Breathing Together: QAnon and the New Age
Parts 0ne-Four of Eight
Part One
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. – W.B. Yeats
All that is solid melts into air. – Karl Marx
Throughout 2020 and 2021, following the police murder of George Floyd, the nation reacted to the cries of dark-skinned “Others” demanding racial justice: I can’t breathe! At the same time, millions were struggling with covid, literally unable to breathe easily. Meanwhile, many privileged white people were searching for meaning in an incomprehensible world – by breathing together – and others were busy relegating them to the fringes.
In my essay on false equivalencies, I discuss one way that society’s gatekeepers exclude and demonize progressive thought by associating it in the reader’s mind with bizarre right-wing claims, thereby delegitimizing both:
Countless websites and books are devoted to narratives that marginalize anyone who questions the dominant paradigms...They typically do this by identifying “loony” theories from the perspective of the “rational center”...with patronizing, pseudo-psychology, they explore the unconscious motivations of conspiracy theorists, be they fascists or anarchists, Christians or Pagans, oligarchs or street people...They want us to forget about radical change because – they tell us – some of its adherents and some of their proposals are as laughably, preposterously unacceptable as are those on the other extreme.
The use of the term “conspiracy theory” is one of the main ways in which they banish any legitimate criticism of those in power...The intent is insidious, even if often sincere. The only position that reasonable people could hold (they say) is the only one that remains, C – the consensual center that ranges between “not as crazy as A” to “not as crazy as B.”
Many writers claim to analyze what they denounce as conspiracy theories, and all the ones I’ve seen, left or right, serve that gatekeeping function. Even though most of their analysis applies primarily to right-wingers, they consistently associate the same faulty thinking with people on the left.
But here is something new. For 160 years, citizens could view photographs to determine what was true. The image was reality. In this age of fake news, “alternative facts” and AI, however, when any image can be manipulated, reactionaries have become skilled at offering theories with superficially progressive themes, but which, upon closer inspection, reveal different agendas. They rely on the inability of countless good-hearted people who consume their well-funded rants to discriminate the former from the latter. One writer refers to these folks as “DRH” for “Down the Rabbit Hole.” I suggest another term: “New Age Conspiracists,” or NACs.
The popularity (seen by 84 million people and translated into 27 languages) of the 2011 film Thrive is an example. Its creator Foster Gamble featured many progressive thinkers but concealed his own libertarian views. Learning about them, ten of the participants publicly denounced the film. For more, see my blog, The Mythic Foundations of Libertarianism. Later in this essay, we’ll consider the massive impact of social media “influencers”.
The pandemic year 2020 saw massive resistance to social distancing and masking guidelines that overlapped with vaccine skepticism. Most of it emanated from right-wing and libertarian sources. But many left-wingers also favored personal choice on these matters – and the right was well aware of this. Hence the appearance of “free-speech” websites such as Londonreal that, like Thrive, included articles by Noam Chomsky along with the usual ads for gold and crypto investments. But the further one followed their links, the more explicitly right-wing claims appeared.
Let’s get a few things straight. Of course, there are conspiracies in which powerful people privately discuss their shared goals and strategies. After all, to con-spire is merely to “breathe together.” Call it the Committee of 300, the Illuminati, oligarchs, the British Royal Family, the Rothschilds, the Israelis or the Khazarian Mafia – or just call it late capitalism and neo-colonialism rationally pursuing its short-term goals. Such people would be crazy not to meet periodically to shape national policies and international trends in their interests. In this kind of a world, Trumpus is merely a minor thug, a useful idiot, while the aristocrat George H.W. Bush was Capo di Tutti I Capi of the Deep State.
“Deep State” is a phrase that NACs use too loosely. So I’ll try to define it from three perspectives:
1 – From the Center: The Deep State is the entrenched status quo whose members, lazy career bureaucrats, care only to protect their jobs and benefits. More charitably, it is composed of government regulatory agencies such as the EPA and FEMA that exist permanently, keeping the whole thing going, regardless of who inhabits the White House. Indeed, many such people heroically resisted Trumpus’ anti-environmental initiatives from within the bowels of various bureaucracies. For more, read here.
2 – From the Right: The Deep State is “Big Government,” ideologically devoted to piling up infinite numbers of regulations intended to crush personal initiative and redistribute wealth to the undeserving poor. Ronald Reagan said, “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” He was making what I call mythological assumptions. Only in America, with its aggrandizement of radical individualism, do we consider poverty to be the fault of the individual. Similarly, we celebrate people who claim to have accumulated their fortunes without the benefits of inheritance or the assistance of that same State in the form of a regressive tax system and military interventions. My essay Blaming the Victim shows how these cruel beliefs are rooted in American religious thinking.
This is the libertarian perspective of many NACs, who view regulatory agencies as elements of a conspiracy to deprive them of the right to choose for themselves, especially in matters of health. But this thinking can slide down a continuum that posits secret groups that control even the Deep State itself. In the most extreme scenarios, they are composed of demented (or Jewish) pedophiles determined to impose an authoritarian world order.
Note another mythological assumption: a dualistic world of extreme good and extreme evil. This thinking had its roots in ancient Zoroastrianism, became solidified in early Catholicism and justified centuries of European barbarism that produced the Holocaust and the genocides of the 21st century.
