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The Conspirituality Report
The Yoga/Wellness World Can Help Calm the QAnon Fever It Helped Spread
Opinion: Regulation and licensing are pro-social tools
8 min readJun 15, 2021
We’re now thirteen months into the Conspirituality Podcast project, and my co-hosts and I have done several dozen interviews with journalists and podcasters about the landscape of “converging right-wing conspiracy theories and faux-progressive wellness utopianism.”
Most interviews explore the basic themes:
- How easy it is for conspiracism to hijack spiritual impulses in a global economy with little connection to the groundedness of religious cultures.
- The weird history of New Age and far right overlaps.
- How depoliticized neoliberal self-care consumerism has made yoga and wellness people vulnerable to manipulative ideologies.
- How social media gamification has made conspirituality content irresistible to influencers who are always trolling for flashy new material.
- How conspirituality influencers regularly use cultic techniques —already rife in their industries — such as isolation from family, and the promotion of disorganized attachment.