#derek beres

The pandemic had inflamed an obsession with health. Not the public type of health—now caricatured by tedious messages about social distancing and masks—but an impassioned, moralizing fetish for personal health that is preoccupied with low body fat, supplements, positive thinking, sugar elimination, and focus on the soul.

September Book Pile

…as the COVID science-communication (sci-comm) directors learned in a very hard way, it’s not enough to be right about the world. It’s not enough to have science on your side. Mythology helps, too. You need a compelling story. Conspirituality is a masterful storytelling medium. The stories told by conspirituality influencers might be grandiose. But they also feel personal, accessible, and urgent. They can make the abstract, vaguely upbeat comms of medical professionalism seem pale in comparison: We are always working to provide better care for you and your family. We have researchers, we deliver services, we keep tabs on the flu. And we will tell you what you need to know.

The official responses to the COVID-19 pandemic illuminated the opacity of medical bureaucracy. The changing rules, and the jargon they were delivered in, reminded many of every confusing and queasy doctor’s office visit they’d had. Lockdowns reminded some of all the times it felt like the cure was worse than the disease. COVID exposed the craven policies of governments interested in health only as far as it could keep people working. It made many people feel, more powerfully than ever before, that they live in an age in which they are surveilled but neglected, in which they are managed but not heard.

Conspirituality does not create its followers’ nausea at the state, modernity, or the poisoned chalice of techno-capitalism. It does not create real-world disasters such as the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking network (a reality that makes QAnon reasonable on a symbolic, if not factual, level). It does not create histories of genocide, nor does it create histories of governmental cover-up. Conspirituality does, however, exploit a pandemic of disenchantment. Disrupting that exploitation is not just a matter of debunking falsehoods, or revealing the money lust or hypocrisy of alt-health influencers who predict another Holocaust so they can cosplay Oskar Schindler–style humanitarianism. Disrupting it is a matter of reckoning with the deep anxieties about social fragmentation and ecological ruin for which conspirituality offers sparkling but flimsy answers.

…it’s no surprise that the politics of the conspiracy theorists we examine in this book virtually always trend right. Some will argue that the left is equally prone to conspiracism through its abstract analysis of power relations, in which another ruling elite takes center stage: the ultra rich, squeezing the underclasses for their lifeblood. But what we’ve seen so far among conspiritualists is that they are inconsistent at analyzing the ultra rich, or surveillance capitalism. They will impugn Bill Gates for his medical interventions and George Soros for funding various political projects, and sometimes Jeff Bezos for capitalizing on pandemic lockdowns. But at the same time they will ignore how their favorite influencers are bashing conventional medications while selling unregulated supplements or heading up huge digital pyramid schemes. They ignore the excessive wealth of their political icons, like Trump, who give them permission to focus their attention and rage on immigrants and imagined pedophiles.

…conspiritualists are not wrong. They are attuned to systemic problems. They have felt their existential angst insulted by lifestyle marketing, and their humanity reduced to consumer data. They have felt the cold neglect of the state, the vacant stare of the medical gaze, and the brutal rise of rents. When COVID struck, they were quick to prophesy that whether the virus was real or not, the crisis would exacerbate wealth and class inequality. They were right: the billionaire class padded their net worth by $1 trillion. Conspiritualists know that most citizens of the Global North, and their children, are hyperurbanized, screen addled, and disconnected from rivers and forests and food sources. Yet conspiritualists feel the interconnectedness of things. Their empathy may be compromised by paranoia and bigoted blindspots, but it carries a sentimentality that lends poetry to their posts. They grasp the enormity of the human challenge, and they respond to it with an equally vast hope.

Two monks are arguing about a flag. One says, “The flag is moving.” The other, “The wind is moving.” A third walks by and says, “Not the wind, not the flag; the mind is moving.” from an article