3 – From the Left: The Deep State is what we once called “the establishment”, or Military-Industrial Complex, and the media, academics, diplomats and covert operatives who do its bidding. Now we could call it the Military / National Security / Intelligence / Corporate / Petrochemical / Big Pharma / Big Banking / Big Agriculture / High Tech Complex. Before selling his soul to the Devil,
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explained,
…the Deep State does exist. It has already obliterated the middle class...The real power behind the curtain is a conglomeration of corporations – coal, oil, chemical, steel and pharmaceutical, recently joined by telecom, Big Tech/Big Data – all bound, in a web of corruption, to our global military-intelligence apparatus…Anyone who doubts that the Deep State exists should read the myriad histories of the…Central Intelligence Agency, including Tim Weiner’s “Legacy of Ashes,” David Talbot’s “The Devil’s Chessboard” and James Douglass’s “JFK and the Unspeakable.”
From this perspective, government is not inherently bad, and there have been good ones, but it has been so utterly corrupted by capitalism that its major products are a culture of fear and a perpetual state of war. It crushes the imagination and redistributes the national wealth to the undeserving rich. Note another mythological assumption: nothing in our 400-year history has so deeply held our attention and limited our natural kindness as fear of the Other (the internal Other of race and the external Others of immigration, communism and terrorism). Leftists see little practical difference between Big Business and Big Government. When Defense Secretary Charles Wilson said, “What’s good for General Motors is good for America” in 1953, he was speaking quite literally.
The F.B.I. is an example of the Deep State. Like any institution, its first function is, quite simply, to grow larger. It does this by heightening the national sense of paranoia with contrived terror threats that justify its budget, although individual agents may work to counter the politicized directives of the leadership. Right wingers claimed that it was enacting Joe Biden’s agenda to prevent Trumpus from running for President in 2024, and QAnon saw it as helping Big Pharma repress vaccine truth, while to leftists it was both the domestic arm of the U.S. empire (the CIA being the international arm) and a semi-private police force, helping every president persecute his rivals.
Of course, people conspired to kill John F. Kennedy. Even the U.S. Senate found this to be likely. Of course, elements within the government conspired to assassinate Martin Luther King. Indeed, a court determined that this is a legal fact. Obviously, members of Bush’s administration had some foreknowledge of the 9-11 attacks and did nothing to prevent them. And there are plenty of broader conspiracies to worry about.
But many people who reject the official narratives and understand that the mainstream media (MSM) have shaped a false picture of the world for decades, can get caught up in the paranoia. Rejecting the center as illegitimate and the media as mendacious, identifying as mavericks out on the margins, they may find other fringe opinions appealing. Some gatekeepers speak of the “Horseshoe theory”, with the far-left and the far-right closer to each other than either is to the center.
Rather than being a straight line, the political spectrum is shaped like a horseshoe. From this perspective, when we conclude that all we’ve been taught is wrong, we may entertain the possibility that any alternative may be right. Historian Michael Gordin writes:
…most devotees of a fringe theory are usually committed to more than one…given the prevalent tendency for people to get their information from specific, often partisan social networks, publications and radio shows, theories emerge in one of them and can quickly migrate across platforms, stacking fellows on the way...the fringes come with complex, interconnected social substructures and serve as sources of identity...They provide meaning to how adherents think about the world, much as the mainstream scientific consensus does.
Not long ago, most conspiracy theories were clearly divided between right (Obama “Truthers”) and left (CIA drug dealing, military coups). Gradually, many came to muddy the distinctions, especially on health issues, with conservatives mistrusting the government for intruding on their liberties and radicals criticizing Big Pharma’s corruption of the FDA and the CDC. Meanwhile, the liberal, rational center – the abode of the gatekeepers – desperately holds to a naïve trust in objective and incorruptible science, a working democracy, honest mainstream media who inform us (rather than selling us to their sponsors) and a foreign policy that protects freedom.
But then something new happened. The obvious lies of the official 9-11 narrative abruptly brought people on right and left together, if with different conclusions. Meanwhile, the MSM attempted to marginalize all dissent in favor of unified military belligerence, just as they had done 84 years before to drag the nation into World War One, 60 years before to drag the nation into World War Two, 37 years before to drag the nation into Viet Nam and only nine years before to drag the nation into Iraq.
Writers such as David Icke (who was interviewed in Thrive but did not repudiate it) have taken advantage of these people – some of the 100 million Americans who no longer vote – to posit secret groups that control the destiny of the entire world. This leads us to QAnon.
Part Two: Q
The essence of American politics is the manipulation of populism by elitism. – Christopher Hitchens
At the core of the QAnon narrative is a sinister, global power struggle. On one side is a depraved group of pedophiles, sowing chaos and strife to create a pretext for their rule. On the other side are decent people who are tired of being deceived by the power brokers and their MSM collaborators. But patriotic elements within the military recruited Trumpus, who has worked behind the scenes to defeat the evildoers.
Whoever Q is (or are, or were), its millions of followers received thousands of hints about its agenda, and Trumpus himself (who many believe to be Q) took full advantage of it. During his first term, he amplified dozens of posts from pro-QAnon social media accounts and promoted QAnon-supporting political candidates. After leaving office, he amplified QAnon-promoting accounts over 800 times.
A promise of foreknowledge of the approaching great awakening was part of Q’s appeal, as is the feeling of being part of a secret community, which was reinforced through the use of acronyms and ritual phrases such as “Nothing can stop what is coming” and “Trust the plan.”
Covid added another dimension. Those who had legitimate concerns about corporate corruption of federal regulation were skeptical of the emerging medical consensus, with QAnon asserting that the evil cabal of insiders deliberately created the pandemic or was exploiting it to frighten the public into accepting a totalitarian world government under permanent medical martial law. William Stranger writes:
The QAnon conspiracy represents nothing less than the chickens coming home to roost for the massive loss of public trust created by the plethora of outlandishly uninvestigated, under-investigated, and even fraudulently investigated marquee crimes in American history...
