A few weeks ago my children wanted to go to the park, and I had no reading material with me so I stopped by the closest book store and purchased Conspirituality because it sounded interesting, and I was right it is an interesting, if sad book.
Conspirituality is a term coined by the authors to represent a set of beliefs held by a group. There are two main tenants of conspirituality1.
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The world is possessed by evil forces
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Those who see the evil clearly are called to foster in themselves and others a new spiritual paradigm.
From this definition they look at the wellness, alternative medicine, spirituality, and yoga communities to see how these communities that were seemingly full of love would fall into "red pilling" and become COVID denialists and conspiracy theory leaders.
Red pilling is a term used by right libertarians and conservatives in the United States where taking the "red pill" signifies waking up and becoming aware of all the political biases in the world and then fighting against them[^2].
I'm not going to go into the whole book, but let's look a bit more at some points that stuck out to me.
Social Media Works in Binaries
The authors rightly state that social media works in binaries2 and punishes social media users for any perceived flip flop in opinion. This is a terrible state of affairs as we should celebrate those that are willing to change their opinion in the face of new information.
As I've stated many times, if social media was around when I was in my early 20's you would have heard someone that felt First Nations in Canada were a "conquered" people and should stop their whining. Now, I find those views abhorrent and the only reason I don't pay a huge price for them now is that there is no digital record for people to bring back in my face and show my "hypocrisy" as I now talk openly about the horrors visited upon First Nations in Canada.
The Wellness Industry is Soft Eugenics
Much of the wellness community has an idealised body type that you're striving for which makes fat shaming a professionalised and "social acceptable" form of bullying3. Many of the core tenants of the spirituality and wellness community come down to, if you believe hard enough you can heal yourself and if you can't then you clearly aren't a "pure" person. The next leap from this is that maybe you shouldn't be around anyway and dying of cancer is a test to see how pure you can be.
This lets them lionise the death of someone refusing medical treatments and blame the person themselves (soft eugenics) for their own death.
But Conspiracy Influencers Get Some Things Right
What is the one thing they get right4? That our institutions have failed us, and that they continue to fail us. Many people look at Canada as a bastion of free healthcare. But I've got a 5 year wait for tests for my daughter. My wife waited 3 years for surgery to deal with constant leg pain.
Hospitals and doctor's offices in many parts of BC are closing never to open because they can't get enough staff to do the work5.
Wellness influencers and conspiracy theorists use these institutional failures as a way to highlight what's bad about society. They don't take the next step of working to fix these broken institutions, they highlight these shortcomings of the system to bring people into their circle and then market "alternative" products that they say have been rejected by doctors because it doesn't make money.
I can get behind the ways in which many of our institutions have failed us, but when I see that you have a bunch of stuff to sell me, while you rail against the profits that some company is making, I can't help but see the hypocrisy in your stance.
Should You Read Conspirituality?
While I enjoyed the book, I wouldn't recommend you purchase it. It was interesting, but a good book to get from the library as I don't think I'll be pulling it off the shelf many times to reference what is written.
It was a decent book that can help you understand how yoga teachers become conspiracy theory leaders.
