Background Story: ‘Everything you’ve been told is a lie!’ Inside the wellness-to-fascism pipeline
Background Story: ‘Everything you’ve been told is a lie!’ Inside the wellness-to-fascism pipeline
One minute you’re doing the downward dog, the next you’re listening to conspiracy theories about Covid or the new world order. How did the desire to look after yourself become so toxic?
A background story about how a healthgroup became conspiracytheorists. Not a completely new subject, but still relevant.
"They have been moving generally to far-right views, bordering on racism, and really pro-Russian views, with the Ukraine war,” she says. “It started very much with health, with ‘Covid doesn’t exist’, anti-lockdown, anti-masks, and it became anti-everything: the BBC lie, don’t listen to them; follow what you see on the internet.”
Things came to a head when one day, before a meditation session – an activity designed to relax the mind and spirit, pushing away all worldly concerns – the group played a conspiratorial video arguing that 15-minute cities and low-traffic zones were part of a global plot. Jane finally gave up.
This apparent radicalisation of a nice, middle-class, hippy-ish group feels as if it should be a one-off, but the reality is very different. The “wellness-to-woo pipeline” – or even “wellness-to-fascism pipeline” – has become a cause of concern to people who study conspiracy theories.
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Jane has her own theory as to why her wellness group got radicalised and she did not – and it’s one that aligns with concerns from conspiracy experts, too. “I think it’s the isolation,” she concludes, citing lockdown as the catalyst, before noting the irony that conspiracies then kick off a cycle of increasing isolation by forcing believers to reject the wider world. “It becomes very isolating because then their attitude is all: ‘Mainstream media … they lie about everything.’”
I wonder why people would have a dismal view of mainstream media, Guardian? I mean, surely we would expect it to hold itself to a rigorous standard of objectivity.
Let's scroll a bit up in your article.
“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?
Criado Perez says: “If we want to address the trend of women seeking help outside mainstream medicine, it’s not the women we need to fix; it’s mainstream medicine.”
I mean, do you guys ever look in the mirror and think "maybe providing a politically distorted narrative is a factor in people not trusting me"?
I thought so too at first when I heard about the notion of gender inequality in medicine and treatment, but it turns out that there's actually something to it
An overview from 2013: https://scholar.google.de/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=gender+medicine&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&t=1691051117695&u=%23p%3DW7U_RsCHHIMJ
There's even a textbook just covering gender medicine (used here as "Do I need to treat my patient differently if they're male/female and if yes how so"): https://scholar.google.de/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=gender+medicine&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&t=1691052542356&u=%23p%3DQZsELNCo5GMJ
A German article discussing these developments, quoting a professor at Germany's most prestigious Research hospital: "The text reads as if the findings were equally valid for everyone. And on the last page, in the electronic supplement, one finds that the risk reduction for men is 30 percent, but for women only 1 percent, i.e. not at all." https://www.swr.de/swr2/wissen/gendermedizin-frauen-sind-anders-krank-102.html
So it's not a case of people talking about gender discrimination, there's actual hard data to back that up.
That's not the distortion, the bias in diagnoses and treatments is well known, same reason nobody in their right mind should trust the AI diagnobots. The problem is that if you're concerned about the loss of trust in the official sources, maybe don't immediately split the people you're writing about into "victim of the system" and "Alex Jones gymbro incel" (ironically, thus denying the women in question the agency to be a shithead).
But that's not what the article in question is doing?
Then what is it doing? Because from what I can tell, it neatly splits the kooks into "the mum who shops at Holland & Barrett" and "Andrew Tate-watching teenage son". It then interprets the son as "spends a lot of time online", "supposed crisis of masculinity manifesting in the “incel” movement", "rightwing influencers" and "masculine gym culture [.. ] keen to look for the “secrets” of getting healthy", but presents the mother as "Far too often, we blame women", "it’s not the women we need to fix;"
If the article were more honest, it would see the throughline of "not happy with reality and looking for alternatives", and the mirror images of "gym and suplements" and "yoga and Acai berries", or "influencers" and "health gurus". It would maybe even notice the "inadequate healthcare drives people to seek help elsewhere" parallel between women's chronic pain and men's mental health. Or it would at least have the selfawareness to rephrase the diagnosis, considering the Grauniad constantly calling for men to be fixed, to the point that even the sympathetic articles use the exact same phrasing.
I honestly think you're reading a whole lot into this article just to have something to be indignant about.
First, the "shopping mom" and "teenage son" bit is clearly a hyperbole and a juxtaposition of two (extremely) different audiences.
Many young men spend (too) much time online, I think you'll find that's fair. The article is not saying that all young men do, just that there's a sizable amount of them that do.
There actually is a crisis of masculinity feeding into incel culture, that's fairly well established (cf these papers; also that's a different discussion). It's not saying that all young men are radicalized far-right would-be incel mass shooters (which has happened before), but rather that there's a growing tendency for disenfranchised young men to listen to ... bullshit & con artists, for lack of a better term.
I also think the article does not do a good job of explaining the whole female medicine insufficencies to QAnon link, but you seem aware that it's just badly written at this point.
Lastly, I get the impression that you're seeing black and white - you're claiming that the Guardian has an agenda, perhaps mirrored by other outlets and that women are treated in a more positive light. Honestly, at least in this and your other linked article I fail to see this.
I honestly think you're not reading enough into it. For one thing, I'm not calling the crisis "supposed", I'm quoting the article. The author is calling it "supposed". It's one of the things that makes me doubt the rest of the article's problems are (just) bad writing. "Agenda" is a loaded word, it's (ironically) too black and white, and presumes intentionality. A better one is "Perspective", and the one on display is that men and women go nuts for fundamentally different reasons, where ones are personal faults (and fixed by changing the person), and others are systemic faults (and fixed by changing the system). I specifically chose the article I linked to show that it's not malice, necessarily, it's just the lens through which the subject is seen. IDK, think of it as sublimated misogyny, if you must.
And just to make this point one more time: young men do spend too much time online. So does everyone. You don't end up in a Qanon Facebook group by not being online. And they do fall for bullshit artists. So do the rest of the cranks. You don't end up in a Qanon Facebook group by not falling for bullshit artists. They just stick out like a sore thumb because, tech being male dominated as it is, they were the first to be a big enough bunch of suckers to be worth dedicated con artists. The rest of the world will undoubtedly get there, just wait :(
That's the thing, in their mind that's not distorted, and they won't, or even can't, step into someone else's shoes. Ironically a problem they share with conspiracy theorists.