But many were not aware that QAnon is well-situated in a long – and highly racialized – American tradition in which people who feel threatened by evil cabals are in fact relatively well-off. It’s a story about
But many were not aware that QAnon is well-situated in a long – and highly racialized – American tradition in which people who feel threatened by evil cabals are in fact relatively well-off. It’s a story about privilege and victimhood, and it’s an excuse for violence, real or vicarious, that we’ve been telling ourselves ever since the first massacre of Indians in the early 17th century. But in this new version (prior to Biden’s election), the savior was the President himself, who was arguably the most powerful person in the world already, and his people were already in charge. It’s a story that seems to have been designed to cope with the cognitive dissonance caused by the gap between Trumpus as his fans imagine him and his actual policies.
How to know what’s true? Caitlin Johnstone suggests that QAnon:
1. Has always excused Trumpus’ facilitation of corporate agendas.
2. Has always refused to prove the validity of its position.
3. Has always made inaccurate predictions.
I add a fourth point, as questions: How many people claiming to be victims of the deep state are people of color? Or are they people who are generally privileged and almost universally white?
But mythologists cannot wallow in our own form of patronizing self-deception. QAnon was (or is) a mass phenomenon that at its core represents a legitimate if misdirected anger at secular modernity. Johnstone continues:
...it’s an obvious propaganda construct designed to manufacture support for the status quo among people who otherwise would not support it. It presents itself as an exciting movement where the little guy is finally rising up and throwing off the chains of the tyrannical forces…yet in reality all it’s doing is telling a discontented sector of the population to relax and “trust the plan” and put all their faith in the leader of the U.S. government.
And that’s exactly what makes QAnon so uniquely toxic...it’s a fake, decoy imitation of what a healthy revolutionary impulse would look like. It sells people on important truths that they already intuitively know on some level...It takes those vital, truthful, healthy revolutionary impulses, then twists them around into support for…the agendas of the Republican Party.
The Anti-Fascist Network places Q and its strategies squarely within an old tradition:
Part of the fascist strategy is to misguide people into thinking the centrist neoliberal policies that trouble them are leftist policies. The far-right then pretend to be rebels against capitalism, whilst in fact standing for an even more extreme and brutal form of capitalism.
Benito Mussalini, who invented the word “Fascist”, defined it as the union of the state and capitalism.
Eventually, most haters moved on to more specific agendas, leaving a core group of religious fanatics. For three weeks in November, 2022 a Q-inspired crowd of a hundred kept a vigil at Dallas’ Dealey Plaza, waiting for the return of John F. Kennedy’s son, JFK Jr.
To simply dismiss these people, however, is to ignore the implications of two of the basic ideas I’ll be addressing further on. The first is that even a broken clock is right twice a day. For example, writes Russ Baker,
When I published a massively documented reappraisal of recent American political history, Alex Jones wanted to share my findings with his audience, when others wouldn’t go there...He wasn’t skilled or sophisticated enough to know exactly what to do with this information (and maybe not principled enough to resist sensationalizing or adulterating it), but he shared it with a large audience that might otherwise not be exposed to it…Jones was not merely a creature of his own overheated ambition. It was in some respects the American “mainstream media” that – by consistently catering to the establishment and suppressing important, factual stories…by ignoring, insulting, dismissing, or seeking to destroy hard-working, independent authors and journalists whose only sin was to seek the truth – made it possible for Alex Jones to thrive. They created the space that allowed him to devolve into the monster we know today.
Q followers agree with progressives that the mainstream media and mainstream political parties can’t be trusted, and some of the things that Q people say may well sound superficially attractive. But – and here is my second idea – we all need to learn how to discriminate, to notice when the clock really is broken, why it’s been broken and who broke it.
The issue is complicated by the technological changes of the past ten years. Despite those few points of agreement, Q followers no longer share a common language with progressives. The documentary The Social Dilemma reveals that the major social media sites have deliberately ensured that these people don’t ever read or hear the same news that progressives do.
Still, we acknowledge that the worst lies can be effective if they contain a core of truth. The great majority of Americans are suffering from a brutal economic system and behind that, a soul-killing mythology that has produced an epidemic of depression. The one thing all but the happy ten percent agree on is the need for change, of which Q is a “decoy imitation”.
I’m interested not so much in its Tea Party, libertarian or evangelical followers, most of whom identified as Republicans long before Q arose and have returned to their roots as it disappears. I’m curious why so many New Age Conspiracists fell for this con, which appears to be related to a strategy to rebrand certain right-wingers as “new paradigm influencers.” But first we need to detour through American history and myth.
Part Three: The Mythology of Gatekeeping
Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. – Andre Gide
Belief means not wanting to know what is true. – Friedrich Nietzsche
As both American history and American mythology have shown us, it is always easier to blame others for our troubles – dark-skinned people or dark-web conspiracies – than it is to admit our own darkness. Chapter seven of my book discusses what I call the Paranoid Imagination, tracing it backwards to the roots of Christianity and forward to the beginning of the American Republic and its original fascination with the Illuminati:
The paranoid imagination seeks itself: it constantly projects its fantasies outward onto the Other and then proceeds to demonize it. Therefore, it finds conspiracies everywhere. In 1798, ministers whipped up hysteria about a tiny Masonic group. Anticipating McCarthyism by 150 years, one minister ranted: “I have now in my possession...authenticated list of names.” In 1835, future President John Tyler blamed abolitionism on “a reptile who had crawled from some of the sinks of Europe...to sow the seeds of discord among us.”
