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July 3, 2023 - Conspirituality

07:43

Bonus Sample: From Pranams to Pogroms

Derek discusses the new Conspirituality book with filmmaker and podcaster Mike Hull at Powell's Books on June 26, 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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	This is what you, this is the thing you say here.
	What awakened in 2020 were the sleeping values of a century before.
	The conspirituality explosion was in part a story of bad historical ideas bursting out of their hidey holes in the gentrified yoga studios of the global global north.
	So this is something that actually we were talking about a moment ago about RFK and all of the, you know, the sort of tweet thread that he Popped up the other day.
	And the way that these, you know, these sort of conspiracy theories all sort of work under the same, they're sort of very simple sort of categories and the language is predictable.
	So the reason why is because as you say in here, like these things all grow out of Protocols of the Elders of Zion and stuff.
	Like I hate to even like, but that's, I mean that is, you know, a lot of it sort of starts In that era, right?
	Well, it all goes back to there, and I was having a conversation with someone before about RFK is very effective, and a lot of these wellness influencers we cover are very effective at brokering and binaries.
	So they start with a little bit of truth.
	We have a broken healthcare system.
	Yes, we do.
	We have an over-reliance on pharmaceuticals.
	We have a lot of doctors who turn to that as the first course of action.
	All true.
	These are all problems.
	Wellness can offer some solutions with anxiety and stress and depression, anecdotally, for different people in different measures.
	All of those things are true.
	But what you get when you get to an RFK is, we need to take down big pharma, so I'm going to be the first wellness president.
	My healthcare administration is going to be based in wellness, but it's going to be a free market solution.
	Which doesn't make sense, but that's what he's proposing right now.
	Because people have lost trust in a lot of institutions, for good reason, you have the space for people to come and to seem as if they're taking it down.
	You've also caught some controversy, my friend.
	If you look intently enough at that pattern, a political impulse begins to reveal itself.
	The conspiracy theory is a paranoid fantasy about a source of disgust that haunts our lives and must be purified.
	It is a foreign influence.
	It is unnatural and repugnant.
	It must be purified from the body with cleansing practices, purified from the mind with prayers and chants.
	And purified from one's native land with anti-immigration policies up to and including pogroms.
	That was something that I think, as soon as I read that paragraph, it made really, it made a lot of sense to me.
	And we've seen, you know, along with the rise of QAnon, along with the rise of Birkenstock conspiracies.
	I don't know what you call it.
	The left version of QAnon, right?
	The crunchy QAnon, the Lightbringers.
	I don't know, right?
	That, even though I would never think about it that way, that certainly made a lot of sense to me because we've seen growing anti-immigration, like, not just language, but the language gets more violent, it gets more virulent, and then you actually start to see acting out.
	Growing anti-Semitism, you start to see first, you know, just sort of online, then you start to see vandalism, and then you start Was that a revelation to you?
	Did it feel like a revelation to you, or did it sort of feel like an obvious conclusion as you were working through the book?
	I think a lot of it's revelation, but then the conclusions we come to, it's kind of like they're sitting there all along.
	I'll take that from a particular angle around beauty and beauty standards, because I'm working on an episode now on Andrew Huberman, who I don't consider a conspiritualist.
	He's a neuroscientist.
	He has a lot of good episodes.
	But I noticed this trend with him and others.
	So a few months ago, and I apologize, I work on episodes and I also have a full-time job where I'm a journalist, so I forget names sometimes if I'm not working specifically on that episode.
	But there was the Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover model this past year, and Jordan Peterson shared a tweet.
	With her photo saying not pretty because she happens to be a little larger.
	And so you have here you have Peterson setting this beauty standard and then you see that just toxic language by his followers under it.
	Then a few months later you have Huberman who's talking about jaw exercises.
	And he's really good when he's in his lane.
	But then for some reason, when he goes on to other podcasts, he just starts riffing on ideas and it's kind of like he's pulling them out of the air.
	And so he's talking about how some supposed studies where we do, we have weaker jaws.
	I mean, that's true.
	That's why we have molar teeth.
	That's why we have wisdom teeth.
	We have impactions.
	We have these problems.
	But he then says, if you look at a child who is not a mouth breather, Their mouth breathers are not as beautiful as children who know how to breathe through their nose.
	And I'm looking at this, I'm like, why would you make that correlation to that?
	And then you have RFK come out, and a video came out recently where he's talking about children who have autism because they were vaccinated are not as pretty as unvaccinated children.
	The threat from going to that, which is truly disgusting, but the threat of going from that To the pogroms isn't as long of a walk as I think some people realize when you have millions of people following you who are ready to identify somebody who might be a little larger or might mouth breathe or something and then you're like yeah that's a problem.
	So that walk I think that's the revelation I think is that distance is not as long as I suspected it to be.
	At one point you mentioned that you and Matthew and Julian have all sort of flirted with conspirituality on your paths.
	I would say that Matthew and Julian did a bit more than flirt.
	I would say they at least dated conspirituality quite seriously.
	So describe a little bit about all three of you and the way you actually interacted with this before pushing against it.
	It's fascinating.
	We have a lot of internal tension.
	We talk about it sometimes, but we have different points of view and it also comes from our experiences.
	I think that makes the podcast and the project better because that tension is because sometimes I'll be pushing back on Matthew or him on me and Julian's kind of the moderator between us.
	But we all push each other in such a way to create a better product and a more thoughtful product.
	Hopefully, you know, that's what we're going for.
	And Matthew was in two cults.
	Full on, like living there, being in there, being the transcriber for Michael Roach and then with Charles Anderson, this A Course in Miracles cult that he was in.
	And then Julian with Anna Forrest was, we call it cult adjacent.
	She has a culty vibe and he was very in that, but then it actually drove a wedge in his family and that created problems.
	I was very invested in the yoga world, but I don't know, I grew up with a strong bullshit detector from my father, and anytime people started promising me things, I was immediately like, no, no, I don't know about that.
	Even though I don't say I'm a practicing Buddhist, I'm not, but I have a degree in world religions, and Buddhism always made the most sense to me, and the reason That Buddha developed his own sort of ideology was because he was studying under two yoga masters.
	They kept telling him, if you do this, you'll be like us.
	And he was like, I don't want to be like you.
	I want to figure this out myself.
	And I do think I have had that attitude.
	So anytime I got pulled a little too far into something, I was sort of, because I practiced a lot of Jiva Mukti in New York City.
	And it has a pretty vegan, cult-y vibe.
	I'm not against veganism, but that particular brand is a little bit rough.
	And any time I started getting pulled in a little too much, I was like, no, I have to pull back from that.
	Matthew and Julian realize that now.
	I mean, that's how we got where we are.
	But it wasn't always that way for them.
	Have you ever used namaste as a greeting outside of the yoga room?
	Outside of the yoga room?
	No.
	Okay.
	No.
	That counts then.
	Just to you.
	Fair enough.

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