Conspirituality

The race to capitalize on the world’s wellness needs in a post-pandemic society—well, at “post” as we can pretend to be—was unavoidable. Derek reflects on the continually unrealistic marketing promises being offered by wellness influencers, discussing how we’d benefit from more honest ad copy than the hyperbole attempting to be passed off as destiny.

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In June 2020, equity consultant and journalist Dax-Devlon Ross—who you might remember from Conspirituality 4 that very same month—published an essay called “A Letter to My White Male Friends of a Certain Age.” In it, he applied his decades of experience as a nonprofit executive and program facilitator to have an honest discussion with, as the title suggests, his white male friends.

A year later and the book version of that essay, called “Letters to My White Male Friends,” has been published by St. Martin’s Press. There couldn’t be a better time for this conversation, given the heated skirmishes around the meaning and manipulation of Critical Race Theory in our politics. Dax joins this week as a co-host, nearly a year to the day since his last appearance, to discuss the topics in his book, including the many years of lived experiences that cut through the academic rhetoric and political posturing concerning race in America today.

Show Notes

A Letter to My White Male Friends of a Certain Age (the original essay)

Letters to My White Male Friends

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Humanity has an apocalypse fetish. But wrapped up In the doomsday death wish is a utopian fantasy of the ascension that comes after a fallen and sinful world is purified by cataclysmic fire. Whether the longed-for intervention is supernatural or extraterrestrial, spirituality porn hijacks our neurobiological wet-ware to bond cults together in a shared and singular climactic focus.

For this week’s Bonus, Julian traces the recurring themes between the 19th-century Great Awakening, the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide, the New Age fascination with 2012, and the QAnon fever dream.

Might our vulnerability to these narratives stem from evolutionary side-effects—which, like the space between medieval cathedral archways that are decorated with ornate trumpeting angels and burgeoning flowers, serve no structural purpose, but somehow draw a hyper-focused otherworldly fixation? 

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This episode is co-hosted by Dr. C. Thi Nguyen, a philosopher who teaches at the University of Utah. His breakthrough book is about agency in games, in which he shines a light on disquieting aspects of our gamified lives and the question of whether we’re still able to act on our own values. We’ll talk about Dr. Nguyen’s key ideas, all of which are super useful for navigating conspirituality: the gamification of Twitter and other systems of “value capture,” the feeling of knowing something really clearly can foreclose on the desire for nuance, and the pleasures and perils of “moral outrage porn.”

Show Notes

Polarization or Propaganda? (Boston Review)

Why We Call Things ‘Porn’ (New York Times)

Escape the Echo Chamber (Aeon Magazine)

Why Games are Good but Gamification is Terrible (Conceptual Foundations of Conflict lecture)

Who Trains the Machine Artist? (Daily Nous)

The Gamification of Public Discourse (Royal Institute of Philosophy lecture)

How We Can Understand Ourselves Through Games (OUP)

Group-Strapping, Bubble, or Echo Chamber? (SERRC)

Am I in an Echo Chamber? (Open for Debate)

On gurus and seductive clarity (Decoding the Gurus podcast)

What’s in a game? (Philosophy Talk radio show/podcast)

Games: Agency as Art (New Books in Philosophy podcast)

Cheap talk (Escape the Void podcast episode, talking about clarity porn)

Echoes in the void (Escape the Void podcast episode, talking about echo chambers)

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News from Alabama: after a 23-year ban on yoga in schools, generated by a Republican moral panic, Governor Kay Ivey signs a bill that lets kids do yoga again, but with some restrictions:

“All instruction in yoga shall be limited exclusively to poses, exercises, and stretching techniques. All poses shall be limited exclusively to sitting, standing, reclining, twisting, and balancing. All poses, exercises, and stretching techniques shall have exclusively English descriptive names. Chanting, mantras, mudras, use of mandalas, induction of hypnotic states, guided imagery, and namaste greetings shall be expressly prohibited.”

Those who promote yoga as a universal good will welcome this Indian art form being made more accessible for children in a State with terrible educational markers. Hindu nationalists, on the other hand, may be outraged at a secularized version of yoga, stripped not only of references to Hinduism, but of signs of any type of Indian spirituality. And a lot of white yoga progressives will look at this policy—mostly from the urban North— and worry about authenticity and appropriation.

How will the children feel?

In considering who wins and loses with this new development, Matthew reviews recent U.S. yoga-war history: battles between the Hindu American Foundation and Yoga Journal, the rise of Christian non-yoga-yoga “Praise Moves”, and Encinitas Union School District got sued for allegedly violating the Establishment Clause by contracting devotees of Pattabhi Jois to teach the kids yoga.

It’s not a stretch to see an overlap between this theme and the medical-moral panic over vaccines. In both cases, the focus is on the imagined corruption of children, whether by poison, politics, or inner quiet.

Show Notes

Alabama lifts three-decade-old ban on yoga in public schools—with a catch.