The classic text on our unique willingness to search for that “reptile” is Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964), and many of our gatekeepers still quote it when pontificating about conspiracy theories. But Hofstadter had his own critics, who noted his tendency to conflate left-wing and right-wing populism and ignore their significant differences. In other words, Hofstadter himself was a gatekeeper who encouraged the same kind of false equivalencies that I’ve been talking about.
We don’t need another study of conspiracy theories. What we do need is a deeper understanding of why we become part gatekeepers, why we reflexively reject what doesn’t appear to be “common sense” and learn to marginalize others. We need to learn to discriminate. Indeed, we can learn much from their analyses of right-wing conspiracism. However, as they invariably express the anxiety of the Center, they cannot resist the temptation to falsely equate right and left. Steve Clarke and Brian Keeley offer a useful definition:
A theory that traces important events to a secret, nefarious cabal, and whose proponents consistently respond to contrary facts not by modifying their theory, but instead by insisting on the existence of…circles of high-level conspirators controlling most or all parts of society.
There is a strong similarity to religious cults. Renee DiResta argues that there is no self-correction process within cults, since true believers are immune to fact-checking or conflicting opinions:
When people get involved in a movement, collectively, what they’re saying is they want to be connected to each other. They want to have exclusive access to secret information other people don’t have, information the powers that be are keeping from the masses, because it makes them feel protected and empowered.
But for a true insider’s view, consider New Yorker contributor Jonathan Kay’s book Among the Truthers:
In America…life’s losers have no one to blame but themselves...the conceit that they are up against some all-powerful corporate or governmental conspiracy comes as a relief: It removes the stigma of failure and replaces it with a more psychologically manageable feeling, anger.
We first note his blind acceptance of American myth: “...losers have no one to blame but themselves.” But his observations make some sense, even if he uses pop psychology to patronize his subjects. In mythological terms, this is Apollo the lone archer killing from afar, as opposed to the drunken Dionysus, god of the common people. To patronize is to label oneself as an expert – smarter, more advanced – to be what Spanish speakers call el patron. Kay excels in this tactic, peppering his writing with phrases like “quackery,” “satisfy his hunger for public attention,” “typing out manifestoes on basement card tables,” “something they fit in between video gaming and Facebook,” “college-educated Internet addicts,” “faculty-lounge guerillas,” and the false equivalency of “Glenn Beck and Michael Moore.”
Should we take this guy (and his editors) seriously? More importantly, can we identify their agenda?
Ultimately, Kay tells us more about the psychology of objectivity and the “experts” than about their subjects. It is precisely this east-coast, quasi-academic style and devaluing of flyover-state values that has driven millions of white working-class men either into reactionary politics or out of political engagement entirely. As Chris Hedges writes:
The longer the power elite and the liberal class speak in words that no longer correspond to reality, the more an embittered populace loses faith in traditional systems of government and power (and) leaves the disenfranchised open to manipulation by the demagogues…Those cast aside are often willing to listen to anyone, no matter how buffoonish or ignorant, who promises that the parasites and courtiers who serve the corporate state will disappear. Right-wing rage is becoming synonymous with right-wing populism.
So we find ourselves divided into perhaps five (sometimes overlapping) groups. First, there is a progressive, activist, young, mostly non-white, often non-binary community who question the fundamental aspects of the myth of American innocence and have elected Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City.
Second, we have a tiny but vastly influential class of media gatekeepers (divided into either true believers or con men), whose mandate is to maintain the illusion of innocence and objectivity for (Three) the great majority in the center, innocently inhaling American myths along with their TV news.
Fourth, the true believers on the right who, despite their white privilege, consider themselves victims of the center, which they equate with the Left. Many of them take a very selective “libertarian” stance (see Uncivil Liberties: Deconstructing Libertarianism). You can read my introductory essay, “The Mythic Foundations of Libertarianism” here.) At the far end of this continuum are the last of the Q followers, many of whom apparently see no contradiction in, for example, their support of both Trumpus and the Black Lives Matter movement, or of both personal choice on vaccines and their willingness to execute abortion providers. “Libertarians” who would ban abortion?
Fifth, we have those grandchildren of the sixties who anticipate an Aquarian Age on Earth if only everyone would think positive thoughts, but unaware of how they are being manipulated, cannot discriminate right from left or right from wrong. They are all over the map – re-posting on Facebook from both progressive and ultra-right sources, alternately denouncing racism and praising those who enforce it.
Psychology gets us only so far. I prefer mythological and religious-historical perspectives. In Chapter Seven I identify a trend in early American Protestantism:
Cooperation between northerners and southerners birthed a paradoxical mix of extreme religious and modern Enlightenment values. Man was fallen and sinful, yet he could become whatever he wanted. Indeed, in 1776 – for the first time in history – a nation proclaimed the pursuit of happiness as its prime value. Soon, Tocqueville observed of American preachers, “...it is often difficult to be sure when listening to them whether the main object of religion is to procure eternal felicity in the next world or prosperity in this.”
Where else but in America would there exist a doctrine known as the “Prosperity Gospel”? QAnon may have been propelled by paranoia, but it utilized familiar apocalyptic language. In his 1957 book, The Pursuit of the Millennium, historian Norman Cohn examined this thinking and found one common condition. It consistently emerged in regions where rapid social and economic change was taking place – and the rich were ostentatiously displaying their wealth. This was true in Europe during the 11th-century Crusades and during the Black Death of the 14th century. Here are two essays on apocalyptic thinking, one by Michael Meade and one of mine in which I argue that millenarians always mistake the need for internal, symbolic change for literal end-of-days:
...we must step away from literalist thinking (whether New Age or fundamentalist) and accept that in biological, ecological, mythological or indigenous initiatory terms, to end is nothing other than to die. Only when death and decay are complete can they be the necessary precursors to fermentation and potential new growth...
