Matthew Remski: ‘Yoga can be a gateway to proto-fascist politics’

What is a health influencer doing talking about the Epstein files? Why would a whole food promoter tell us to “escape the Matrix”? What is the meeting point of health and wellness culture with the world of conspiracy theories? The authors of the book Conspirituality use its titular term to encompass a fusion that, as they explain, is anything but random.

It is, they say, a movement without no formal membership, made up of people who are equally attracted to self-care products and conspiratorial political theories, obsessed with self-improvement, but also with the dynamics of power and domination. These various interests are united by a passion for looking for patterns, and the belief that it’s possible to “wake up” and discover truths through alternative methods.

The book was published in 2023 by PublicAffairs with the subtitle “How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat.” It was written by three authors who have seen firsthand how the world of yoga, in which they work, has become contaminated by conspiracy theories and the extreme right. One of them, Matthew Remski, 55, spoke with EL PAÍS via video call.

He talks about conspirituality as a “quasi-political” perspective, in the sense that it takes on “right-wing views up to and including fascism,” but that at the same is very passive, because “it doesn’t really ask people to do anything about the problems that they’ve located in society.”

Question. Is there a kind of profile that is more vulnerable to conspiracy narratives?

Answer. We know that it attracts right-wing evangelical Christians, because they already have a spirituality that sort of is apocalyptic, that believes in faith healing. But I would put the blame for the eruption of conspirituality on liberals and progressives. The people who get drawn in very personally and become devotees, they are probably situationally vulnerable. They’ve had a chronic illness that hasn’t been served by their medical system. They’ve just had a divorce; many of them have had family members die. They’re marginally employed, they’re disabled, they can’t be employed, they have untreated autism. Spirituality gives a very powerful explanation that also doesn’t really require you to do anything.

Q. You say in the book that they are sometimes right in their diagnoses, but that they offer absurd explanations.

A. Absolutely, and I think that’s why the Epstein files are a great contemporary example. The narrative structure that there is an elite network of pedophilic oligarchs who are controlling every aspect of your society is not wrong. But the question is, is this a material, predictable consequence of the excesses of capitalism? Or is it a sign of divine warfare on Earth?

Q. Another premise of the conspiritualists is that everything is part of a master plan.

A. Yes. And the ironic thing about capitalism is that there is no plan. There’s no planned economy. It’s anarchic, in terms of production. Nobody is making choices about what we want or do not want or need or do not need. And even without planning for a particular outcome, there is a logic to the system which simply must create predators at the top. It cannot stop from doing that, because anybody who engages competitively in the profit motive is going to have to continue to win, continue to climb. If it wasn’t Epstein, it would be somebody else. If it wasn’t [George] Soros, it would be somebody else.

Q. Why have these far right ideals penetrated the world of wellness?

A. It’s a set of explanations that focuses on individualistic accomplishment and merit. It focuses on the body as the location of agency, instead of your social relations. It has all kinds of romantic ideals about the evolution of the soul, and it is fundamentally opposed to the capacity of a community to organize for mutual aid. It doesn’t really want to work with other people. I would also say that there’s an impulse within spirituality to scapegoat, whether they’re Jews or trans activists or Antifa or Black Lives Matter — there’s a class of people who are responsible for social chaos or degeneration, and the fascist answer is very appealing: kill them all. Clear them out. Get rid of them.

Q. What is the connection between yoga and fascism?

A. In the 1920s, proto-nationalists within South India begin to innovate a physical culture that could become a guiding fitness model for the emergent nationalist state. It was a time in which many were trying to create universal schooling, universal health care and physical education programs for young people. The models that they had for that came from their colonial oppressors: calisthenics, gymnastics, weightlifting. From that, the urban elite of Bombay, Delhi and Calcutta indigenized physical culture by bringing old elements of medieval yoga — modern postural yoga, that’s what we call it now. The Germans already had the gymnastics, but these Brahmins also had mystical discoveries that they could offer. Then there’s all this cross-cultural dialogue. This is how we wind up with somebody like Heinrich Himmler, who became extremely interested in yoga as a monastic organizing principle for soldiers. He winds up carrying around a copy of the Bhagavad Gita [a sacred Hindu text] in his trench coat for the entire war, and believed that he could eventually create super-soldiers.

Q. What are the impacts of that today?

A. Today, there are major yoga influencers in India who support the Hindu nationalist ideals, who imply that yoga will purify the heart of the nation. In North America and Europe, the fascist overtones of yoga culture are much more sublimated into concerns about gender essentialism, the divine feminine, masculine, bodily purity, and how that discussion interacts with vaccine science and the notion of cultural purity.

Q. But the practice of yoga doesn’t have anything intrinsic to do with that kind of ideology.

A. There are three gateways that can lead into proto-fascist politics. The first is essential female and male qualities of bodies. The second is the notion of purification. Do you have toxins within you? How will you purify them? That’s kind of a neurotic project. And the third is the entire culture of pseudoscience. If you take yoga classes today with an Iyengar teacher, they will have learned from a root text produced in 1966 that each yoga posture can cure a medical condition. Those claims were made without any evidence. Not every teacher will believe those things or pass them on, but they are deeply embedded within the culture.

That’s an attitude that is consciously irrational and consciously anti-intellectual, and those are key sort of cognitive mechanisms for the growth of fascism. If they attack the scientific community, then they remove some kind of gateway or barrier to them being able to say whatever they want about the nature of reality. Those three influences create a context in which there is, at the very least, no resistance to right-wing views.

Q. Why are conspiritualists obsessed with vaccines?

A. It really all goes back to the debunked and fraudulent work of Andrew Wakefield, who first proposed the connection between the MMR vaccine and autism in the 1990s. The vaccine is very evocative for the conspirituality-minded person, because it is very easy for the process of vaccination to be compared to assault, to the state entering your body without permission, to lack of bodily agency and consent. It is very, very common for anti-vax people to talk about vaccination programs as programs of mass, state-supported rape. Distrust of clinical medicine and technology is another influence. I think the final, very important thing is that it is an insult to people in the wellness world to be told that for all of their uniqueness, all of their individuality, all of their bespoke treatments that they engage in and purchase, the same 0.8 milliliters of fluid for every single person will solve this one problem. It is insulting to them because it takes away their uniqueness.

Q. How does conspirituality damage public health, beyond vaccines?

A. The FDA just took down a page of old pseudoscientific cures for autism, including drinking horse’s milk or something like that. It used to say that if you run into these therapies, they’re not evidence-based, and you should stay away from them, they’re not going to help your kid with autism. Measles is breaking out all over the country, because vaccine rates are falling. And meanwhile, all of the United States’ contributions to the World Health Organization have ended.

Q. How can this movement be countered?

A. There is no amount of good vaccine science that overcomes vaccine conspiracy theories, and we don’t know what the world is going to look like because of that. Our ability to actually have a consensus conversation with the same set of facts is completely gone. I would never end an interview with that kind of bleakness, but I would say that there is no answer to conspirituality that does not foreground changing the material conditions in which it emerges. And that is late-stage capitalism, and governmental neglect of healthcare, and a kind of isolated population that has forgotten that they’re members of a working class. That’s personally what I turn my attention to.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition