Now, breathe into the Anticommunist pose

The cornucopia of antimaterialist ideologies in North America are just flavors of right-wing magical thinking

Review of: Conspirituality by Julian Walker, Matthew Remski, and Derek Beres. Penguin Random House. June 2023.  

“Conspirituality” refers to a mix of spirituality, New Age thinking, yoga and wellness (I would add martial arts), and political conspiracy theorizing. The book has a focus on anti-vaccination campaigns during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it goes beyond health and explains something important about how politics have evolved in both Canada and the US in recent years. 

The book is a valuable resource to explain to people how their families and social groups have divided during COVID-19. Despite politics being a generally taboo topic in mainstream North American society, during long crises, like wars, big political changes, or the pandemic, political conversations are inevitable. People discover the politics of their friends and loved ones. Friendships break up, family ties are strained, and you begin a search for answers about how your friends went down these rabbit holes.  

As you try forensically to find out what happened, know that your friend’s rants are not really about them believing ever more esoteric beliefs. Other people’s beliefs always appear exotic, after all, especially when they’re unverified or unverifiable, as spiritual and religious beliefs are. Your friend’s rants are the rhetorical gestures of someone who is leaving one group, one social ecosystem (yours), for another. Conspirituality beliefs, like Kevin Simler wrote about advertising, are about social signaling more than they are about brainwashing. 

The politics of conspirituality run deep

I mentioned that in North America, political conversations are mostly taboo and that could be because people figure it’s better not to know, the better to get along. Avoidance usually is politely accomplished by saying something like, “I’m not really a political person.”  But conspiritualists are not merely beyond politics: they claim to be beyond earthly concerns altogether. 

Don’t believe it. Conspirituality is hyper-political and the politics of conspirituality, as the authors use the term, run far deeper than they appear. The movement against vaccine mandates didn’t stand down after the mandates were repealed - that movement is bigger now than it was when there were vaccine mandates. It is a movement that has a special hatred for public health measures, yes, but it also has: 

• its own philosophy of knowledge

• Its own media network

• A political economy including a durable source of revenue and livelihood for its leaders 

• Politicians and business leaders in high places

• Social groups and organizations meeting in person and on the web day in, day out, 365 days a year. 

It is a major social and political phenomenon, with deep roots: at least a movement, it is perhaps better understood as a religion whose many adherents are willing to make major sacrifices - to their social, financial, and health lives - in the name of what they believe. In the name of their own freedom, they are also willing to impose the consequences of their beliefs on others. 

It’s necessary to understand these core beliefs, beyond the wide array of details. Its leaders use a well-established right-wing trick of using language co-opted from the left, emptied of its original content, then redeployed. From the women’s movement for abortion rights, they call for “bodily autonomy” and “the right to choose”. But though they claim to despise liberals, they assert above all the liberal politics of individual property asserted against state control and of individual rights asserted against the collective. 

What makes their movement distinctive and gives it a religious character is that it goes beyond individual rights and assigns non-materialist, super-powers to the individual will - to heal, to acquire wealth, to change the course of history. In the same breath, the movement assigns non-materialist blame to the individual - for being poor, sick, or powerless. In their world, everybody gets what they deserve. It’s allocated by the universe. All that states, collectives, or public action can do is engage in immoral redistribution - from the undeserving to the deserving. 

Reading the description above, listeners of the Civilizations Series (e.g. our episode about Nietzsche) will start to discern patterns in today’s conspirituality movement that look a lot like the belief systems circulating in England, its colony, India, its former colony, the US, and its greatest admirer, Germany, at the end of the 19th century. The triumph of the will. Contempt for the collective. Fear and loathing of state action. The belief that the majority are sheep, natural slaves. The belief that there is a non-material power to the individual will. That the unfairness we see around us is actually fair, indeed optimal. You can call it many things. A hundred years ago it would have been Nietzschean or Theosophical. Today, as the book documents, it’s conspirituality and QAnon. Another word that sums it up? Anticommunist. 

Because what is communism? A system that values not individual will and intention for individual reward, but collective work for social benefit. A system that is willing to seize private wealth to allocate resources to public goods (yes, including health care and education). A system where there are no masters and slaves, natural or otherwise. A belief system that is materialist and scientific, that seeks to understand the relationship between human volition and the historical and physical realities in which we make our choices. 

