The 80s model Elle Macpherson recently disclosed in her book Elle that she was diagnosed with a form of early-stage breast cancer called HER2 positive oestrogen receptive intraductal carcinoma. In an interview with the Australian Women’s Weekly magazine, she talked of her refusal of her surgeon’s recommendation of a mastectomy with radiation, chemotherapy and hormone therapy and her decision instead that to follow “my own truth, my belief support to support me.” To embark in this journey, she set up residence in Arizona to devote “every single minute to healing myself under the care of a team including a naturopathic doctor, an osteopath, a holistic dentist and her primary doctor". (I am not sure they were in this loop of wellness woo).[1]
And lo and behold she was cured within eight months! Except that she had, in fact, a conventional lumpectomy or surgical removal of a lump from her breast. For as numerous surgeons can attest in cases as Elle’s, when caught early, when cancerous cells are still confined to the breast ducts rather than having the wider breast tissue, then a choice of either more conservative or more aggressive treatment is frequently offered and, in some cases, a lumpectomy alone suffices. For Gaby Hinsliff, this is a cautionary tale about rejection of conventional medicine; of the risks of resisting the “cancer-industry complex” on the probing of an Instagram post, of following vague encouragement to “follow their heart and give things a go.”[2]
While acknowledging the gruelling nature of breast cancer treatment on friends and a family member and not wishing to deny sufferers to partake of anything “that gets them through the day,” Hinsliff emphasises the critical importance of accurate scientific information on cancer or any medical malady. She cites the result of Angelie Jolie’s 2013 article in the New York Times about opting for a preventive double mastectomy due to her carrying of a gene predisposing her to breast cancer; the next fortnight reportedly saw a 64% increase in the demand for genetic screening. Pondering on the agonising dilemmas of women experiencing their cancer ordeals at whatever stage who may be reading about Elle MacPherson’s “heart-led, holistic” journey back to glowing health, Gaby Hinsliff issues this stark health warning: ‘Live your own truth, by all means. Just remember others can die of it.’[3]
The story of Elle MacPherson’s journey to “wellness” without recourse to conventional medicine (told untruthfully as we have learned) is paradigmatic of our unsettling times and their discontents which, to use a cancer metaphor, metastasized in the Covid-19 global pandemic of 2020-21. The profound changes wrought on humanity’s social, domestic, and working lives through governmental fiat brought to the fore a seemingly paradoxical phenomenon; a fusion of archetypically typical “feminine” milieu of spiritual thought and praxis known in shorthand as “New Age” and archetypically “masculine” far right conspiracy theorising. This amalgam has been conceptualised as “Conspirituality”[4]
Conspirituality
Conspirituality rests on two key pillars: first that a secret groups covertly controls, or is trying to control the political and social order (e.g. “Globalist” institutions such as the World Economic Forum or the Illuminati) and that humanity is undergoing a ‘paradigm shift’ on consciousness and that to act in accordance with this “Great Awakening” worldview to deal with the threat of a totalitarian ‘New World Order’’[5]
As the offspring of UFO theorists such as Steven Greer, New Age publicists such as Diana Cooper, David Icke’s beliefs in reptilians and shadow government, X-File type conspiracy narratives with their red pilling urgings and the scepticism around events like 9/11 promoted by the Zeitgeist Movement, change or transformation is a key theme of conspirituality. Clients seek to uncover a shadow government. People are ‘awakening to the truth and are saying no to tyranny and to assume personal responsibility as the shadow government exists because we allow it to'.[6]
Central to the ‘new paradigm’ is, in the words of Mahatma Gandhi, is ‘becoming the change you wish to see in the world. The inner self is commanded to change before the outer world can.' ‘Spiritually conscious’ ideals include self-responsibility and independent thought – removing oneself from the ‘mind control matrix’ by foregoing TV and chemical additives, rejecting consumerism and anticipating earth changes. In this non-violent revolution, people must ‘join the dots to see the truth’ – the shadow government is too well-hidden to see without collectively ‘doing your research’ ‘The People’s United Community (TPUC) advocates ‘lawful rebellion on the basis in the Magna Carta allowing citizens to ignore the law if they feel they are being unjustly governed – the notion of the “sovereign citizen” used by anti-lockdown refuseniks during the pandemic. In order to reveal ‘truth,’ the movement supports whistle-blowers, campaigns for governments to end secrecy and expose and publicise suppressed evidence.[7]
So far, so very transformative, humanity infused and such peaceful antidotes to the strife, incoherence, and silently tyrannical nature of our modern world. However, as Beres et al were to discover, conspirituality has developed into a cultic, financially exploitative, and politically sinister movement. For as an online religion, conspirituality is generated and operationalised by virtual churches, revival meetings and séance sessions in the shape of small-group courses and mastermind Zoom meetings. There is thus an intrinsic synchronicity between virtual worship and the e-commerce model that propels it.[8]