“End times” is also a metaphor for the archetypal cry for initiation. It is our own transformation – the death of who we have been – that we both fear and long for. The soul understands that there is no initiation into a new state of being unless we fully accept the necessary death of what came before...(but) when we can no longer imagine inner renewal, we see literal images elsewhere. We project our internal state onto the world and look for the signs of world changes “out there.”
The literalization of mythic images occurs everywhere that mythic thinking has broken down. But we know that a social or even political movement has elements of specifically American religiosity by the unmistakable smell of money.
The Q universe’s most prominent figures have produced numerous books, radio shows, chat software and far-right platforms such as Gab, which attracts many people banned from Twitter. Bloggers offer options for people to pay extra for exclusive material. They carry ads on YouTube, where Dave Hayes’ videos have been viewed over 33 million times.
Like its Christian model, this belief system, with its paranoid notions of overwhelming influence, control and victimhood, is literalistic, paranoid, misogynist, hierarchal and dogmatic. It reduces the great mystery to simplistic dualisms. Its lone savior-figure is all-knowing and all-powerful. And, like its model, this mythology cannot include its evil opposite. So it requires other mythic figures to carry that role. The faithful have eliminated the Devil and substituted the Illuminati, Bill Gates, the Clintons, George Soros or the Reptile beings. Rejecting paradox, diversity and ambiguity, they demand belief, which implies not merely a single set of truths but also the obligation to convert – or eliminate – those who question it.
This heritage is perhaps three thousand years old. Or, if we were to take a feminist perspective, we could say that its antecedents extend 2,000 years further back, to the origins of patriarchy itself. But by the beginning of the Christian era, it had solidified into the dualistic thinking that ultimately led to the mentality of the crusader. Here is more insight from Cohn’s Pursuit of the Millennium:
The elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted and yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic, demonic powers to the adversary…The tyranny of that power will become more and more outrageous, the sufferings of its victims more and more intolerable until suddenly the hour will strike when the Saints of God rise up and overthrow it. Then the saints themselves, the chosen, holy people who have groaned under the oppressor’s heel, shall inherit the earth. This will be the culmination of history; the kingdom of the saints will not only surpass in glory all previous kingdoms, it will have no successors.
Cohn points out another characteristic of those times when the oppressed saints “rise up and overthrow.” In his examples from Northern Europe, they begin by attacking their rich overlords, but finding them too powerful, quickly move on to massacring more traditional scapegoats, the Jews.
Much Q-related dogma is merely recycled, medieval anti-Semitism. This complicates our theme, since millions of religious right-wingers are both anti-Semites and allies of Israel, whose supporters resolve their ambivalence by equating criticism of Zionism with anti-Semitism.
But what happens when, after a thousand years, a grand narrative, that sense of meaning, begins to break down? Or when an entire mythology – such as the myth of American innocence – collapses? Religion as a system holding the mass of society together has been essentially dead since the mid-19th century, when a new way of knowing, the scientific method, replaced it and modernity was born. Very quickly, the new meta-narrative of nationalism arose. Italy, Germany and Japan, for example, did not unite as nation-states until the 1860s. This was also true for the U.S., as North and South reunified after Reconstruction.
This new thinking was ideological, and in the sense that people were willing to die (and kill) for an idea, it had clear Judeo-Christian undertones. It gave people meaning in a world in which science had stolen that meaning from religion.
All nations continued to give lip service to religion, but they utilized it to justify the new national orders. Fundamentalism continued to motivate millions, but primarily as an adjunct to the state (as the consistently pro-war positions of nearly all televangelists show) or as its mirror-opposite (in socialist countries).
Rising out of the universal disillusionment following World War One, modernist literary and cultural movements attempted to replace the certainties by which we once defined ourselves. But they offered only two secular alternatives: the scientific method that had already de-throned religion, and the political ideologies that led to World War Two, the Holocaust, the Cold War, Korea and Viet Nam. And, since neither of these belief systems addressed the soul’s longing for deeper meaning, faith in both began to collapse.
In the 1960s, Post-modernism identified this dislocation, celebrated the breakdown of structure and threw off the constraints of grand narratives. Individual identity, especially gender, was no longer fixed, but fluid and socially constructed. “Postmodern” individuals have no essential selfhood; they are constructed by webs of language and power relations. But very few of us can thrive in such a world, as Huston Smith wrote:
These thinkers have ceased to be modern because they have seen through the so-called scientific worldview, recognizing it to be not scientific but scientistic. They continue to honor science for what it tells us about nature, but as that is not all that exists, science cannot provide us with a worldview – not a valid one. The most it can show us is half of the world, the half where normative and intrinsic values, existential and ultimate meanings, teleologies, qualities, immaterial realities, and beings that are superior to us do not appear…Where, then, do we now turn for an inclusive worldview? Postmodernism hasn’t a clue...Having deserted revelation for science, the West has now abandoned the scientific worldview as well, leaving it without replacement.
All this would be hugely magnified by technology, writes Alexander Beiner:
This is what identity is online. Fragmented, fluid, partial. Online, you can be anyone you want to be, and simultaneously, you are nobody. If this is where we gain our sense of self, we find ourselves adrift in a sea of language and relativistic narratives over which we have no control.
