Suspicious minds

I've long been cynical about the cult of mindfulness/wellbeing, seeing it as a means for unscrupulous quacks and grifters to cloak their capitalist greed in a tie-dye T-shirt and exploit the anxious, the vulnerable and the desperate.

But, as James Ball explains in this Guardian article (and in a new book, The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated The World), the phenomenon is significantly more troubling when you consider the evidence for what he calls "the wellness-to-fascism pipeline". Look closely, he argues, and alternative healthcare comes to seem like a gateway drug, the first formative stage in the development of right-wing conspiracy theorists.

The suggestion that a spot of yoga can lead to fascist sympathies seems faintly ludicrous at first, but researchers are finding evidence to support that case. Ball suggests a number of cogent reasons why this should be so - primarily, because those entranced by holistic therapies and the like see themselves as on the fringes of society, and are simultaneously suspicious of the mainstream and naive/gullible when it comes to alternatives. Little wonder, then, that they're susceptible to swallowing conspiracy theories of all hues.

It can be a disconcertingly short hop from environmental concerns to ecofascism, from a belief in alternative medicine to full-on tinfoil hat ravings about 5G. Sadly, I've seen as much reasonably close at hand - a friend who started buying into homeopathy prior to the pandemic became a fervent anti-vaxxer.

One of Ball's interviewees, Caroline Criado Perez, warns that we should be wary of pointing the finger at women "for turning to alternative medicine, painting them as credulous and even dangerous": "[T]he 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". As a consequence, conventional treatments are regularly ineffective, leading to a natural inclination to seek out alternatives.

However, as significant as the connection with the wellness fad is and whoever is to blame, Ball's article hints at the fact that the sharp rise in conspiracy theories and theorists is a bigger issue. He talks about the perceived need to "fill a void", given the decline of religion, and I'd also suggest a parallel or even a correlation with the way in which right-wing populist movements have emerged out of a growing disillusionment with traditional democratic processes.

And then there's the prime accelerant, the pandemic. Stringent lockdown measures, governmental incompetence and the Partygate scandal have quite understandably made people more resentful and distrustful of authority. Ball's interviewee Jane cites the impact of lockdown isolation, though not the way it forced people into living their lives in the virtual realm. A few friends of mine have certainly suffered as a result of both isolation and being terminally online, disappearing down conspiracy rabbit holes from which I can only hope they'll somehow escape.