‘Everything you’ve been told is a lie!’ Inside the wellness-to-fascism pipeline
www.theguardian.com
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.

  • Aqarius@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    1 year ago

    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).