By the 1980s, dissatisfaction with post-modern culture – consumerism, the nuclear family, conventional religion, anti-communism and vicarious intensity (see Chapter 10 of my book) – was leading many Americans in one, or both, of two directions: the substance abuse that would eventually explode into mass death-by-opiates, and the retreat into fundamentalist religion.
When myths that bind us together in worlds of meaning die, the soul – and the soul of the culture – search for substitutes. All political ideologies, like the religions they emerged from, are monotheistic since they allow no alternative viewpoints. Whereas myth once invited us to have our own ideas about the same thing, as Michael Meade has said, ideologies demand that we think the same ideas.
Evidently, many NACs cling neither to conventional religion nor to any nationalist ideology, but only to “freedom.” They value the pseudo-community of the Internet, where they can freely share meta-narratives, and experience neither the risks nor the support of authentic community. And they do have the opportunity to connect the dots and explain everything, and in so doing, reduce their levels of anxiety.
Connecting the dots – mistakenly finding some correlation and attributing direct causality – became the new way of countering the terror of finding oneself in an economy, a pandemic and a political system that is broken and a climate that is out of control, in which a god of evil seems to have replaced a god of good. It’s difficult to confront the possibility that this good god may not really be concerned with our welfare (that would be a truly pagan perspective). Americans still believe in that good god at much higher rates than Europeans – but 70% also believe in the existence of Satan.
Although he can’t resist adding false equivalencies, Kay accurately observes:
Conspiracism is attractive to the Doomsayer because it organizes all of the world’s menacing threats into one monolithic force – allowing him to reconcile the bewildering complexities of our secular world with the good-versus-evil narrative contained in the Book of Revelatio…so saturated is American culture with the imagery of Christian eschatology that it has been widely co-opted…Once you strip away their jargon, radicalized Marxists also can be classified as Evangelical Doomsayers…unfailingly compressing many random evils into a single, identifiable point-source of malign power…This psychic need to impute all evil to a lone, omnipotent source inevitably requires the conspiracist to create larger and larger meta-conspiracies that sweep together seemingly unconnected power centers …Both of them (conspiracism and millenarianism) go together: Both of them put the fact of human suffering at the center of the human condition. Conspiracism is a strategy for explaining the origin of that suffering. Millenarianism is a strategy for forging meaning from it…(in) a generalized nostalgia for America’s past.
No American fully escapes this legacy, since, as Hillman said, “We are each children of the Biblical God…(it is) the essential American fact.” Deep in the unconscious psyche of every American Yogi, Buddhist or New Age influencer is a 3,000-year-old monotheist, with an agenda to convert or eliminate its competition.
Here is a clue: if your people consider their story to be literally true and other people’s stories are “myths,” then you and your people are thinking mythically or literally. Other mono-words share the brittleness of one correct way: monopoly, monogamy, monolithic, monarchy, monotonous. If solutions to our great social and environmental crises emerge, they will originate outside of the monoculture, from people on the edges – or at least those who have learned to discriminate.
Once we become comfortable thinking in terms of myth – as stories we tell ourselves about ourselves – we can step out of own monocular thinking. We can acknowledge, as Charles Eisenstein writes, that a conspiracy narrative is “...after all, neither provable nor falsifiable,” and then take a clearer look at what it illuminates.
Underneath its literalism, it conveys important information...First, it demonstrates the shocking extent of public alienation from institutions of authority...Second, (It) gives narrative form to an authentic intuition that an inhuman power governs the world...(it) locates that power in a group of malevolent human beings...Therein lies a certain psychological comfort.
Alternatively, we could locate the “inhuman power” in systems or ideologies, not a group of conspirators. That is less psychologically rewarding, because we can no longer easily identify as good fighting evil; after all, we ourselves participate in these systems, which pervade our entire society...Stamped from the same template, conspiracy theories tap into an unconscious orthodoxy. They emanate from the same mythic pantheon as the social ills they protest. We might call it...the mythology of Separation...matter separate from spirit, human separate from nature...we must dominate our competitors and master nature. Progress, therefore, consists in increasing our capacity to control the Other.
...Events are indeed orchestrated in the direction of more and more control, only the orchestrating power is itself a myth, beyond anyone’s power to invent. The Illuminati, if they exist, are not its authors; the mythology is their author. We do not create our myths; they create us.
Now we have enough background to understand what makes NACs tick.
Part Four: Conspirituality
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. – Carl Jung
Most conspiratorial thinking deliberately serves the interests of the rich and powerful. But we are now confronting something entirely new. Extreme right wingers are presenting aesthetic web presences with superficially progressive themes, but which, upon closer inspection, reveal reactionary and even racist agendas. This phenomenon relies on two factors. The first is the major social media platforms and their algorithms that encourage rapid dissemination of unreliable information and the confirmation bias that results from seeing only what the viewer already believes in. Q-followers rarely see what you see, and if they do, it is in formats that minimize the moral implications and transformational possibilities.
The second is that these platforms are deliberately designed to take advantage of millions of good-hearted, “spiritual but not religious” people who have lost all trust in the mainstream media, but who have also lost the ability to discriminate between progressive ideas and the language of hate. These folks are the New Age Conspiracists.
Such people may share certain personality traits such as distrust of authority, openness to unusual experiences, willingness to detect hidden patterns and longing for authentic community. Many have made their way outside of conventional career paths, share a libertarian, entrepreneurial tone, are open to information that psychics claim to have “channeled” from other dimensions, and believe in the ability to manifest financial and romantic success and vibrant health through positive thinking, as taught by Rhonda Byrne’s mega-selling book The Secret.
