Bonus: The White Yogi, The Brown Activist, and the Evil Billionaire
Who’s right, who’s confused, who’s noble, who’s the bad guy?Nothing exists in a cultural vacuum. The emergence of yoga as a hugely popular and lucrative phenomenon in the West is no exception.In this bonus episode, Julian discusses a recent article that was posted, and enthusiastically liked, shared, and commented upon in sincere solidarity by yoga folks contributing to the conspirituality zeitgeist.This despite the article being written by a respected brown scholar and activist and posted by an earnest white yogi—and being about a billionaire with some questionable history.
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The White Yogi, the Brown Activist, and the Evil Billionaire.
I'm going to talk about how a recent article posted and enthusiastically liked, shared, and commented upon in sincere solidarity by yoga folks contributed to the conspirituality zeitgeist.
This, despite the article being written by a respected Brown scholar and activist, and posted by an earnest white yogi, and being about a billionaire with some questionable history.
Nothing exists in a cultural vacuum.
The emergence of yoga practice as a hugely popular and lucrative phenomenon in the West is no exception.
We can trace a counter-culture curiosity about the East back into 60s psychedelia and a yearning for an experiential, consciousness-expanding spirituality that breathed life into the hollowed-out, stiff moralism and repression of a 50s-era, square, Caucasian, American Christianity with its rigid gender roles and, aw shucks, leave it to beaver, conventionalism.
A white picket fence, neatly enclosed authentic emotions, messy visceral sexuality, the dark shadow of brutal racism.
Like the numbing and widespread Mother's Little Helper, sedatives, Miltown, and Valium, at a time when a billion of those drugs were being pumped out every year, and one in three Americans were being prescribed pills for mental health.
But we can go back further into the late 19th century theosophical and Order of the Golden Dawn fascination with a European and American occultism that always had an exotic flavor.
A cultist and Golden Dawn prodigy, Aleister Crowley would publish his Eight Lectures on Yoga in 1939, expressing the growing mystical synthesis of a belief in ancient magic, individual self-realization, astrology, Kabbalah, and the power of sexual ritual.
In fact, we can even see the conspiracy theories that have emerged over time on the conservative side of Western culture as a backlash against this perceived satanic, unconventional, non-Christian dabbling with witchcraft and taboo magic.
It's always the Jews, the Satanists, or the Jewish Satanists, right?
But back to our story.
And why I am offering this perhaps tangential seeming introduction for the contemporary American yogi,
I see it as important to not overlook the tension between colonialism, which looks down upon the conquered locals, and the opposite attitude, which is an idealizing of ancient and exotic cultures and indeed spirituality from those cultures as a way out of Western materialist malaise.
The positive stereotyping of non-Western cultures as embodied, intuitive, in touch with a sense of the sacred that technology and rationalism have expunged from the conventional Western experience is at the heart of wellness or New Age culture.
Yoga, meditation, Ayurveda, acupuncture, herbal remedies, astrology and even essential oils All are presented as a way back into natural holistic balance for the stressed out and disconnected, clueless American.
Intuition over reason.
Psychic trance channels over psychotherapists.
Alternative practitioners over medical doctors.
Reiki over physical therapy.
But the picture of an ancient golden age in a utopian tribal or eastern culture where people lived in balance with the earth, in harmony with nature, and in touch with the spiritual wisdom of the ages, a wisdom that of course conveniently mirrors modern and usually liberal or progressive values, this is a largely fabricated idealization.
It's also born of privilege.
The type of privilege that is oblivious to all the invisible ways that science, technology, democracy, progress in establishing as imperfectly as it is, liberal values and laws, robust capitalist economies, and significantly medicine, which robust capitalist economies, and significantly medicine, which have all given Westerners a baseline standard of living.
That includes freedom and equality under the law, again, as imperfect as they may be, but at a level that we often take for granted or assume to be the norm elsewhere.
But these are not the norm.
In so many places in the world, we choose as sources of mystical insight or as spiritual tourist destinations.
questions.
But that's not the whole story.
