbanized, screen addled, and disconnected from rivers and forests and food sources. Yet conspiritualists feel the interconnectedness of things. Their empathy may be compromised by paranoia and bigoted blindspots, but it carries a sentimentality that lends poetry to their posts. They grasp the enormity of the human challenge, and they respond to it with an equally vast hope.

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.

True believers of conspirituality turn legitimate critiques that can be addressed through democratic policy making into apocalyptic crises that can only be solved by miracles.

That flatness reveals that what public health sci-comms has not done, and what conspirituality has done, with religious fervor, is mobilize what philosophy and religion scholar Alan Levinovitz calls “empowerment epistemology.” 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.

Making people feel guilty for their material conditions is cruel. People who are fat for whatever reason are not suddenly going to get ripped overnight instead of getting vaccinated.

he described taking ivermectin, Tylenol, and Advil, while denying he had “Convid.” The postmortem found that Parhar did in fact have COVID, but died of ethanol, fentanyl, and cocaine poisoning.

Blood-and-semen anxiety is going increasingly mainstream. In April 2022, Tucker Carlson featured a “fitness professional” named Andrew McGovern in a Fox News documentary called The End of Men. McGovern talked about how testicle tanning with red-light therapy could help restore falling testosterone levels. (It doesn’t.) The vibe was self-care, but the context was the endless stream of Carlson conspiracism about how wokeness was destroying masculinity, and dog whistles at the Great Replacement theory. As the documentary aired, MAGA-inspired state legislatures across the United States were rolling back abortion rights and implementing anti-trans legislation, along with various forms of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. It’s no coincidence that body-fascist fears about permeable national borders and impure bodies go hand in hand with an obsession with genitals and the anxious desire to protect the right kind of semen.

Whatever they’re called, the villains are after innocent children, whose blood, according to the lore, contains some essence of purity and vitality. This would be the adrenochrome of the QAnon fever dream: a substance that Anons believe the Elites extract from kidnapped children to ingest as a youth elixir. QAnon memes spreading the fiction show children, post-harvest, with dark circles over their eyes. The so-called panda eyes are striking on the mostly white faces. And so children are pure and empty vessels for adult neuroses that flow in two opposing directions. As the victims of vaccination, their innocent blood is allegedly corrupted, with made-up consequences such as autism. As the victims of QAnon blood libel, innocence is extracted from their veins, leaving a lifeless, terrified husk. Whether poisoned or bled, the violation occurs at the tip of a needle, where the state gains access to the inner person. “The natural body meets the body politic in the act of vaccination,” writes Eula Biss, “where a single needle penetrates both.”

The collectivist logic of vaccination proves that immunity is a group effort. This truth strikes at the heart of the consumerist economy of alternative health treatments that are marketed to consumers based on individual needs. The notion that every human being in the world can benefit from the exact same 0.5mL dose of colorless vaccine is an insult to the world of bespoke treatments based on temperament, heritage, body type, or astrological sign. The vaccine tells the wellness-world consumer that they are not special, that they need no special crystals or remedies, nor special attention. It tells the alternative health practitioner who claims to be able to “boost the immune system” with herbs or acupuncture to take a seat and STFU.

Accusing Jews of crucifying young William of Norwich is a good way of obscuring the story of a Christian god who sacrifices his own child and distributes his pure blood to give his followers eternal life. The projection highlights a psychological need shared between the conspiracy theorist and the fascist: to find a scapegoat for all the things that fill us with horror and shame, and to make someone else responsible for the vulnerability of our children. In the conspirituality paradigm, children are not vulnerable because of inadequate health care access or horrible economic inequality. They’re not vulnerable because of ordinary family dysfunction and abuse, alcoholism, or repressive religious attitudes. They’re not vulnerable because of our tacit consent to engage in predatory capitalism, which bleeds all but the mega-wealthy dry, and is driving the human bus off the climate cliff. The enemy is not our habits and policies and confusion. It has to be someone else, someone impure who can infect us, someone we must resist.

If capitalism is good at anything, it’s co-opting and monetizing transgressive trends into new income opportunities.

The Federal Trade Commission’s study of 350 MLMs over a fifteen-year period found that less than 1 percent of participants make any profit at all.

Yoga and wellness culture presented itself as being educated by virtue of being spiritual. It confused politics with good intentions. Worst of all, it promoted the attitude that the common good could be served not through concrete activism, or by engaging with the details of public policy. People could change the world, it taught, through private practices, and by personally contemplating ancient moral edicts. It was a proud, aspirational culture that thought it had shared values, until the shit hit the fan.

Conspiritualists fetishize science, philosophy, and community, but make a mess of all three.

The content was bullshit, dressed up as nuance.

Eisenstein also argued that Indigenous ways of knowing the world and healing the body challenge the principles and technologies of modern medicine, and that his white readers should somehow adopt them. In the context of COVID, however, pitting premodern Indigenous wisdom against modern public health is more of a narcissistic fantasy than an on-the-ground reality. By September 2021, the CDC found that among racial demographics, American Indians and Alaska Natives boasted the highest vaccine uptake in the United States, after an initial period of COVID devastation in their communities. “It’s embedded in our values that we don’t just think about ourselves,” said Navajo Nation member Leonela Nelson, of the Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health. In explaining the vaccination success, researchers cited the power of actual, pragmatic bonds that some wellness influencers only point at: respect for elders, community, and a desire to maintain tribal sovereignty.

