Metadata#
- Author(s): Derek Beres, and Matthew Remski, Julian Walker
- Number of pages: 384
- Year published: 2023
- Year read: 2024
Review#
A long-ish, engaging intellectual screed against the marriage of conspiracy theorizing and New Age woo. This was written with a lot of color and brio, so it’s a lot of fun and quite podcasty.
This is a history of 20th and 21st century wellness movements - yoga, Reiki, all that New Agey stuff - and their underlying politics, as well as their often close relationship with conspiracy theories and cults. The first two parts are a lively sociological and historical study of this stuff, and I learned a lot and filled in lots of gaps that I had had. This was basically what I wanted to learn from <a href=https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9255017-american-veda?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=HGPrL6drUm&rank=1">American Veda, a book I am too lazy to actually buy. So, it was a lot of fun! And cut very close to home, especially the Theosophists and Buddhism in the West stuff. [I look down at my Buddhist tattoo in some chagrin.]
I didn’t care for Part 3, where the authors present a Wall of Shame of the worst “conspiritualists” in recent years. Oh yes - “conspirituality” is basically the tight coupling of alt-right Qanon craziness with New Age business, and how the Covid pandemic was like gas on that flame. The Part 3 Wall of Shame chapters profiled the most egregiously awful of these yoga-practicing, coffee-enema-ing, Covid/election denialist influencers. And honestly, I just don’t have the patience to listen to complete and utter garbage for chapter upon chapter.
The final part zoomed in on more quotidian conspiritualists - the conspiritualist next door, if you will. This was, of course, much less outrage-inducing and much sadder. e.g. The breast cancer patient who refuses mainstream medicine and dies amidst her magical thinking and potions. Ugh. It’s just awful. So the book, ultimately, preaches compassion for these benighted and confused people.
The book also discussed the tropes of conspiritual thinking: namely, I replace your reality with my own. A lot of this has to do with people’s ignorance re: the scientific method - and their disappointments in it (i.e. they expect science to be infallible and - once a scientific question is “answered”, the answer never changes). This is a real problem, indeed, and is the problem of MY CAREER, I would say: how do you get people comfortable with uncertainty? How do you convey the epistemology of the scientific methods(and statistics, do not even get me started)? Without them just completely jumping ship and swimming to crazy island?