Very interesting article about how people into wellness are susceptible to conspiracy theories
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…….Thanks to wellness, QAnon is the conspiracy that can draw in the mum who shops at Holland & Barrett and her Andrew Tate-watching teenage son. The QAnon conspiracy is one of the most dangerous in the world, directly linked to attempted insurrections in the US and Germany, and mass shootings in multiple countries – and wellness is helping to fuel it.
Something about the strange mixture of mistrust of the mainstream, the intimate nature of the relationship between a therapist, spiritual adviser, or even personal trainer, and their client, combined with the conspiratorial world in which we now live, is giving rise to a new kind of radicalisation. How did we end up here?
There are many people interested in spiritualism, alternative medicine, meditation, or personal training, whose views fall well within the mainstream – and more who, if they have niche views, choose not to share them with their clients. But even a cursory online request about this issue led to me being deluged with responses. Despite most experiences being far less intense than Jane’s, no one wanted to put their name to their story – something about the closeness of wellness interactions makes people loth to commit a “betrayal”, it seems.
One person recounted how her pole-dancing instructor would – while up the pole, hanging on with her legs – explain how the CIA was covering up evidence of aliens, and offer tips on avoiding alien abduction.
“A physiotherapist would tell me, while working on my back with me lying face down, about her weekly ‘meetings’ in London about ‘current affairs’,” another said. “There was a whiff about it, but it was ignorable. Then, the last time I saw her, she muttered darkly about the Rothschilds [a common target of antisemitic conspiracy theories] ‘and people like that’. I didn’t go back.”
Some people’s problems escalated when their personal trainer learned about their work. “I had three successive personal trainers who were anti-vax. One Belgian, two Swiss,” I was told by a British man who has spent most of the past decade working in Europe for the World Economic Forum, which organises the annual summit at Davos for politicians and the world’s elite.
“It was hard because I used to argue with all of them and the Swiss made life very difficult for the unvaccinated, but the Swiss bloke insisted that, with the right mental attitude and exercise, you could defeat any illness. I was always asking what would happen if he got rabies.”
When the trainer found out the man worked for the World Economic Forum, he was immediately cut off.
Other respondents’ stories covered everything from yoga to reiki, weightlifters to alternative dog trainers. The theories they shared ranged from extreme versions of wellness-related conspiracies – about the risks of 5G and wifi, or Microsoft founder Bill Gates plotting with vaccines – to
15-minute cities, paedophile rings and bankers’ conspiracies.
Is there a reason why people under the wellness and fitness umbrella might be prone to being induced into conspiracy? It is not that difficult to imagine why young men hitting the gym might be susceptible to QAnon and its ilk. This group spends a lot of time online, there is a supposed crisis of masculinity manifesting in the “incel” (involuntary celibacy) movement and similar, and numerous rightwing influencers have been targeting this group. Add in a masculine gym culture and a community already keen to look for the “secrets” of getting healthy, and there is a lot for a conspiracy theory to hook itself on to.
What is more interesting, surely, is how women old enough to be these men’s mothers find themselves sucked in by the same rhetoric. These are often people with more life experience, who have completed their education and been working – often for decades – and have apparently functional adult lives.
But, as Caroline Criado Perez, author of Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, observes, the answer may lie in looking at why women turn to wellness and alternative medicine in the first place.
“Far too often, we blame women for turning to alternative medicine, painting them as credulous and even dangerous,” she says. “But the blame does not lie with the women – it lies with the gender data gap. Thanks to hundreds of years of treating the male body as the default in medicine, we simply do not know enough about how disease manifests in the female body.”
Women are overwhelmingly likely to suffer from auto-immune disorders, chronic pain and chronic fatigue – and such patients often hit a point at which their doctors tell them there is nothing they can do.
The conditions are under-researched and the treatments are often brutal. Is it any surprise that trust in conventional medicine and big pharma is shaken? And is it any surprise that people look for something to fill that void?…….
Peter Knight, professor of American studies at the University of Manchester, who has studied conspiracy theories and their history, notes that the link between alternative therapies and conspiracy is at least a century old, and has been much ignored.
“New age and conspiracy theories both see themselves as counter-knowledges that challenge what they see as received wisdom,” he says. “Conspiracy theories provide the missing link, turbo-charging an existing account of what’s happening by claiming that it is not just the result of chance or the unintended consequences of policy choices, but the result of a deliberate, secret plan, whether by big pharma, corrupt scientists, the military-industrial complex or big tech.”
Knight notes an extra factor, though – the wellness pipeline has become a co-dependency. Many far-right or conspiracy sites now fund themselves through supplements or fitness products, usually by hyping how the mainstream doesn’t want the audience to have them.
Alex Jones, the US conspiracist who for a decade claimed the Sandy Hook shootings – which killed 20 children and six adults – were a false-flag operation, had his financial records opened up when he was sued by the families of the victims. During the cases, it emerged he had made a huge amount of money by selling his own branded wellness products…….
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeand...-a-lie-inside-the-wellness-to-facism-pipeline