Leaders in the field were often former corporate executives who had departed the rat race for the lifestyle race with all their expertise on branding and customer experience and ability to soft-sell their communities of loyal followers. At the onset of Covid, there was in situ a well-oiled machinery to connect with millions of people across multiple platforms through massive online conferences. Through social media ads, Google keywords, blog posts and videos, the high priests of spiritual prosperity were able to market their wares like DVDs, supplements and premium video courses supposedly guaranteed to generate lashings of passive income[9] through the multi-level marketing model (MLM).
Multi-level Marketing and Wellness
Multi-level marketing is an exploitative structure employed by companies that use direct sales to shift product, in contrast to the retail model. In direct sales, customers earn the right to sell products – and receive monthly commissions – based on purchasing preset levels of stock, which they have to then sell on to other customers in a fixed time window or else face steep losses. An oft used synonym for the MLM structure is a pyramid scheme because one’s place in the hierarchy is dependent on the number of recruits they bring into the scheme and therefore those who in the lower reaches of the pyramid risk operating at a loss while chasing the dream of eventually climbing up the ranks of the business and making fortunes.[10]
The pathway to these dreams is almost entirely virtual, as social media provides an optimal space for MLM recruitment, especially for isolated demographics, be they new mothers, empty nesters, people wanting a career change or housewives in search of a community or additional income. The pizzazz of these schemes is enhanced by young influencers with millions of Instagram followers showcasing their wealthy lifestyles to their soul sisters and high impact motivational conferences in spacious venues rigged out like megachurches where the prosperity gospel lessons of entrepreneurial capitalism and the aspirational self are belted out with gusto.[11]
The MLM model assumes a real degree of perniciousness in its merging with the wellness, New Age, and yoga worlds. For yoga teachers recruited into an essential oil or supplement scheme, the constant pressure to sell can unhealthily monetise relationships with clients or students with every interaction becoming a potential recruitment pitch. The layperson who sells essential oils for an MLM will make recruits in the wild by relying on the company’s most outlandish claims such as “Thieves oil boosts the immune system." But the yoga instructor already has a captive audience and potential market susceptible to the viewing of any marketing spiel about a product through the lens of spiritual progress. In this nexus, the business models of MLMs and New Age spirituality will merge at the highest levels of integration. This happens due to the attractiveness of the MLM model to the New Age wellness economy due partly to the psychological symmetry between the promise of limitless financial growth and that of limitless spiritual growth[12]; where financial freedom meets emotional freedom.
The contours between both MLM and the wellness sector are also similar. With the revolutionary impact of the internet on wellness, the leading producers have utilised many direct sales techniques such as email marketing; algorithm-based online advertising, monetised connections among social media accounts and websites for selling products and digital courses.[13] By 2021 the wellness industry was reportedly worth $4.5trilion, with, for example, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop brand worth £250m alone.[14]
The Dark Side of Wellness
So, what the New Age/MLM synchronicity had produced by the time of the Covid pandemic was a magic moneymaking machine for conspiritualists to network and share the profits from large online events. It is a system that enabled the promotion of Covid-denialist conferences centred on alternative wellness practices, pseudo-political activism, and conspiracy porn.[15]
Let’s look at some figures in the rogues gallery of the conspirituality/wellness axis. First, the “golden girl”, the celebrity Maine doctor Dr Christine Northrup who practiced obstetrics and gynaecology for 26 years before allowing her license to lapse in 2015 and who rose to national prominence in the USA in the 1990s with her book Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom and through her frequent appearances on the Oprah Winfrey Show. She used her status as a celebrity medic to churn out prolific lies and disinformation on the Covid-19 pandemic. Through her social media accounts including her 175,000 Instagram followers, she denied the reality of the pandemic, to discourage the wearing of masks and to argue that Covid-19 vaccines will make women infertile and cause recipients' bodies to turn against them and then endanger unvaccinated people around them by the shedding of malignant vaccine ingredients.[16]
These lurid claims match those of the pro-life movement on the medical effects of abortion.