New study ranks Alabama as 43rd for student achievement, grade of D+

12 Reasons Why Yoga is NOT Good for Christians

Hindu Group Stirs Debate in Fight for Soul of Yoga

Hindu American Foundation: Hindu Roots of Yoga

Shukla’s letter: Is Hindu a bad word?

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Matthew sits down, across 9,000 miles of mostly ocean, with journalist Anke Richter and reporter and Māori rights activist Joe Trinder to discuss the mind-bending rise of Māori MAGA in the COVID-free sanctuary of Aoteoroa, aka New Zealand. Led by former blues musician Billy Te Kahika, conspirituality has seeped from music and cultural festivals and straight into national politics, where white supremacists manipulate Māori post-colonial distrust of settler governments to boost vaccine hesitancy and milk paranoia.

In the Ticker this week, Derek dunks on Deepak Chopra’s “Lovetuner” penny-whistle, which will change your DNA for $58 and a few toots. Julian reports on Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying as they drift farther into conspiratorial pseudoscience and advocate for whiz-bang COVID cure-alls over vaccines.

Show Notes

Exploring the Actual Science Behind Why Music Makes Us Feel Good

Anke Richter bio

Anke Richter on cults

Anke Richter on conspiracy theories in New Zealand

How alternative festivals became platforms for conspiracy theorists

Luminate Festival organisers criticised for promoting far-right conspiracy theorists

Anti-conspiracist campaigners take aim at ‘Mothers for Freedom’ event

The self-proclaimed ‘political prisoners’ in managed isolation

Anti-lockdown group of academics criticised for promoting conspiracy theorists

The scientist and the rabbit hole: How epidemiologist Simon Thornley became an outcast of his profession

E-Tangata The rise of Māori MAGA

Billy TK: False Profit

Sue Grey

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Derek looks back at three important historical figures with unsavory pasts to ask the question: who gets to decide who gets canceled, and why?

Show Notes

Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India

How would Gandhi’s celibacy tests with naked women be seen today?

John Muir Is Canceled. Who’s Next?

Don’t Cancel John Muir

I’m an MLK scholar – and I’ll never be able to view King in the same light

A judge gave a drug dealer a second chance. Sixteen years later, he swore him in as a lawyer.

Sponsored Content: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

The Unbearable Feelings of the Anti-Masker

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We’re extremely pleased that someone who isn’t a Boomer  — and is younger than us — is making a serious but accessible contribution to this golden age of cult literature. Linguist Amanda Montell joins Julian for an engaging interview about her new book, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, which examines the power of language in high-demand groups, from The People’s Temple to the local Young Living dinner party. In a debrief, we discuss not only Montell’s study, but also our own run-ins with spiritual mumbo-jumbo.

In the Ticker, Matthew wonders what Sayer Ji does when he loses his Facebook privileges and is relegated to the armpit of Telegram. Why, he goes full Satanic Panic, of course!

Show Notes

Deplatformed for Anti-Vax Propaganda, Sayer Ji Turns to Satanic Panic Content

Amanda Montell’s website

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Julian and Matthew discuss words, world views, and how productive disagreement can lead to mutual understanding. In today’s overheated discourse, social media posturing can make the culture wars feel like pro wrestling and political conversation like tip-toeing through a hair-trigger minefield. While these two co-hosts share a healthy skepticism for conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and New Age grift, some of their underlying philosophical and political beliefs hold interesting tensions. On the table this time: postmodernism, science, cultural sensitivity, Enlightenment values, social constructionism, and grand narratives about the arc of moral history.

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This week we learned that Melinda Gates was disturbed by Bill’s men’s-club relationship with Jeffrey Epstein all the way back in 2011. And for fuck sake: when Bill visited Epstein’s Manhattan lair, reports say, he counseled the predator on image rehab while Epstein counseled Bill on his loveless marriage. Are the conspiritualists right, and about what? Matthew will revisit an earlier essay on Gates, and fill in some blind spots.

Derek tackles the obscene co-optation of trans activism by anti-vaxxers who now pledge to lie about their status by “identifying as vaccinated.” In keeping with our musical theme, Julian reminisces about playing protest rock under an assumed name and the threat of a bomb under the stage during the Apartheid years in South Africa.

In our feature interview, world-weary rock star Alex Ebert—frontman for Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros—joins Derek to map out the late 20th-century slide into infinitely co-opted creativity and revolution. They discuss the reasons America could use death rituals, the rise of Trump as the ultimate New Ager, wellness influencers as “the clerical class of the right,” and to ask if critical thinking and open-eyed spirituality are the new punk rock—and for how long.

Show Notes

The NYT reported in the fall of 2019 that Gates was a frequent guest of Epstein in Manhattan

A description from Town and Country of Epstein’s mansion

Sources at many meetings describe the Gates-Epstein vibe

Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic

The Gene: An Intimate History | Siddhartha Mukherjee

Inside the Republican Anti-Transgender Machine

Gender-affirming surgery linked to better mental health, study finds

“Identify As” Twitter thread

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