The film version features several self-help teachers promoting the power of positive thinking, primarily toward the goal of acquiring consumer goods and a great love life. This New Age thinking stems from a tradition extending back to the 19th-century New Thought movement and forward toward Norman Vincent Peale – at whose New York church the Trump family worshipped when Trumpus was young.
By ignoring the values of community almost totally, both the book and the film were best-selling expressions of what Hillman called the “therapeutic culture” – the first assumption of which is that emotional maturity and growth entail a progressive differentiation of self from others, especially family. American psychology mirrors its economics: the heroic, isolated ego in a hostile world.
The MSM, channels for the myths of financial progress and American Dreams, have always satirized or marginalized those who reject middle-class values – beatniks in the 1950s and hippies in the 1960s. Later, more sophisticated writers demeaned post-hippie spiritual culture as “bliss ninnies” of the “love-and-light crowd”. However, among my 1960s generation, artistic and religious exploration generally produced liberal-to-radical, anti-authoritarian attitudes on social issues, especially concerning the military empire. Some took those values into Silicon Valley and birthed the high-tech world (see John Markoff’s, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry).
But under Reagan’s contracting economy, freedom had become expensive. Some of those same characteristics, when encouraged alongside conservative economics and a disdain for introspection, revealed, once again, the paranoid American shadow rooted in Puritan religion. By the 2000s, hugely influential “spiritual” teachers had joined business leaders in preaching secular versions of the Prosperity Gospel and proclaiming everyone’s permission to “look out for number one”. For millions, narcissism replaced empathy. Once again, the poor had only themselves to blame.
The term “conspirituality” was coined in 2011 – long before either Trumpus or QAnon. Charlotte Ward and David Voas wrote:
It offers a broad politico-spiritual philosophy based on two core convictions, the first traditional to conspiracy theory, the second rooted in the New Age: 1) a secret group covertly controls, or is trying to control, the political and social order, and 2) humanity is undergoing a ‘paradigm shift’ in consciousness...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.
Jules Evans shows how these two forms of experience can flow into one stream:
.... The first is a sort of extroverted, euphoric, mystical experience: “Everything is connected. I am synchronistically drawn to helpers and allies, the universe is carrying us forward to a wonderful climactic transformation (the Rapture, the Paradigm Shift), and we are the divine warriors of light appointed by God / the Universe to manifest this glorious new phase...” The second: “...Everything is connected, there is a secret order being revealed to me, but I am not part of it...But perhaps I can wake up to this Grand Plan, and expose it”...The first is ego-expansion and the second is paranoid ego-persecution...In both, the individual awakens to this hidden reality. But in the first, they are a superpowered initiate in the hidden order and a catalyst for transformation, in the second they are a vulnerable and disempowered exposer of the hidden order...two sides of the same coin...to switch between ecstatic, optimistic millenarianism and paranoid persecutory conspiracy thinking.
The challenge has always been about waking up, becoming “woke.” For my children’s generation, the “red pill” moment of the 1999 film The Matrix became the central metaphor that connected these two forms of mystical thinking. On the left, being “red-pilled” implies awareness of social justice issues and the imperative to work for positive change.
Rightists, however, have adopted the metaphor to represent an awakening from the trance of soft, inappropriate concern for the unworthy. Institutions such as the welfare state that interfere with this focus on the individual are simply impediments to self-fulfillment. The ability to discriminate devolves into an intuitive knowing and an essentially religious disdain for both science and community.
It’s complicated: much of that disdain is regularly justified by revelations of corporate corruption, especially in the field of health so dear to middle-class parents. The danger, however, is that NACs can become vulnerable to fake news and magical thinking.
Before we slide into simplistic demonization of “anti-vaxxers,” however, please remember that many on the Left who have retained that ability to discriminate have been vaccine skeptics – long before Covid – not because they disregard science, but because they reject the capitalist corruption of science.
American history is replete with good-hearted, naïve “holy fools” – and the con men, from P.T. Barnum to the grifters already lining up to replace Trumpus – who have always been willing to steal our watches and sell them back to us. For more, read my series “The Con Man: An American Archetype.”
The devaluing of intellectual checks and balances combined with exclusive emphasis on positivity and the inability to grieve can result in “spiritual bypass” – adapting spirituality to deny, distort, or reframe human suffering, both personal and social; and it can attract decent and idealistic people toward celebrities, cults and ideologies, whether spiritual, political or consumeristic.
After the Dionysian explosion of the sixties, the meeting with Eastern religion, psychedelics and indigenous spirituality popularized much needed, healthier lifestyles. But the phrase “human potential movement” entered the lexicon carrying the seeds of its own destruction wherever its proponents refused to address the fullness of the psyche. In late capitalist America, a society led by uninitiated men and sociopathic narcissists long before Trumpus, they encountered institutions – work, church, media, politics, education, the police, and especially the family – seemingly designed to elicit their darkest potentials, much of which were channeled into fundamentalism, toxic masculinity, addictions and the vicarious fascination with brutal militarism. Julian Walker writes that ungrounded spiritual people may be
...engaging in a practice that, rather than shaping outside reality, as is often claimed in media like The Secret, instead burns a distorted operating system and perceptual lens into our neuroplastic brains...thinking facts and evidence are relative, mutable, and can be made to mean whatever we want via the narcissism-enabling belief in absolute subjectivity – the divine “I” that alone creates reality and stands all-powerful within it...the threshold into the overlap is crossed into just the exact shadow reflection of the light-and-love delusion. It is the positive, synchronistic pattern-seeking confirmation bias turned on its head and set on fire – and that fire fueled by the explosive emotional gasoline kept buried until now by spiritual bypass.
