Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat

by Derek Beres

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.