The aspects of personal growth, community, physical health, mental well-being, and even an expanded sense of identity and meaning that, for example, yoga practice has afforded at least three generations of Western seekers, is real.
It's easy to poke fun at, especially from the outside, and it has many blind spots and shadows, but speaking personally as a yoga teacher and practitioner, having a consistent practice is a beautiful thing.
It provides a structure for self-care and awareness that can be profoundly beneficial.
But there are aspects of how the New Age subculture relates to knowledge and authority, And how it deals with some of these underlying tensions and fantasies that can be deeply confusing and problematic.
And we're seeing this right now with COVID denialism, anti-mask rhetoric, and the yoga and wellness influencers who are becoming spreaders of misinformation and conspiracy theories designed to sway the election and sow chaos in our society.
Okay, so it's on this particular stage that I witnessed three players emerging.
Bill Gates, Dr. Vandana Shiva, and Saul David Ray.
Of the three, Saul is the least well-known, so let me just say he's a contemporary of mine, a very influential local LA yoga teacher, and a good guy.
He posted an article on social media last week by Dr. Vandana Shiva that was widely shared, appreciated, and commented upon by our fellow yogis.
If you don't know Dr. Shiva, she's an anti-globalist and environmentalist activist.
She's an author based in Delhi who has written over 20 books.
She's very focused on sustainable agriculture, food sovereignty, and pushing back against widely reviled giant agrochemical company Monsanto and global food corporation Cargill.
So far so good.
Her doctorate is in philosophy of science and her undergrad degree was in physics.
Dr. Shiva has been called an environmental hero by Time Magazine for her work promoting biodiversity in agriculture.
She sounds well positioned as a voice that liberal Americans who care about the environment, equality, and challenging corporate hegemony should want to amplify, especially yogis with an appreciation for Indian culture and spirituality.
Now, on to Bill Gates.
I saved him for last because he's the best known of the three characters in our drama.
We know the story.
He founded Microsoft.
He was the wealthiest man in the world most years since 1995, until Jeff Bezos very recently overtook him just by a smidge in 2017.
Gates has very publicly been the subject of antitrust litigation due to his business practices around monopolization, product tying, and blocking competition.
But he's also one of the most generous philanthropists alive, having donated $36 billion of his roughly $100 billion in wealth to fund the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Founded in 2000 and gradually consuming more and more of his time and energy as he increasingly eased out of his leadership roles at Microsoft.
The foundation focuses on enhancing health care and reducing extreme poverty across the globe and on improving access to education in the US.
Part of how they advance these goals is through methods that fall under the heading of venture philanthropy, which seeks to create win-win type situations for big investors to get behind projects that will benefit the social good, as well as providing endowments to companies that drive research and development.
This style of philanthropy does have its critics in terms of concerns about conflicts of interest and whether or not partnering with corporations in profitable ways really counts as charity.
Regardless, a report by the independent EMBO Press in 2008 said that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had, over the previous 13 years, distributed $2 billion to combat AIDS and malaria.
1.9 billion for immunizations and another 448 million for a variety of UN initiatives listed under the GCGH or Grand Challenges to Global Health.
Of course, we cannot leave out that in our time of pandemic and all its associated conspiracy theories, a fictionalized version of Bill Gates is an often demonized shadowy villain.
This is partially because he predicted that a pandemic like this would happen in a TED Talk five years ago, so obviously they say he's in on the conspiracy.
When asked in a survey this year by Yahoo and YouGov, more than a quarter of Americans and 44% of Republicans said they believed that Gates wanted to use a COVID vaccine to implant a microchip under their skin.
Others believe a false claim that he wants to depopulate the world with a deadly vaccine, and also that immunization efforts in Africa and India are actually about deadly experimentation on the poorest people in the world, not helping them overcome disease.
This is not the case, and that claim has been debunked.
The microchip accusation probably goes back to an invisible dye that the Gates Foundation had studied delivering with a vaccine as a possible way of tracking vaccination history in areas of the world that didn't have other medical infrastructure.
