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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/aug/02/everything-youve-been-told-is-a-lie-inside-the-wellness-to-facism-pipeline>
"Jane – not her real name – is nervous about speaking to me. She has asked that
I don’t identify her or the small, south-coast Devon town in which she lives.
“I’m feeling disloyal, because I’m talking about people I’ve known for 30 to 40
years,” she says.
Jane isn’t trying to blow the whistle on government corruption or organised
crime: she wants to tell me about her old meditation group. The group had met
happily for decades, she says, aligned around a shared interest in topics
including “environmental issues, spiritual issues and alternative health”. It
included several people whom Jane considered close friends, and she thought
they were all on the same page. Then Covid came.
Jane spent most of the first Covid lockdowns in London. During that time, she
caught Covid and was hospitalised, and it was then that she realised something
significant had changed: a friend from the group got in touch while she was on
the ward. “I had somebody I considered a real best friend of mine on the phone
telling me, no, I ‘didn’t have Covid’,” she says. “She was absolutely adamant.
And I said: ‘Well, why do you think I went into hospital?’”
The friend conceded that Jane was ill, but insisted it must be something other
than Covid-19, because Covid wasn’t real. Jane’s hospital stay was thankfully
short, but by the time she was sufficiently recovered and restrictions had
lifted enough to allow her to rejoin her meditation group, things were very
different.
“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."
Via Christoph S.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