She also falsely claimed the vaccines have ingredients that alter corporate entities to remotely monitor their biological states which would somehow benefit the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through the medium of cryptocurrency. An analysis by the New York Times found that Northrup had a crucial, catalysing role in the phenomenal spread of the notorious conspiracy video “Plandemic” after sharing it with her Facebook followers. This video argued that a secret cabal of elites was using Covid-19 and the vaccines that would be developed to counteract it to enrich and empower themselves.
In the spring of 2021, Dr Northrup was cited as one of the “disinformation dozen” by the UK think tank Centre for Countering Digital Hate. But she had plenty of other strings to her bow. On 4th April 2020, Northrup began her series of one hundred Facebook videos that she soon tagged “The Great Awakening”; a phrase which resonates so powerfully in the memory of American evangelicalism. She commenced this odyssey by inviting her disciples to join her for an online meditation event where she bowed towards Aries people, starseeds (who believe they are advanced intergalactic spiritual beings with cosmic scientific knowledge) and truthers, saying that this Great Awakening was a rebirth for everybody, and advising followers to take information from “many different sources”[17] (the “do your research” conspiracist motif).
In the video caption was a link to a newsletter from a “global decentralised group of Lightworkers working on World Peace.” The newsletter was a pastiche of disinformation riddled with QAnon and Evangelical clarion call of mistruths. It falsely claimed that three million people had died from radiation poisoning in Wuhan China due to the “dark agendas” of the “corrupt elite and dark forces” it asserted were evidenced by the recent global coronavirus scare/potential false flag to mask their 5G weaponry and attempt at mandating bio-chipping vaccines and the further enslavement and eradication of mankind.”[18]
But rescue was on the way from the Legions of Light Beings that have entered our galaxy “to assist us in our ascension and help direct this high dimensional light.” Furthermore, the newsletter claimed that “the financial debt slave system constructed by the Knights Templar seven hundred years ago can soon be brought to an end by the labour of a minimum of 144,000 mediators across the globe; this number also stands for the “elect” in religious cults like the Jehovah’s Witnesses who as “saved souls” are destined for ascent to Heaven and to avoid Hell. The number appears in the Book of Revelation as a symbolic representation of all human persons.[19]
Northrup’s modus operandi was the combination of evangelism with self-care. Direct links to QAnon recruitment materials and anti-vax propaganda are interspersed with posts advertising her self-care and herbalism products. She soothes her followers with self-care tips, knowing gazes and arpeggios. Soothing is an essential counterbalance to her apocalyptic warnings from a position of trust and respect of a doctor that evidence-based medicine is out to kill them. That they’ll get sick or go sterile if they have sex with their vaccinated partners. Her mantra and that of similar conspiritualist influencers is that the elites “want to make you afraid.”[20]
How was Northrup able to gain so many followers during the pandemic when her medical credentials and credibility was so comprehensively shot to pieces. An answer is given by psychologist and cult survivor Alexandra Stein. Her analysis is that trauma-bonding functions as the glue of cultic movements. Northrup’s flip flopping back and forth between doom mongering and the soft reassurance of New Age things like harp playing provides the storm that only she can protect her followers from.[21]
Northrup’s New Age and supposedly feminist women’s health content is essentially deeply conservative camouflaged by layers of pseudoscience. Her folksy writing style in Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom makes the reader believe she is batting for you against medical misogyny, according to Dr. Jen Gunter. However Gunter points out, Northrup claims that women get sick because of their misalignment with their spiritual purpose, and that the fear produced by mammogram results is as dangerous as any cancer. AIDS is caused by pollution and sexual repression and can be reversed by love. She recounts consulting with a medical intuitive about a patient’s ovarian cyst.[22]