The depopulation myth comes from a misinterpreted quote about slowing population growth.
Again, in a TED talk, which is a great place to hide your evil diabolical plans, right?
Slowing population growth through providing better access to vaccines, healthcare, and birth control in poorer countries.
But in times of uncertainty and complexity, the simple answer that an evil billionaire who has convinced the world he is a good guy is actually pulling the strings to enslave us all for his own benefit or acting at the behest of some secret cabal or even supernatural evil force has an unmistakable allure for a lot of people.
Now back to our Doctor of Philosophy, Vandana Shiva and her article published on CommonDreams.org and shared widely in the yoga community.
We've established that Shiva is a scholar and an activist most people like us feel we can get behind.
But the article, entitled, Bill Gates's Global Agenda and How We Can Resist His War on Life, seems to have fallen prey to the aforementioned conspiracist allure.
She starts off by asserting that because Gates says the pandemic is a kind of war between humans and a new virus, he's exemplifying a worldview that fails to see that we are in deep relationship with viruses and microbes.
Okay, she sounds like a philosopher already.
The problem is not one of the novel virus, but of a confusion in our language game and the meaning of words.
The pandemic, she asserts, is inseparable from the ecological crises in the world, rooted in a mechanistic, I'm quoting here, rooted in a mechanistic, militaristic, anthropocentric worldview that considers humans as separate from and superior to anthropocentric worldview that considers humans as separate from and superior to other beings.
Now look, this plays well to folks in our demographic and it has a strong poetic, emotive allure.
But it really is empty rhetoric if you think about it.
What are we even talking about?
It sounds like she, like a lot of our conspiritualists right now, has been listening to Zach Bush.
His buzzwords about the virome and the microbiome and poetic appeals to extending a holistic model of immunity, illness, and symptoms as representing a lack of balance in our relationship to Mother Earth stand out here in her prose.
Likewise, the pandemic, she says, has somehow been caused by greedy capitalism.
Now, I can give her the benefit of the doubt here that a good argument might back this angle up, but that good argument is not being presented here.
Next, we segue into statistics on how the lockdown has affected poor people.
Estimating that 300,000 could die every day from hunger.
This is awful.
The lockdown is awful.
She says, killing cannot be a prescription for saving lives.
The coronavirus pandemic and lockdown have revealed even more clearly how we're being reduced to objects to be controlled, with our bodies and minds as the new colonies to be invaded.
Empires create colonies.
Colonies enclose the commons of the indigenous living communities and turn them into sources of raw material to be extracted for profits.
The extended coronavirus lockdown has been a lab experiment for a future without humanity.
So we're into the same anti-quarantine arguments that right-wing libertarians and New Age conspiracists are making, but now with the added gravitas that pits progressive social justice and environmentalist concerns against the shadowy cabal with ulterior motives that are somehow imposing tyranny via lockdown and experimenting on us as a way to eradicate our humanity.
But it is how Shiva jumps the conspiracy shark in the last third of the article that is most troubling.
She references a patent taken out by Microsoft in March, along with its ominous and technical numbered code, and asserts that this is evidence that Gates, who by the way stepped away from being CEO of Microsoft in 2000 and did head the board of directors until 2014, when he actually left the board earlier that month, supposedly wants intellectual property
over our bodies and minds.
She again compares this technology to a form of colonialism and claims it is a way of mining human beings saying rather than sovereign spiritual conscious intelligent beings making decisions and choices with wisdom and ethical values about the impacts of our actions on the natural and social world of which we are a part And to which we are inextricably related, we are users.
A user is a consumer without choice in the digital empire.
Notice the term sovereign in there.
Notice the forced black and white contrast between an assertion of what she believes this technology does and our insulted and enslaved noble humanity.
It's very, very emotionally provocative stuff.
And of course, given our current grappling, to some extent via documentary on Netflix, The Social Dilemma, with the ugly realities of how social media companies have indeed built their business model to exploit our emotions in ways that manipulate our minds, this all does sound ominous indeed.
Technology that can measure our bodily signals, brain activity, heart rate, eye movements.
