Why do so many inflammatory culture war issues crystallize around vaccines and masks? What is so compelling about these forms of public health and mutual aid, that they become central to the right-wing imagination?
For some, straight-up libertarianism might be a sufficient answer: the knee-jerk allergy to being asked to do anything as a social player. And beneath that might lie conspiratorial notions of Fauci being a Red, Bill Gates monetizing polio, or George Soros controlling Congress.
Matthew argues that even those are surface stories, covering over a trembling anxiety about the status of the body in relation to the State, and God.
Show Notes
Rudolf Steiner on Traditional Childhood Illnesses and Vaccines
Biss, Eula. On Immunity: An Inoculation. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2015
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This is a conspirituality brief called The Spirituality of Vaccine and Masking Panic.
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Okay, here we go.
Today, I'm announcing a petition with the Supreme Court of Florida to impanel a statewide grand jury to investigate any and all wrongdoing in Florida with respect to COVID-19 vaccines.
That is the as yet unannounced GOP presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis announcing his intent to call a grand jury to investigate public health officials and vaccine manufacturers for unspecified wrongdoing.
He also convened a hand-picked Public Health Integrity Committee of seven vaccine-skeptical quacks directed to analyze federal guidance from the CDC to make sure policies are, quote, tailored to Florida's needs, unquote.
Two of those quacks, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, are co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, published in October of 2020, which argued for the terrible idea of letting the virus rip so that herd immunity could be established through infection.
Now, a third panelist is culture warrior and former academic Brett Weinstein, famous for appearing on Bill Maher and Joe Rogan to tout ivermectin as a miracle cure for COVID.
Now, the grand jury and committee announcements followed DeSantis' statements that he'd be making the laws that ban vaccine and mask requirements permanent, which effectively ensures that Florida will not be able to respond to the next public health threat.
He has also introduced a measure to prevent the censoring of contrarian doctors who feel compelled to post misinformation.
The moves constitute a very effective reframing of COVID politics.
We're no longer in the realm of discussing the pros and cons of COVID mitigations.
DeSantis has figured out a way to completely invert the discourse, turning the public health response to the virus into the virus.
By the time anti-vax and anti-masking rhetoric institutionalizes at this level and then flips to go on the attack and start to echo calls from 8kun and Trump rallies to execute doctors and public health officials who advocated for vaccination, all kinds of noise is in play.
DeSantis is making a bet on not only anti-vax politics, but anti-vax prosecution, and he thinks this will play to his base.
He must know that that base has been galvanized by propaganda, post-vaccine tremor videos on TikTok, QAnon paranoia, the ableists who falsely link vaccination with autism, and conspirituality influencers who equate vaccines with poisons in relation to their natural products.
So his announcement is really a managerial collation and distillation of all this noise.
Here's what we know about anti-vax discourse in the COVID era.
For fame, fortune, or both, outlier contrarian doctors are willing to try to discredit germ theory and the success record of vaccinations and public masking.
Wellness influencers who have been claiming their yoga, reiki, or coffee enemas cure all diseases are extremely motivated to disparage vaccines.
And on the tech side, we know that the major social networks were just making too much engagement money to shut down the main players soon enough, who, according to a July 2020 report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, spent north of $1 billion yearly on Facebook ads.
We also know that the tech is set up to amplify outrage, which means that regular users become posting propagandists whether they were committed anti-vaxxers or not.
And that gamified engagement feels good.
It alleviates loneliness.
It bestows a toxic mimic of political power.
And for a lot of wellness folks, things are suddenly less boring.
They can do more than offer breathwork workshops and juicing regimes.
So all of that is going on and it will continue through a storm of monetized and now politicized acrimony.
What I would like to outline in this brief is the complex of spiritual beliefs that are detectable in this discourse if you can hear through the static.
My question is, why do so many inflammatory culture war issues congeal around the topics of vaccines and masks?
What is so primally compelling about these forms of public health and mutual aid that they become central to the right-wing imagination?
For some people, straight-up libertarianism might be the sufficient answer, the knee-jerk allergy to being asked to do anything as a social player.