But some conspirituality influencers can be victims as well as players in this toxic milieu. In February 2021, the US National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism reported that over two-thirds of the QAnon followers who’d been charged around the January 6th insurrection at Capitol Hill experienced severe mental health conditions. Many of the women sampled became involved in QAnon after learning their child had been abused.[23]
The case of Melissa Rein Lively, a PR executive in Arizona, is especially informative as regards the mental health histories of those ensnared in the conspirituality movement. Producer of a video that rapidly became known as QAnon Karen that was made on 4th July, Rein Lively who had always thought of herself a spiritual person interested in “wellness, natural health, organic food”, became exposed to anti-vax content while clicking on videos of foods that boost immunity. She also noticed that QAnon content was more and more the focus of wellness influencers. QAnon is the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump is fighting a Deep State cabal of Satanic paedophiles and acquired notoriety with the false claim that Hilary Clinton abused children and drank their blood She became radicalised by her readings of anti-Big Pharma output and content condemning the supposed amount of influence and involvement on public health policy. She enjoyed the community she was becoming ensconced in.[24]
However, clicking on and reading about imminent genocide under the guise of the Covid crisis put her over an edge. In one of her videos, Melissa Rewin Lively calls police Nazis, in another she uses the N-word frequently. In one particularly disturbing experience, she saw a Covid-denial meme depicting an image of Polish Jews being put on a train in World War II, edited so they were wearing face masks. As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, this traumatising image solidified her belief that at least some aspects of what she was reading was true; that nothing was really what it seemed.[25]
Melissa Rein Lively eventually suffered a mental breakdown, leading to hospitalisation for ten days. Her husband filed for divorce and was mercilessly tormented online by members of her erstwhile “community,” driving her to the verge of suicide. In hospital, she worked with therapists to tackle unresolved trauma, including the suicide of her mother and to address how the upheavals of the pandemic had revisited all of these life experiences. Reunited with her husband and having come ‘through the other end’ of her engagement with the pseudo-science wellness culture, Rein Lively now accepts that wellness and spirituality is ultimately an industry with some useful lessons best taken with a pinch of salt.[26]
There is thus a strong correlation between the embrace of ‘wellness woo’ and susceptibility to misinformation as the mental health histories of recovering QAnon and other conspirituality cult movements cited here illustrate. As conspiracism welds into ideology, it becomes easier to sell wellness kook and conspiracy theories as being ‘on brand.’ Having started this article with a cautionary tale of cancer care in and the wellness woe ecosystem, I end with an anecdote of viewing with horror on the Facebook page of an old acquaintance, recommendation of Ivermectin (rejected on its first cycle of medical trials as a Covid treatment ) as a cure for cancer. Whither a cancel culture here.
[1] Gaby Hinsliff Live ‘your truth.’ Just don’t let it harm others. Guardian. September 2024
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid
[4] Charlotte Ward & David Voas, The Emergence of Conspirituality. Journal of Contemporary Religion Vol.36, No1, January 2011, pp.103-21
[5] Ibid, p.103
[6] Ibid, p.12
[7] Ibid, pp. 12-3.
[8] Ibid, p.13
[9] Ibid, p.13
[10] Ibid, pp.128-9
[11] Ibid, p129
[12] Ibid, p.130
[13] Ibid, p.130
[14] Eva Wiseman, 'The Dark Side of Wellness: the Overlap between Spiritual Thinking and far-right Conspiracies'. The Observer. Sunday 17th October 2021
[15] Ibid, p.130
[16] See.
[17] Beres et al. p.182
[18] Ibid
[19] Ibid, pp.182-83
[20] Ibid, p.183
[21] Ibid
[22] Ibid, pp.183-84
[23] Wiseman
[24] Ibid
[25]Ibid
[26] Ibid.
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
Caveat emptor!
ReplyDeleteThe human need for connection, community, and belonging inevitably clouds peoples' capacity for discernment. The promises and attraction of the transcendent in this hyper-connected virtual milieu becomes evermore appealing, especially to the vulnerable.