Conspirituality - Bonus Sample: Romancing the Stoned
Aired: 2023-02-27
Duration: 06:02


=== Back to the Past (05:59) ===

[00:00:03]  Hello Conspirituality Podcast listeners.
[00:00:05]  Welcome to a sample of our weekly bonus episode.
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[00:00:34]  We'd be so much better off if we just admitted that we're making it up as we go along.
[00:00:41]  There's long been this sense that the right is in love with the past.
[00:00:45]  Specifically a 1950s Leave it to Beaver style post-war America, when industry was booming, the economy was soaring, and the middle class could just middle class without interference.
[00:00:58]  Constant growth seemed imminent.
[00:01:01]  Of course, this is a pre-civil rights, pre-feminist, heavily Christian America, which opens the sentiment up to all sorts of criticism.
[00:01:10]  At times, it feels like the right's fascination with a nostalgia that never actually existed, this myth of a perfect America, is indicative of their racism and misogyny.
[00:01:23]  And for some it likely is, though I feel that this phenomenon speaks as much to biology as sociology.
[00:01:32]  Plus, my focus here really isn't on the right, or at least not in terms of traditional conservatism.
[00:01:38]  Yes, they'd likely be better off admitting we're just making it up as we go along, but that also applies to the left and the center and everyone else.
[00:01:47]  This trend seems particularly suited for the conspiritualist left, as there's currently a lot of romanticism occurring there, especially when it comes to church attendance and homeschooling, the latter serving as a socially safer way to say religious instruction.
[00:02:04]  But throughout wellness spaces, a different type of romanticism is in plain view.
[00:02:11]  Some of this perfect time myth points to the 19th century, a period that we cover throughout the first section of our upcoming book.
[00:02:19]  Many current conspiritualist ideologies point back to this specific era, Likely due to the incredible depth of scientific advancements that occurred during this time.
[00:02:29]  And the wellness space's seeming insistence that much of this progress is unnatural and therefore bad, even though the people claiming it to be nefarious benefit from its application today.
[00:02:42]  But there's an era that points back even further, to ancient times.
[00:02:47]  Don't feel bad if you can't define ancient, as the term is being used in a meaningless way.
[00:02:52]  There's no actual date it needs to point back to because it's entirely made up.
[00:02:58]  This is something I've thought about often, but I started thinking about it specifically for this bonus episode after receiving a marketing email last week about a new Ayurveda skincare product that uses the magic of white snow mushroom, which the publicist is positioning as a hot new ingredient that's actually ancient.
[00:03:18]  This dichotomy is common, something brand new that's really just been rediscovered, and here's our influencer that found it for you.
[00:03:27]  This mindset was common when I worked in the natural foods industry back in the mid-aughts.
[00:03:33]  New products were always rolling in.
[00:03:35]  Goji berries, acai, yerba mate, raw cacao, yacon syrup.
[00:03:40]  Each company was dedicated, in marketing if not in reality, to working with regional farmers harvesting their yield organically.
[00:03:48]  And each superfood was unlocking an ancient secret to healthy longevity that's been lost in the processed food haven that is the modern American refrigerator.
[00:03:58]  Ironically, a byproduct of the post-war Republican Golden Era.
[00:04:03]  Modernity, then, is something to be rejected, a sentiment you can use your smartphone to blast out into the world, apparently without irony.
[00:04:13]  We've seen an uptick in the fervor of this messaging since the pandemic began.
[00:04:17]  COVID somehow thrust us back to a time when germ theory and vaccination weren't medical breakthroughs but questionable interventions competing with equally valid centuries-old methods.
[00:04:29]  And so you have a resurgence of terrain theory, which mingles with hints of miasma theory, yet at its most extreme is this romanticizing of the power of thought.
[00:04:40]  If you're sick, it's really something you did wrong.
[00:04:44]  It's really just a form of moral escapism that's existed in various forms of religion for centuries.
[00:04:50]  The notion that all health and wealth are mindsets and not attributable in any way to genetics, social constructs, or just plain bad luck.
[00:05:00]  Take Melissa Sell, a chiropractor we've covered in the past, whose certainty that Germanic New Medicine, a healing modality created by an anti-Semite who claims that all disease is actually a special, meaningful program of nature, results in tweets like this.
[00:05:20]  Modern society is a smoldering trash heap and ancient natural living is the phoenix rising from the ashes.
[00:05:27]  I'm so glad you're alive at this time with me so we can explore this knowledge and witness this beautiful transformation together.
[00:05:35]  While Cell has rebranded Germanic New Medicine as Germanic Healing Knowledge, the foundational ideal remains.
[00:05:43]  You, and more directly the way that you think about life, is the direct cause of every disease you'll ever experience and oh wait, disease isn't even real.
[00:05:54]  It's a teachable lesson meant to show you the true path.
[00:05:58]  And if you die in the process, that too was destined.
[00:06:01]  Sorry, bye!