In reviewing his socials, it’s hard to see any commitment to political values mixed into the New Age aspirations to transcend political divides. His love posts for Bernie Sanders, for instance, rarely mentioned platform issues, preferring to focus on populist gumption and the willingness to disrupt two-party hegemony. Willis backed Sanders, it seems, because he believed that Sanders was breaking politics-as-usual. It’s a naive take on Sanders, a seasoned politician who has held office since 1981. But it’s on brand for a depoliticized New Age scene fixated on how “those who tell the stories” shape society, rather than “those who draft the policies.”

This is how the New Age updates the old: “If you weren’t such a nag, he wouldn’t look elsewhere,” reasoning of prior generations. Now it’s more like: “If you would only deal with your own wounds, he wouldn’t have to put salt on them.”

Bush claims that crimes against humanity are being perpetrated in ICUs, where patients are dying alone, on a kind of battlefield. Doctors should be like Marines, never abandoning their comrades. (Of course they never did. News reports of COVID-19 patients dying alone uniformly described the tragic absence of family, not medical staff.)

COVID-19 is a war when Bush needs a war to symbolize modern corruption. But it’s a flu when he needs a flu to illuminate modern cowardice.

In 2019, Kennedy’s activism was implicated in a measles outbreak in Samoa that infected 5,700 and killed 83. Kennedy had personally visited Samoa earlier that year, and was pictured with local anti-vaccine advocates at the US embassy. This was followed by his Children’s Health Defense organization sending a letter to the president of Samoa, urging him to question the safety of the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps, and rubella.

Kennedy does find some contemporary Black allies who cosign his pitch, but this narrow and self-serving view of Black liberation efforts in the field of public health erases a nuanced history. We never hear from Kennedy, for example, about how in the 1970s the Black Panthers made access to free, evidence-based health care a pillar of their revolutionary vision. They established thirteen free health clinics in communities across the country, offering physicals, gynecological and dental exams, and cancer screenings. They sponsored pioneering research. They also provided… wait for it… free vaccinations.

The tropes of holism can soothe the fragmented modern mind. But the salve can come with the high price of category confusion, false equivalency, and therapeutic vagueness. When Northrup links vaccination drives to rape culture, when Brogan calls masking submission signaling vis-à-vis the state, and when Kennedy links environmental degradation and structural racism to vaccination, their rhetoric might be in the black, but their solution game is in the red.

In more than two years of watching Robert F. Kennedy Jr. bluster about imagined vaccine aggression against Black Americans—in the midst of a pandemic that disproportionately killed them—we didn’t once see him offer anything of concrete benefit to the demographic he fetishizes and co-opts. He never came close to echoing the rhetoric of his uncle standing on the stage of Madison Square Garden in 1962, arguing for the same universal health care that the Black Panthers enshrined as a policy objective.

Winfrey really deserves her own book as an enabler of dodgy channeled wisdom. She played a key role in boosting the American psychic and Amway superstar Esther Hicks and her “Law of Attraction,” a thoughts-change-reality concept. Hicks claims that the “Law” emerged from channeling a gaggle of entities she calls Abraham. Abraham offers garden variety self-help bromides, such as “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” But Abraham also spiced it up with some truly disgusting claims, such as only 1 percent of rape allegations being true violations, with the rest being attractions. Abraham also believes that for Black people in America, slavery was “the beginning of a journey that was better” and part of an “overall improvement in humanity.” Like the New Age celebrity publisher of Hicks’s bestsellers, Louise Hay of Hay House, Abraham also thinks that people contract AIDS when they don’t love themselves.

The overwhelming instruction doled out by the New Age source is that we should learn to accept things as they are, as perfect expressions of a divine plan. That we should accept our circumstances as both divinely ordained and chosen by us through the Law of Attraction—if we’re listening to Abraham Hicks. This depends on never questioning those circumstances, but rather, implicitly validating them. When Hicks recycles self-help bromides blended with prosperity gospel promises, for instance, what she really seems to be channeling is a subconscious yearning to win at capitalism—or at least for capitalism to feel like it can be manageable.

In these cases, what they’re really channeling, apologizing for, and spiritualizing is structural brutality.

But pseudoscience isn’t honest in that way. It’s one thing pretending to be another. Dispenza was promising healing, spontaneous remission. The former chiropractor, who calls himself a doctor, was giving Louis cover for giving up on real doctors.

The history of spiritual excess is littered with the wreckage of individuals and groups high on their own grandiose supply. Indoctrinated into beliefs that feel so right in the moment, they believe they have attained superior consciousness. The irony is that their hubris rises in tandem with their disconnection from reality.

But immature spirituality attempts to eliminate the instinct to doubt, toward the goal of nurturing a uniformly pure and positive outlook. The problem is that all of that doubt has to go somewhere—and conspirituality tells you where to put it. In order to keep your spiritual life unquestionably pure, your doubt must be deflected onto institutions, governments, scholarly disciplines, and the media.

one antidote to conspiratorial world-making might be a solid education in history. He helped us see how the myths of American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny still cast their shadow over a conspirituality world rife with colonialist and domineering attitudes.