And beneath that might lie a conspiratorial mindset, churning out Red Scare stories of Fauci being a criminal, Bill Gates monetizing polio, or George Soros controlling the White House.
But perhaps those are the surface stories that cover over a trembling anxiety about the status of the body in relation to God or the state.
So there are two parallel but competing frameworks that I'm going to nod to in unpacking this primal layer.
What conspiritualists are rebelling against are the implications of what historian and philosopher Michel Foucault dubs the biopolitics of the state.
Briefly put, these are the practices of social and political control that regulate human bodies towards functionality in productivity and empire.
Hygiene, public health, hospitals, mental hospitals, regimes of pathologization and recovery.
In short, all of the homogenizing practices that express rules for the bodily existence of acceptable citizens.
In contrast, can spiritualists advocate for the biomorality of the spiritually aligned body?
Now the scholar I'm influenced by most here is the anthropologist Joseph Alter, who shows how the modern yoga renaissance that began in India in the 1920s and was inextricably bound up in early Hindu nationalism was obsessed with medieval ideas about the spiritual nature of bodily tissues and fluids.
The body, they avowed, was a reservoir of divine substances and potentials, governed by gods, planets, and the elements.
The yogi's most precious substance, they argued, was semen, distilled from pure food, from meditation, and through the practice of celibacy.
If controlled with absorbed attention, they argued, that seed was a material form of God.
Illness, they said, was a spiritual misalignment.
To intervene with science deprived the holy body of its self-healing mysteries.
It usurped the function of the Spirit and the authority of God.
No doctor has the right to dispute what the sages have decided.
So from 30,000 feet, this is the existential question of conspirituality and wellness.
Are we biopolitic or biomoral?
Should bodily function be disciplined by the state as it manages unruly illnesses?
Or should our bodies remain committed to the divine play in which tissues and fluids are not diagnosed but praised for their sacred potential?
The biomoral, medieval wellness body carries no medical insurance.
It never uses a scale.
It doesn't wear a Fitbit or count calories.
It has no passport.
It needs no money.
It's not a good worker or a compliant citizen.
It is not the disciplined body of modern medicine, as medical anthropologist Jean Lankford writes as she describes the philosophy of Ayurveda, the traditional medicine of India.
The body of pre-modern medicine is, she writes, A fluent body, streaming with temperatures and aromas, eloquent with densities and moistures, where illness is communicated in a teeming lexicon of air currents and blockage, emotions and digestive fire.
So the fluent body that Lankford describes is not going to yield its secrets to lab tests, to probes or devices.
If it contains elements that are invisible to the naked eye, then only someone very special will be able to perceive them.
Impurities will be found through meditation, not the microscope.
And the true and vast nature of the body will remain unseen to everyone but the yogi himself who turns his practice into a stethoscope to listen for kinks and clogs in the ethereal channels that can pulse with divine substances if they are kept clean.
And it's crucial that the yogi or the Reiki master or the natural healer always retains the authority to assess the body and its illnesses through this kind of magical intuition that cannot be questioned or falsified.
When I was writing my book about how the yoga entrepreneur Patabi Joyce assaulted his students for decades, I came across this idealization everywhere.
People would say that Joyce was a mystical genius and his students believed it, that he instantly knew what was wrong in the human body and could fix it by wrenching a limb or a joint back into place while the person was deep into a posture.
One of his most devoted students, Brad Ramsey, described how he thought Joyce was seeing things.
He says, What Joyce was seeing wasn't, if I step on this guy's knee he's going to scream and he's going to be out of action for a couple of weeks.
He was seeing energy circuits.
And I believe that sometimes he was not conscious of the physical dynamic at all.
That wasn't what he was looking at.
And that's the way it's supposed to be with a guru.
In many wellness discourses, this mystical insight is contrasted with the benighted arrogance of the lab-coated nerd who is blind without machines and gadgets, who can never peer into the source of things to really know what is happening and what the soul of the person needs.
So, the bio-moral body is fluent, mysterious, knowable only through mystic means.
It can fill up with toxins, but it can also purify itself with the help of an intuitive master.
It is often a subtractive approach to health, insisting that we need do very little but to reaffirm the holy potentials of our juices.