After WWII, the US violently took up the leadership of the struggle against communism in all its forms (even modest social democratic reforms in remote parts of the world and pre-1917 forms of Indigenous, “primitive communism”). But before WWII, the great anticommunists were Nazis and Fascists, and before them, the great anticommunists were various kinds of Nietzscheans. 

Understanding conspirituality as a flavor of anticommunism makes possible some quick sorting. Suddenly the dense jumble of talking points changes from an incomprehensible muddle to simply one of a few possible variations on a few key themes. 

The actual book

The authors of Conspirituality, Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker, were  members (victims? survivors?) participants in yoga-based or other similar cult-like conspirituality organizations, have researched cults, and currently run a podcast talking to people who have been in and out of these kinds of organizations. The book includes both journalistic and historical investigation, and skillfully weaves the experiences of the authors and their guests through the narrative. Through their critique of the right-wing and their defense of science and of public health care specifically, the authors identify themselves as being on the left: to me they read like social democrats with interests in both electoral work and grassroots activism. 

I worried as I read the beginning of the book: when liberals write about conspirituality and related movements, they often end up defending the indefensible. In the liberal world view, deportations, assassinations, police worship and corporate giveaways are bad when Trump does them but fine when Obama/Biden does; liberals have an imperialist focus on the crimes of official enemies, etc. But there was very little of that in this book. 

There are real conspiracies

I was perhaps even a bit defensive in Chapter 2 when the authors outlined “three pillars of conspiratorial thinking, as laid out by the political scientist Michael Barkun.” These pillars are: “Nothing happens by accident. Nothing is as it seems. Everything is connected.” 

Reading this critique of conspiracism I remembered Michael Parenti’s lecture on “Conspiracy and Class Power”, Lance deHaven Smith’s book, Conspiracy Theory in America, or comedian Ron Funches, who asks: “You don’t believe in any conspiracy theories? I understand not all of them, not most of them, but you don’t believe in any conspiracy theories? You think the government’s just batting a thousand and telling us the whole truth? That’s a strong stance to take.” 

Because there are conspiracies, and dismissing all conspiracy theorizing is a gift to imperialists, who, after all, spend enormous amounts of money and resources on covert operations. But the authors of Conspirituality acknowledge that there are real conspiracies: “real conspiracies”, they write, “are discovered through evidence”. From Chapter 1 they note that there are real-world conspiracies - and that conspiritualists actually blur the lines between real conspiracies (like Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring) and spurious ones (which they discuss and refute in their book). 

Their analysis is brutally honest, going well beyond a simplistic defense of the liberal establishment. In Chapter 6, “Conspiritualists Are Not Wrong”, they discuss the vacuum created by privatized health care, into which the alternative health & wellness community seeps in. Conspiritualists, they write, “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…”

They continue: “Conspirituality does not create its followers’ nausea at the state, modernity, or the poisoned chalice of techno-capitalism. It does not create real-world disasters such as the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking network (a reality that makes QAnon reasonable on a symbolic, if not factual, level). It does not create histories of genocide, nor does it create histories of governmental cover-up.” 

No indeed, these are all real things that the conspiritualists take political advantage of. 

The political economy of wellness and conspiracy

In Canada, the public system is under attack and has been brought to the point of collapse, with privatization being incrementally brought in as a “solution” to the engineered crisis. In the US, which has no public system, getting sick means facing bankruptcy. Even Americans who thought they had good private insurance find themselves with surprise, ruinous bills after routine procedures or emergencies. At every stage people who need care are faced with actors who have incentives to stop them from getting that care. What is available through the privatized (or semi-privatized) health system is expensive, bureaucratized, frightening, and humiliating. For anyone who can promise an alternative path to good health that does not lead through this system, there are opportunities. 

Because scientific and evidence-based medicine is only accessible through financialized insurers and plans, the alternative paths work on everything else. Many of these are good practices: exercise, breathing, going outside, eating healthy, and of course, nutritional supplements. Some, like yoga, include exercise and breathing but also get people together for social activity, another healthful practice in itself. Some are big business, multi-level-marketing schemes and corporate behemoths in their own right. 

