Lemmy.World

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?

This article describes a connection between wellness and self care and the extremist groups that we have seen pop up the last years.

I thought it was interesting to see how missing research for women is causing more people to see the mainstream as 'wrong' and looking for alternative truths.

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.