How the Wellness Community Lost Its Mind: Part Two

Continuing my review and exploration of Conspirituality

Like many of you, I suspect, I have been amazed to watch the alternative wellness and “transformational” culture splinter into paranoid shards over the last decade.

I remember, back around 2010, the “alternative or “new thought” community seemed to be growing rapidly. It felt like we were evolving toward a shared understanding. We were fitting together the puzzle pieces: Science and mysticism, shamanism and yoga, mindfulness and epigenetics, permaculture and ayahuasca; David Bohm’s holographic universe, Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic resonance, Barbara Marx Hubbard’s conscious evolution, McKenna’s Eschaton, Kurzweil’s Singularity, indigenous wisdom, hermeticism, tantra/polyamory, EDM, psychedelics, Alex Grey’s anatomy of the subtle body, among many strands. Social and economic justice seemed part of this puzzle, if less explicitly addressed. (We explored all the facets of this emergent paradigm in the web magazine I started back in 2007, Reality Sandwich, later absorbed into a truly awful company, Delic).

We felt the possibility for reinventing society at festivals such as Burning Man, Symbiosis, or Boom: The new synthesis of knowledge fused with joyful embodiment. This synthesis was part of the “great awakening,” or the “dimensional shift,” often described, vaguely, as the “ascension” from “4D” to “5D” consciousness by channels such as Barbara Marciniak, Ramtha, and Bashar.

Many of us felt this “transformation of consciousness” could only happen outside our broken legacy systems. Once we attained it, this new consciousness — a resonant frequency — would initiate a more just, sane and equitable world. We agreed with Albert Einstein: “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” Our thinking, therefore, had to change first. Or as Buckminster Fuller put it: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” We felt that new model — that new world — was close at hand.

But this implicit, intangible structure somehow collapsed on us (just as it did, for many, way back when, at the end of the “Sixties.”)

I first heard about Democratic Party insiders such as Hilary Clinton and Obama and their New World Order cronies consuming Adrenochrome, a drug extracted from the pineal glands of babies killed in Satanic rituals, around 2009 or so. I was hanging out with Raw Food guru David “Avocado” Wolfe. We were in Hawaii at the time. A girlfriend of mine also believed this. She would emit witchy peals of giggles whenever she talked about it (which was often). Both Wolfe and my friend breezily linked a Satanic NWO cabal practicing pedophilia and cannibalism to reptilian extraterrestrials and Roswell, underground bases under the ocean, the faked moon landing, among other lurid possibilities.

I found it titillating and memorable. I didn’t believe it to be true. I knew there was no actual evidence for any of it, that it was farfetched. But I couldn’t entirely reject it, either. Something about it, strangely, rang true, on some level that was not rational or grounded. I found the ideas compelling. It was quite easy to envision a seething abyss of evil under the surface of normal life, like a Lovecraft-ian monster swirling beneath a placid lake.

Conspirituality looks at some — but not all — of the factors that led to the spread of such bizarre QANON ideas through the culture where they fed the growth of the Alt Right, leading to an ideological collapse that supported Trump’s victory, and then intensified, since Covid, around the anti-vaccine movement, currently surfacing into the mainstream with RFK Jr’s presidential run. Ken Wilber presented a model for how we ended up in this mess in Trump and a Post-Truth World (2016).

Wilber uses Spiral Dynamics, which charts an ongoing evolution of collective consciousness through different bandwidths (to which he assigns colors). These start with purely selfish or egocentric survival motives, evolving to integrate care for one’s community and particular ethnic group, and eventually graduate to universal compassion, non-duality, non-judgment, and world-centric values. Wilber proposes that what he calls “green” reached critical mass in the 1960s, superseding the previous dominant level, “orange,” defined by concepts such as “reason,” “merit,” “self-authoring,” “excellence,” and “profit.” Green is marked by “a heightened sensitivity to any and all forms of social oppression of virtually any minority, and—centrally—both the understanding of the crucial role of “context” in any knowledge claims and the desire to be as “inclusive” as possible.”

Over the course of the next decades, green started to show its deficient, shadow side: “Green increasingly began veering into extreme, maladroit, dysfunctional, even clearly unhealthy forms. Its broad-minded pluralism slipped into a rampant and runaway relativism (collapsing into nihilism), as the notion that all truth is contextualized (or gains meaning from its cultural context) slid into the notion that there is no real universal truth at all, only shifting cultural interpretations (which eventually slid into a widespread narcissism).” What we were left with — before Trump rumbled into prominence — was narcissism, nihilism, and extreme relativism.

Wilber coins the term “aperspectival madness” to describe the postmodern tendency to reject all “universal truth” and “metanarratives” — except the universal truth and metanarrative that there are no “universal truths” or “metanarratives.” This was one of many contradictions that intensified over the last decades, breaking green’s hegemony.

While green believes all people are equally deserving, in reality over the last decades, society became far more unequal in access to wealth, decent food, education, health care, and so on. The Internet seemed the perfect tool to achieve green ideals — by making the world “more open and connected.” But this promise was betrayed as algorithms started to manipulate the masses. Overwhelmed by information, people retracted into increasingly fractious “ethnocentric” identities: “The entire online experience collapsed from one of unity, open-natured expanse, and worldwide integration, into one of siloed, boxed, separatist, mean-spirited ethnocentric drives. And these poured out of our laptops and smartphones 24/7 and into the culture at large.”

As these contradictions piled up, they brought about a severe legitimation crisis for our society: “Everywhere you are told that you are fully equal and deserve immediate and complete empowerment, yet everywhere are denied the means to actually achieve it. You suffocate, you suffer, and you get very, very mad,” Wilber writes. By 2016, many millions of people across the US were enraged.

This ongoing legitimation crisis (with little end in sight) is responsible for the entrancing power of conspiracy theories, the rise of the Alt Right, and Trump’s victory. To its credit, Conspirituality explores the structural, socioeconomic forces that pushed formerly liberal or apolitical yoga teachers and wellness influencers toward QANON-adjacent viewpoints, particularly once Covid hit, devastating yoga studios and other marginal businesses. Adopting more rancorous rhetoric is a way to claim relevance and gain visibility. Once your star on social media starts to rise, the phenomenon of “audience capture” kicks in: If you go back and recant inflammatory ideas or rhetoric, you risk forfeiting your newly won cultural prominence, which can also be monetized in various ways. The incentives support doubling down on extreme positions, rather than admitting fault — or, at least, indecision.

(Part Three coming soon!)