And the problem with the additive approach of medication and vaccines, they argue, is that if your body is thought to be insufficient unto itself, then somehow God is not doing what God is supposed to be doing.
So, both vaccines and masks insult these premises of inherent invulnerability, and they question the authority of the priest.
They are delivered by state actors who promise management, not salvation.
They are signs of an empty and fallen world.
Let's think about vaccination first.
In a 1917 lecture, as the Spanish flu began to rage, Rudolf Steiner offered a divine perspective on vaccinations.
Here's what he said.
I have told you that the spirits of darkness are going to inspire their human hosts in whom they will be dwelling to find a vaccine that will drive all inclination towards spirituality out of people's souls when they are still very young.
And this will happen in a roundabout way through the living body.
Today, bodies are vaccinated against one thing and another.
In future, children will be vaccinated with a substance which it will certainly be possible to produce, and this will make them immune so that they do not develop foolish inclinations connected with spiritual life.
Foolish here, of course, in the eyes of materialists.
So does this sound familiar?
It's not just that the state or the medical industry is unethical or profit-driven or more interested in managing the masses than caring for people.
It's that vaccinators have the ultimate goal of severing the relationship between humans and the spirit world.
And just to review a point we've made elsewhere, where did Steiner's certainty come from?
Well, he basically channeled it.
Steiner claimed that he could read the Akashic Records, a kind of fantastical library floating in the great beyond that recorded all past and future history.
The Akashic Records gave him the miraculous fascist insights into Atlantis and Lemuria, into the hierarchy of races with, of course, white people on top, and into the educational theories that became the backbone of Waldorf education.
Now, Waldorf's views weren't original.
As the American writer Eula Biss recounts in her beautiful book On Immunity and Inoculation, metaphysical nausea in response to vaccines is as old as the premise of vaccination itself, and Biss begins right from the fundamentals, writing, We source our understanding of the world from our own bodies.
It seems inevitable that vaccination would become emblematic, a needle breaks the skin, a sight so profound that it causes some people to faint, and a foreign substance is injected directly into the flesh.
The metaphors we find in this gesture are overwhelmingly fearful and almost always suggest violation, corruption, and pollution.
Then, Biss tracks that fear of pollution forward.
Throughout the 19th century, vaccination left a wound that would scar.
The mark of the beast, some feared.
In an Anglican Archbishop's 1882 sermon, vaccination was akin to an injection of sin, an abominable mixture of corruption, the lees of human vice, and dregs of venial appetites that in afterlife may foam upon the spirit and develop hell within and overwhelm the soul.
It was the poison of adders, the blood, entrails, and excretions of rats, bats, toads, and sucking whelps that was imagined into vaccines of the 19th century.
This was the kind of organic matter the filth believed responsible for most disease at the time.
It was also a plausible recipe for a witch's brew.
Now, our vaccines are, if all is well, sterile.
Some contain preservatives to prevent the growth of bacteria, so now it is, in the activist Jenny McCarthy's words, the frickin' mercury, the ether, the aluminum, the antifreeze that we fear in our vaccines.
Our witch's brew is chemical.
There is not actually any ether or antifreeze in vaccines, but these substances speak to anxieties about our industrial world.
They evoke the chemicals on which we now blame our bad health and the pollutants that now threaten our environment.
As Biss tracks the poisonous brew from the cauldron to the industrial landscape, she also hints at a further insult to the biomorality of conspiritualists.
The modern polluted world is conceived of by the organically minded as an impossibly large series of interconnected and similar systems that choke out diversity and personalities, locations, food supplies, and air and water quality.
This homogenous ennui, along with the systematized medical protocols that try to mitigate the harm, provokes a kind of mania over individual needs, constitutions, enneagrams, astrological signs, styles of yoga, techniques for opening this versus that chakra, and a myriad of specialized dietary identities—gluten-sensitive, paleo, keto, vegan.
The goji berry fast is good for this person.
The celery juice fast is good for that person.
These individual approaches become unique contracts between the individual and the divine.
But what if everyone needs the same thing in the face of COVID?
Because that's what the vaccinators are saying.