The capture of US health care by private insurers is one side of the political economy of conspirituality; the business of selling online and in-person yoga, lifestyle, spirituality and train-the-trainer courses and nutritional supplements is the other side. 

The number of actors in the conspirituality space that sell supplements came as a shock to me. Alex Jones sells supplements. Jordan Peterson’s daughter sells supplements. The book exposes many other figures - people who have sexually abused their yoga students, ran cults, defrauded clients, and enriched themselves while making unscientific claims. And all of them sell supplements! I remember reading some Big Tech executive lamenting that “we’ve made the world a dystopia so that we could get people to click ads.” If you read Conspirituality, you’ll be horrified at what’s been done to sell nutritional supplements. 

Combine the drive to sell supplements and online courses with the marketing of these products in an attention economy where more extreme claims outcompete less extreme ones and you get an incentive structure for ever-more outrageous theories. These are outlined in gory detail in the book.

By diving into the history of yoga, the authors also pull out links to eugenics. Yoga is less an ancient practice of wisdom and more an amalgam of 19th-century physical culture. Europeans certainly got much of their culture, including physical culture, from Asia (I am convinced that catch wrestling, for example, developed in Lancashire around the same time as British colonialism in India’s most rapid advance, and from which other wrestling traditions followed, was a cross-pollination of local wrestling tradition with Indo-Persian pehlwani / kusti) but the borrowing went the other way too. Yoga was an outgrowth of a Swedish gymnastics movement and heavily influenced by a genocidal German eugenicist bodybuilder who changed his first name to Eugen to reflect his interest in human perfection.

This guy called himself Eugen Sandow, but he was born Freidrich Wilhelm Muller. His birth name didn’t have enough eugenics in it for his taste.

Purity of breath, purity of movement, purity of exercise, and purity of diet: these were all eugenicist beliefs that are also woven inevitably into the fabric of today’s multi-billion dollar wellness industry / movement. In the gospel of prosperity, in the law of attraction, everyone gets what they deserve. In the eugenics movement, that includes genocide for the racially inferior or impure. As India goes fascist, yoga is its standard bearer in North America. 

The authors map every major star in the conspiritual constellation: Joe Rogan, while he doesn’t get his own chapter, is described as

“the Walmart Supercenter that opens up on the access road to a midsized town. It’s enormous. It’s open late. It dries up the mom-and-pop shops in town. Parking is easy. You can buy anything there in a low-cost, frictionless consumer experience. But usually, you can’t tell where the product comes from, and you won’t know its quality until you get it home and use it.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s anti-vax campaigns get their own chapter, as they describe how RFK pivoted from a “big-picture environmentalist fluent in geopolitical intrigue and corporate malfeasance” whose anti-vax moves collapse the big picture into

“a single medical-sized issue. His expertise on the imperiled global environment shoehorns down to an obsession with the individual body—especially the child’s body—as its symbolic victim.” 

For a leftist, such figures really are always the same. They are pushed onto our screens by the algorithm with some kind of reputation for speaking hard truths and being uncontrollable mavericks. We investigate. Before long, every single one of these mavericks kiss the ring of the pro-Israel lobby and reveal that their loyalty is first to colonialism and only secondarily to any other maverick cause they might have or hard truth they might want to speak. 

[And before you tell me, yes I know that Rogan’s had Abby Martin on to talk Palestine. I also find him likeable, ok? As the authors write, Rogan’s “sheer volume of content resists any final word on Rogan’s personal political values or worldview on reality”. But over time, the authors continue, “his guest list has trended… into parroting right-wing talking points about quarantine, Biden, guns, and culture war moral panics. He emphasized his values shift in an interview about moving his business from California to Austin. “I moved to Texas because I want fucking freedom.”]

The simple “triumph of the will” pattern beneath the bewildering details

The authors lampoon conspiracy theorists for believing everything is connected. But their very book provides a framework for simplifying the bewildering details that present as an incredible diversity of beliefs and systems: life coaching, yoga, the law of attraction, aliens, lizards, crystals, vegan diets, buddhism, theosophy, QAnon, antivax. The authors very effectively point out the connections between these. 

