Wellness is turning people into right-wing conspiracy theorists – here’s how

We’ve all followed that friend of a friend online. The one who suddenly went sober during lockdown, cut out sugar, and started posting about her hardcore juice cleanse and daily gratitude ritual. She’s dubious of modern medicine and societal convention; there’s a rumour going around that she never got vaccinated against Covid. You heard she recently moved to Bali to become a yoga instructor. That she had started cutting off friends who weren’t “aligned” with her “energy”. That she’d found a higher purpose. A calling. Then you hear that the mutual friend you have in common is in a WhatsApp group of people who are concerned she’s losing touch with reality.

This is not an unusual trajectory. Since the pandemic, much has been written about the rise of wellness and spirituality fostering a subsequent spike in right-wing ideologies; a pathway that is also cultivating conspiratorial thinking. Misinformation merchants posing as wellness gurus. In the US, there are many, including Kelly Brogan, a so-called “holistic psychologist” whose website carries the slogan: “Own your body. Free your mind.” The anti-vaxxer and New York Times bestselling author has promoted several widely disproven conspiracy theories. She went viral in 2020 for claiming that Coronavirus may not exist and that deaths from the virus were caused by fear. Elsewhere, there’s JZ Knight, another notorious anti-vaxxer who claims to have channelled a 35,000-year-old Lemurian warrior and has spewed hate for Jews and Mexicans. There’s also Amy Carlson, co-founder of the Love Has Won religious group, who claimed to heal cancer victims “with the power of love” and promoted conspiracy theories about 9/11 and UFOs. Carlson died in 2021 of alcohol abuse, anorexia and chronic colloidal silver ingestion.

All this and more is what prompted the launch of the hugely popular Conspirituality podcast, a show dedicated to exploring the unlikely crossover between the wellness industry and conspiracy theorists who err on the side of right-wing ideologies. Created after the viral anti-vax documentary films, Plandemic, the show looks at everything from New Age cults (there’s an episode on CrossFit), Scientology, and climate denialists.

While this has largely been observed as a US-focused trend, the term “conspirituality” itself was coined in the UK in a 2011 paper published in the Journal of Contemporary Religion by Charlotte Ward and David Voas. The “rapidly growing” online movement was described as a synthesis of “the female-dominated New Age (with its positive focus on self) and the male-dominated realm of conspiracy theory (with its negative focus on global politics)”. According to the research, proponents believe that “the best strategy for dealing with the threat of a totalitarian ‘new world order’ is to act in accordance with an awakened ‘new paradigm’ worldview”.

“The phenomenon had been bubbling away in the background during the previous decade, but it was largely invisible to most people,” says Voas, who is currently emeritus professor of social science at University College London. Much of the disinformation spreading was happening on the fringes of YouTube or in niche communities formed by people with chronic or terminal illnesses, who felt they had been failed by modern science. “The Covid pandemic was undoubtedly a tipping point. The social and medical crisis brought more of the population into contact with the ideas.”

As for how right-wing thinking became enmeshed in all of this, Voas suspects it boils down to the fundamental superiority that lies at the heart of conspirituality. “Conspirituality is fuelled by distrust of old sources of authority, including science, religion, mainstream media, and political leadership,” he explains. “Ironically, though, it is also characterised by a willingness to believe almost anything, if the ideas accord with our desires or suspicions. Conspirituality is a kind of crowd-sourced knowledge, where the spread of a belief is taken to be support for its content.”

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It’s not hard to see how this can become a source of concern, particularly when these voices are spreading misinformation on large platforms. But the appetite persists because we’re in an era of distrust, which is exactly what draws people into these communities. “People are looking for answers, and more importantly, alternatives,” says Dr Christopher T Conner, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Missouri. “Austerity measures since the 90s, and a failure of leadership to pass policies to help, rather than disproportionately hurt, the working classes have created a sense of apathy, despair, and hopelessness. People have lost faith in the system, and they are tired of being lied to by politicians trying to earn their vote.”

This alone isn’t worrying. That is, until you start adjusting your life choices according to this belief system. “I may trust my priest for matters of the heart and spirit, but I trust my doctor when it comes to matters of my cardiovascular system,” says Dr Conner. “The real issue, though, is that we have gotten to a point in society where someone would rather believe someone with a YouTube channel than an expert communicating through a traditional societal institution; that points to broader structural problems that we need to address.”

It might seem more pervasive in the US, but experts refer to it as a global trend. So perhaps it’s only a matter of time until we see it escalate in the UK. Polly Shute, founder of the LGBT+ wellness festival in north Devon, Out & Wild, has noticed it beginning in her sector. “I have really noticed the growth of the wellness industry over the last five years, especially post-Covid,” she says. “There are lots of positive sides to this. But the growth also makes it an attractive market commercially and politically. And the target for this is women. Even something as simple as focusing on what the perfect body looks like, for example, does not support those coming from marginalised communities.”

Perhaps it’s important to understand that beyond extremists, such as Knight and Carlson, conspirituality could be seen as a mechanism for dealing with financial and political instability. All of us could do with feeling a little more sure of what’s going on in the world and why. And if that’s subscribing to the belief that we’re from a mythological sunken continent, well, whatever works for you.

“With so much in flux on our polycrisis planet, I would suggest that our tolerance for ‘not knowing’ is being tested beyond our limits,” suggests Hamira Riaz, associate fellow of the British Psychological Society. “Conspirituality can be seen as a human coping response; it is a way of making sense of complex issues that we struggle to understand. Research suggests that people who are attracted to political extremes are more prone to black-and-white thinking, perhaps due to a lower tolerance for ambiguity. Conspiracy theories offer comfort to the brain; they are neat, simplified stories that reduce uncertainty.”

That might be an acceptable coping mechanism, so long as those simplified stories don’t have you ingesting silver, or propagating extremist views online. It might seem like a big leap. But clearly, it’s one more people are taking than you might think.