Vaccination draws on a collectivist logic to prove that immunity is a group effort.
And this strikes at the heart of the consumerist economy of alternative health treatments that are marketed to consumers based on individual needs.
The very notion that every human being in the world can benefit from the exact same 0.5 mL dose of colorless vaccine is really an insult to the world of bespoke treatments.
The vaccine tells the wellness world consumer that they are not special, that they need no special crystals or remedies nor special attention.
They can wait in line like everyone else.
So what about the mask?
Why did the mask infuriate people so much?
To really understand this, you have to grok just how obsessed yoga, wellness, and new age people can be with breathing.
Pranayama, belly breathing, alternate nostril breathing, circular breathing, Taoist breathing, rebirthing breathing, which is really just hyperventilation until you have a meltdown on a group of people who will then surround you and make intrusive eye contact.
The Bhagavad Gita, which emerged from between 400 before the Common Era to somewhere around 400 of the Common Era, puts breath at the heart of all spiritual practice.
So, chapter 4, verse 29 states, Still others offer as sacrifice the outgoing breath in the incoming breath, while some offer the incoming breath into the outgoing breath.
Some arduously practice pranayama, or breath work, and they restrain the incoming and outgoing breaths, purely absorbed in the regulation of the life energy.
Yet others curtail their food intake and offer the breath into the life energy as sacrifice.
All these knowers of sacrifice are cleansed of their impurities as a result of such performances.
Now that notion of breath restraint, by the way, is said to culminate in the perfect self-discipline of being able to stop your breath altogether, and for good, in a kind of yogic suicide called Utkranti, which is like a really heavy metal medieval version of self-sovereignty because it's about choosing the exact moment of your death or your transition into enlightenment.
There's also a lot of Buddhist literature that uses the breath as a guide for meditation, but also points to a poignant metaphor.
Somewhere between inhalation and exhalation, your breath crosses over a line between the world and the self.
And if you conceive of your breathing equipment as an open door to the external world, the breath seems to always be asking the question, Where does my inside end and the outside begin?
So that can be really compelling.
In the 15th century, the primo yoga instruction manual that winds up pointing towards the wellness applications of modern day yoga claimed that if performed well, pranayama or breath control could eradicate all diseases.
But it also warned of its great power.
If done correctly, the old book says, pranayama could make a person very sick.
In more modern iterations, yoga and wellness evangelists add the sometimes pseudoscientific language of combating oxidative stress.
So let's hear from the ice bath guy, Wim Hof.
Great!
Here we are.
We are going to do the breathing.
This is the first video of the mini class.
The breathing.
Breathing, how to change the chemistry.
You know stress, oxidative stress?
It comes through the shallow breathing and a lot of stress coming in.
So much pressure on our lives and that deregulates our chemistry.
Now, I found a very effective way how to deal with this deregulative through stress coming in chemistry inside of our physiology.
body and mind are suffering normally of this wrong chemistry. And with this one, with these
exercises I'm going to show you are able to regulate your chemistry in the depth.
In a March of 2020 YouTube video, he of course suggests that his breathing method can boost
the immune system instantly against the coronavirus. So what happens when you ask this crowd to
wear masks?
It's not just an inconvenience.
It's not just submission signaling, as Kelly Brogan puts it.
It's not just the discomfort, or the tight elastic straps, or the mask getting sweaty, or bringing up feelings of claustrophobia.
Here's part of what it is for the conspiritualist and wellness devotee.
The request to mask implies that your most natural and accessible healing process, your sacred breathing, might carry a hidden danger.
And this is a double insult, because the person is being told that their innermost physical expression might be harmful to others, and that because they wouldn't know it, their self-awareness wouldn't be all that self-aware.
During COVID, the anti-masker was potentially a vector for asymptomatic spread.
But admitting this would suggest not only that the virus is real, but it would point to a lack of mindfulness or self-awareness with regard to their internal condition.
Wellness influencers must at all times believe that they are either well or that they have the capacity for self-healing.
It's essential to their identity.
And of course, the mask also really interrupts the whole selfie vibe.
It's really hard to work your resting guru face from behind in N95.