And I can add that these are all just different flavors of Nietzscheanism, of anticommunism. They are belief systems that can find ample financial and political support on a continent where health care and science have been almost fully subordinated to profit and corporate power. They are ideologies and organizations appropriate to struggle against the main demands of socialists: health and education for all. Didn’t the Nazis, the most extreme anti-communists, build out a science of racial hygeine to “cleanse” science of socialist baggage? Didn’t they build out their own Nazi version of environmentalism, to keep the earth unpolluted of inferior chemicals and inferior races, even as they poisoned and destroyed everything in their path?

Liberal and right-wing politics are complementary anti-socialist strategies. Liberal anti-socialists show up with professional charts and hyper-educated agents of austerity to explain why such demands are infeasible. When socialism is shown to be feasible, there are movements of the right who are willing to fight, kill and even die, out of the belief that science-based measures are the real killers. 

As I mentioned in my last post, before I learned (from Losurdo, Horne, and some others) what liberalism really was, I used to believe that there was some kind of possibility of reconciliation between liberalism and leftism. I’ve come to the conclusion that the core beliefs of liberalism in private property, constraints on state powers of redistribution and public action, and in-group democracy were designed as ideologies of colonialism and imperialism. They’re not compatible with anti-imperialism. 

Conspirituality and me

What about spiritual beliefs? Can they be reconciled with leftist aspirations? As a teenager, I actually had my own fascination with spirituality. On a page of Bruce Lee’s Tao of Jeet Kune Do, I found the name “J Krishnamurti” on a list under the heading “Mental Training”. I became an avid reader of Krishnamurti’s books, dialogues, and lectures. His dialogues with (rogue) physicist David Bohm influenced my decision to make one of my majors physics (the other was history, as listeners know). 

Krishnamurti lecturing. Who wouldn’t want to listen to an enlightening lecture under the trees?

Krishnamurti counsels detachment of the ego, of not projecting one’s own ideas on to other people or situations, of experiencing the moment fully, of not carrying baggage from the past or expectations for the future into the moment. As I started to read more political writing (starting with Gandhi, who met Krishnamurti and they didn’t get along), I wondered if this kind of “mental training” could help in political work. I don’t think it can. Indeed, Krishnamurti’s notebook of dialogues with visitors to one of his retreats contains a dialogue with a communist that goes nowhere - there is an unbridgeable gulf between them as they talk past one another. 

Many years later, I read a book about Krishnamurti by the daughter of his business partner (also the daughter of the woman with whom Krishnamurti had a lifelong affair, known to her husband the business partner - and yes I read the Krishnamurti foundation’s reply to the book too). Learning a bit about how Krishnamurti actually lived, I realized how poorly these lessons translate for anyone who has to actually live in the world, even someone who’s life was deliberately sheltered the way Krishnamurti’s was. Krishnamurti, who was waited on by people who believed in his saintly status, could not live the life he preached. How could his preaching help someone who has to figure out a livelihood, relationships, how to work ethically and try to contribute to making the world a better place? 

As tools for specific situations, focusing on the present and letting go of the ego are useful. As an approach to living? Much less so. Detachment from daily life and from the material world isn’t desirable or possible. Disconnection from the future and past ends up meaning you can’t understand what happened or plan what to do next. With apologies to Bruce Lee, this is the opposite of “mental training”.  

And this is true when you look at the sayings of Krishnamurti, who is among the most benign of these figures. As with liberalism, so with conspirituality: there’s no reconciling it with a leftist world view. 

Indeed, while I think I understand North America a bit better after reading it, the book has given me new worries. It seems there is a grassroots insurgent movement with deep roots, plenty of resources, friends in high places and in the police, that is opposed to public health and to science. In the unlikely scenario that a government comes to power in North America that wants to improve those things, it will have to contend with that movement. 

I’m still going to exercise, pay attention to nutrition, go outside, breathe, and be an environmentalist, and so should you. If Lenin could learn weightlifting, so can I, dammit.

Leftists can’t afford to concede wellness to the right. We can’t concede conspiracy theorizing to the right either. 

We need our own versions of both!