This sounds very suspicious.
But she doesn't stop there.
This mining metaphor is charged.
In fact, Gates has been trying to dismantle the public education system of the United States for two decades.
For him, students are mines for data.
That's why the indicators he promotes are attendance, college enrollment, and scores on math and reading tests, because these can be easily quantified and mined.
Surely, she seems to be arguing, trying to improve standards of American education must be part of an evil plot.
The dystopia, she says, is one where children never return to schools, do not have a chance to play, do not have friends.
It's a world without society, without relationships, without love and friendship.
It's as if she and the others she echoes on these valid concerns are convinced that the quarantine measures are unnecessary and can only be explained via some covert plan, a hidden agenda that is deliberately perpetuating something we all hate for nefarious reasons.
But let's back up.
That ominous-sounding technology is worth a second look, right?
I looked into it.
Yep, I did my research.
So, Microsoft Patent W0202-0060606 Cryptocurrency System Using Body Activity Data.
What is it?
This is a patent, not for a microchip, but for a wearable technology, like a watch, that indeed measures body activity data.
It does this so as to be able to pay people for work they do in helping set up a key aspect of cryptocurrency called blockchain.
Now, cryptocurrency already sounds like something an evil movie villain would invent.
So let's keep defining things here.
Cryptocurrency is actually a way of bypassing big banking institutions by transferring money in a decentralized way that provides security via networks of individuals vouching for one another.
It's a kind of grassroots cyber solution to online payment.
But because it is decentralized, it relies on vast peer-to-peer networks of reliable transaction histories to prevent hacking and ensure secure transactions.
Within these networks, the term mining, in this case, refers to the process of validating transactions.
In exchange for doing this quote-unquote mining, Users are paid in cryptocurrency.
Certain forms of mining are harder to validate, so the technology Microsoft are attempting to patent would help more people get paid for their work, performing tasks that could be validated by body data as proof of work while wearing the device.
This is a way of increasing earning opportunities and continuing to establish secure, decentralized online financial exchange Without big banks.
Now I know, it sounds creepy.
New technology often does, especially if it's hard to understand.
But this is how conspiratorial thinking works.
It proceeds from something that sounds creepy, to a generalization like, I don't trust billionaires, to an identification like, I'm opposed to how corporations destroy the planet and step on poor people.
Add to this the authority of a doctor who is an environmental activist and just so happens to be an Indian woman well known for speaking truth to the unethical power of imperialism, and the white yogi might feel quite compelled to take her side.
Shiva takes the dark associations with both literal mining as colonialist extraction of wealth from the earth of other countries, and the current discomfort we all justifiably feel with data mining by social media companies and search engines, and she then imagines this patent must be a way of mining people for their information and their very lifeblood.
But as we've discussed, mining in this case refers to the boring work the individual is doing to establish blocks of verified transactions to try and build a secure network.
It's not a secret, not an evil plan, it's not related to any of the outlandish and slanderous spin that Shiva puts on it.
Not at all.
As is so often the case, This patent is also a document available to anyone searching online, but it is presented as a slam-dunk piece of evidence that demonstrates sinister intentions.
One thing to consider for people paranoid about being tracked, whether by microchips or wearable tech or trackers supposedly hidden in COVID masks, is to perhaps turn off the phone you're using for posting on Facebook about your sovereign rights.
Because your phone is the most high-tech, complex, effective tracking device on the planet, and social media is its signal amplifier.
But here's the thing about conspiratorial thinking.
When the factual flaws and fallacious arguments in this article were pointed out, its supporters still doubled down.
Dr. Vandana Shiva is not a conspiracy theorist, they said.
Look into her background.
Bill Gates is not to be trusted, they said.
And this patent, it just doesn't sound right.
The problem here is that the argument from authority, she's a scholar and noble brown activist, the mistrust of white billionaires who are using their money to help poor people, and the conviction that if something I don't understand just doesn't sound right, or feel right, doesn't seem natural, it must be ominous, this is the exact recipe for conspirituality.