He describes several “worldview weaknesses” held by many NACs:
1 – Over-privileging of the individual over the collective.
2 – Denying the validity of other points of view, over-equalizing opinion and undermining of respect for expertise. “Real scientists are always open to being wrong, know the current hypothesis is only as good as the next batch of data.” I would add: real scientists oppose Big Pharma’s corruption of their data to increase sales.
3 – “Esoteric knowledge ego inflation”: rejecting virtually any mainstream opinion to subtly bolster one’s sense of having esoteric insights into reality.
4 – A sanitized, overly rosy spirituality that ignores the shadow “creates a bubble of positivity” that, when faced with actual suffering, can twist into its opposite and perceive its polarized antithesis in the form of evil elites. This can fuel messianic zealots who “can become compelling and charismatic leaders because they are rock solid in their convictions.”
5 – Belief in the “Law of Attraction,” that people create their own realities. Although this idea may have a core of truth, it reinforces radical individualism, detachment from collective action and promises of “instant gratification mental changes.” And, I would add, by ignoring its own Calvinist roots, it leads to moral condemnation of those whose bad luck “proves” that they don’t think positive thoughts.
NACs are attracted to “lightworkers” such as Lorie Ladd, and her podcast Is Trump A Lightworker? In 2020 she informed her 184,000 followers (10,000 of whom added comments) that she’d received messages from the “Galactic Federation of Light”: “...information from my guides about what this lightworker in human form looking like Donald Trump has been doing for the human collective.”
A lightworker, as defined by well-being magazine Happiness, is someone who feels “an enormous pull towards helping others.” The term, they say, can be interchangeable with “crystal babies,” “indigos,” “Earth angels” and “star seeds”...”these spiritual beings volunteer to act as a beacon for the Earth, and commit to serving humanity”.
“Serving humanity”, however, conflicts with “looking out for number one”. Martin Winiecki suggests “Six Reasons so Many Spiritual People Have Been Fooled by QAnon”, and I extrapolate:
1 – Lack of Structural Analysis: The culture of radical individualism sees both heroes and villains in particular individuals or small, hidden groups. But when we don’t address the systemic nature of our condition (whether spiritual or material), this kind of thinking merely reinforces the system itself.
2 – Overly simplistic, binary thinking: Suppressing “negativity” encourages the shadow to take on a life of its own, “which will terrorize and subconsciously dominate them...” Jung concluded that when suppressed aspects of the psyche finally emerge – as they always do – they tend to be angry.
3 – Implicit Racial Bias: Stories about George Soros’ control of social movements clearly reflect old-school anti-Semitic prejudice about all-powerful Jews, while New Age fear of introspection leads to the unwillingness to acknowledge white privilege. Repetition of claims that Black Lives Matter is “a tool of the liberal elites” reveals the prejudice that black people cannot speak for themselves. “Not seeing color” insults people who live their entire lives identifying exactly as they are.
4 – To denounce conventional reality as illusion can lead to the inability to realize that one’s own political views reflect ideology and thus to believe everything and nothing at once. Philosopher Hannah Arendt claimed that this is precisely the psychological state of people who follow totalitarian ideologies and replace thought with belief. Ideologies create boundaries, and one stands on one side or the other. Those inside these boundaries share a bond made of allegiances of which no one else can partake. Those on the outside are simply excluded, except as objects for proselytizing.
5 – The post-modern experience that the left has lost its appeal due to intellectual elitism, moral and ideological rigidity and rejection of non-material realities leads to the unconscious search for another ideology as a replacement.
6 – The natural desire for community can be corrupted by its shadow of radical individualism and the profit motive. This results in people with no previous connection to each other fusing together in an illusory sense of shared identity, and individualism’s shadow of conformism re-appears.
Why did so many health practitioners in particular fall for QAnon? Although the global wellness industry is reportedly worth $4.5 trillion, its more controversial elements suffer disparagement not only from Big Pharma but from countless self-appointed, individual gatekeepers of the status quo (do you, reader, giggle when a friend offers a massage with healing crystals?) When the MSM insisted that defeating the pandemic required universal social acquiescence, many purveyors of these views saw their paranoia confirmed. In a form of what Brigid Delaney calls “trauma bonding,” this strengthened their connections with figures such as Alex Jones who appeared to favor individual rights, and like that broken clock, may have been right twice a day.
I would add a seventh factor:
7 – The desire to attain mystical realization can be corrupted by those same factors. People may pursue deeper unity through psychedelics and plant medicines. However, as Daniel Pinchbeck writes,
The problem is that they need a cultural / initiatory context or container which supports them in fully integrating the influx of new knowledge...Otherwise, the ego structure finds ways to distort these revelations for its own purposes...This is how the Neo-spiritual and psychedelic movement have gone off track...Fascism is a kind of low-grade occultism: It satisfies the ego mind’s desire for a simplistic unity and gets rid of all the nagging paradoxes and contradictions of reality.
For more insight, www.Conspirituality.net is “a weekly study of right-wing conspiracy theories and faux-progressive wellness utopianism.” It lists over thirty wellness “influencers” who posted QAnon content, though many scrubbed direct reference to Q itself.
We need to integrate mystical and indigenous wisdom into a perspective that also reveals the systemic sources of racism, misogyny, poverty and genocide. Indeed, the idea of “spiritually awakening” to our true nature long ago predated the current idea of “woke.” But without the ability to discriminate, to understand the mythic narratives that drive our willingness to innocently embody and enact them, we remain “bliss ninnies” at best and crusaders for fascism at worst.