5 Reasons Spirituality may draw You to conspiracy Theories
#Conspirituality
Spiritual and conspiracy culture seems to intersect more and more. There are several elements that lead spiritual people towards ‘truth-seeking’, which more and more often turns open-minded festival fairies, holistic healers, yoga practitioners and New Age hippies into sharing some concerning ideologies. If you live a spiritually connected and holistic life, are wondering what’s going on with that, and why these seemingly empowering narratives are actually quite far from love and light, this article is for you.
(Trigger warning: Antisemitism/ Nazis)
1. Your spiritual awakening
At some point in your life, you have discovered a world far beyond the ordinary, a world very different to the world most people live in. Maybe you were born into a family that raised you with this different perspective since early on in your life. But more likely your experience was similar to mine – after a mystical experience you also found yourself suddenly alienated from family and friends, trying to bridge worlds, having to explain the ineffable. This experience can not only make you feel somewhat lonely at first. But it can also lead to distrusting their judgement, views and opinions: If they can’t understand this, what else are they blind to?
2. You’ve learned to sense subtle energies
When you become more in tune with yourself and your surroundings, may it be through meditation, yoga, plant medicine or any such things, something interesting happens – you begin to pick up the subtle energies of people and places. You walk into a house and sense something is off. Your chest feels a little heavy, your breath restricted and if this was your house you would immediately open up all the windows and burn some white sage. Or you walk into a place and, aside from finding it pretty, there is something about the space that makes your heart feel light, vast, and expansive. You feel immediately comfortable and involuntarily you take a deep breath in to soak up your environment. Chances are though that people traveling with you are oblivious to these sensations – and you place your intuition feel yourself alienated from their limited perception of things.
3. You’ve felt the power of ritual and ceremony
I can remember rituals I created at home by myself as well as ceremonies with other women that have truly and deeply changed my life. I was able to let go of unhealthy patterns and brought in a lot of love, beauty and healing, sometimes literally changing the trajectory of my entire life. The world of science would argue that rituals and ceremonies are empty gestures whose only power lies in the belief of their participants. Whether this is true or not we’ll discuss another time. However, truth be told, science can be a rather patronising when it comes to spiritual experiences. This can easily create a rift and lead to anti-science sentiments.
4. You’ve seen the limitations of western bio-medicine and experienced wellbeing through alternative medicine or spiritual practices
Unfortunately, the interconnectedness, or rather the oneness of body, mind and soul hasn’t quite reached our western biomedicine yet. As someone who used to suffer from psychosomatic stomach pains, stress-related UTIs and chronic backpain with no number of specialists, biopsies and MRIs finding anything wrong with my body I’ve seen the shortcomings and insufficiencies of western bio-medicine myself– it failed me pretty hard at some point. I know many people who benefitted enormously from yogic practices, TCM and Ayurveda – but while western biomedicine is far from flawless and alternative practices can bring actual improvement, we shouldn’t reject it all together (and I don’t think anybody seriously would – if you broke your leg tomorrow, you wouldn’t go to a naturopath, a yoga class or try meditate the pain away, you’d be on your way to a hospital). But feelings of frustration, disillusionment or even despair about the limitations of western medicine can quickly lead to a general distrust towards the medical system as a whole.
5. You see the shortcomings of “the system”
Sometimes you get to the point of wondering what the hell went wrong with this world. People left right and centre burning themselves out, exhausting and overstressing themselves to accumulate fancy shit they don’t need, wearing expensive brand clothing that was manufactured by children’s hands and polluted several Asian rivers is considered absolutely normal, even aspiring in our society. You see the horrific exploitation of workers who barely make a living, you see factory farming and the utter abuse of animals, you see deforestation, fracking and the dwindling of biodiversity. You see the corruption in politics, large scale poverty, violence, and suffering. You might ask yourself how the f*ck we got into this mess and start looking for explanations…
What you might not know about conspiracy theories
Generally, the interest in conspiracy theories comes from wanting to understand how we got into a given mess, combined with the somewhat understandable distrust of mainstream narratives. And over all the interest in uncovering conspiracies comes from the wish for you and those close to your heart to be free, safe, and well. No malicious intent anywhere near, right?
Well… Conspiracy theories have a longstanding tradition among inhumane, hateful, far-right political ideologies and have long been instrumentalised to spread fear and racial and group hatred, as well as endorse a charismatic leader as the only one who can right all the wrongs of this world. Can you sense the whiff of a neatly groomed rectangular moustache, or maybe even a little tanning lotion with a blond fringe wafting in the air?
The narrative of a Jewish world conspiracy was a fundamental part of legitimising the genocide against millions of people during the third Reich with Hitler and others actively pushing the story. We still find almost identical antisemitic structures in the conspiracy narratives of today where the description of people it deems responsible for a given mess – rich, greedy, manipulative, evil, having power over politics and media, even satanic and bloodthirsty – reproduce the EXACT antisemitic stereotypes that have been ascribed to Jews for centuries. While in today’s times outright antisemitism has become rather unfashionable, we still find it sloppily concealed in the narratives around a New World Order controlled by the financial elite, the Rothschilds or George Soros – all three terms being codes for ‘Jews’.
Nazi hippies?
Obviously, this does not mean that every person who believes 9/11 was an inside job or that corona is a hoax, is automatically also a Nazi. But its important to know the ideology underlying these conspiracy theories and this particular world view, and that you or people close to your heart might be fueling them. In the last few months I had a friend, who I know through the Cape Town / Western Cape hippy culture, respond to my telling them about the ongoing German lock-down (contact restrictions, being asked to stay and work from home) with “sounds like Nazi Germany” – which obviously couldn’t be further from reality. And I have friends who organise wonderful spiritual community festivals, who are also big into conspiracy theories and have tried to convince me that the holocaust actually never happened, that barely any people were killed, and that Hitler was actually not that bad. Starting to sound quite fascist, right? (For more on the weird link between the far-right and hippies, check out Jules Evans’ article on Nazi Hippies).
It is concerning when young, liberal, openminded, loving and spiritual people who are generally against discrimination, racism, sexism, and violence all of a sudden, through red-pilling, truth-seeking and conspiracy theories, start aligning themselves with or play into the hands of conservative, right-wing politics. Right-wing politics that promote guns, sovereignty, deny women the right over their own bodies, and equate refugees and immigrants with criminals.
Now, to be clear. We must challenge mainstream narratives about our own bodies, we must challenge the pharma industry, we must challenge the disenchanted secular worldview and we must criticise the government. And I’m not saying there aren’t any real conspiracies. But we must be careful not to adopt a perspective that reproduces antisemitism, rejects life-saving medical interventions, or portrays a conservative, abusive political leader as a light-worker. Since Covid-19, the amount of harmful conspiracy theories has skyrocketed – conspiracy theories which are a breeding ground for dehumanisation and violence. As people who value community, freedom, healing, wholeness, creativity and kindness we must challenge the dominant culture, but instead of supporting dangerous ideologies, let’s focus on supporting what will actually support the values we hold – democracy, equality, humaneness and compassion.
