Kulturkampf

[benji]

I like the lack of self-awareness of this article talking about other people being conspiracy theorists considering how often it uses "neoliberal" as an epithet without definition and explains shadowy capitalist forces controlling everything along with the premise that capitalism is the cause of all problems:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10714413.2024.2388371

To maintain this outer appearance of a perfect equilibrium between purity of body and soul, conspiritual life coaches endorse practices such as adhering to strict diets and following detoxification protocols, asserting that these regimens facilitate attaining a natural state, bolstering individuals’ innate immune systems to closely align with a paradigm of bodily purity. Indeed, it is ultimately the conspiritual life coach’s body that serves as evidence of the successful implementation of “responsible” dietary and fitness regimens, unaffordable and unattainable for most individuals. Conspiritual life coach and unlicensed “trauma therapist” Teal Swan, for instance, tells her followers to have the “Discipline to say nope,” to tell themselves, “right now I’m gonna do a green juice rather than I’m going to go to the club right now.” In Swan’s eyes, the cure for obesity lies in an individual’s decision rather than structural issues such as access to affordable, healthy food options, aggressive marketing of unhealthy foods that often targets children and adolescents, food policies, work conditions, and more (Ball et al., Citation2003).

The conflation of physical appearance with ethical and spiritual principles is quite prominent in the messaging of conspiritual life coaching. Body discipline and health are positioned as moral and spiritual pursuits, or matters of attitude, therefore detached from socioeconomic or structural considerations. If obesity represents a problem, this problem is, essentially, a reflection of an inner shortcoming, an individual’s refusal to deal with a traumatic event or a client’s inability to enact the courage to match an image of a higher self with the present condition in which the body finds itself. Swan (Citationn.d.) herself tells her audience in a blog post that obesity is a coping mechanism to deal with “the fear of humiliation and fear.” She continues: “At the heart of every single case of obesity is this particular fear. Usually, early in life, those of us with obesity experienced extreme demands and expectations from others.”

Swan’s reasoning emphasizes body discipline and purity within strict boundaries that necessarily distinguish ideal forms from those perceived deviant. It is an ideology that supports an insidious message in which “members of [out-groups] groups fail to choose the right spiritual interventions to cultivate self-improvement” (Jain, Citation2020, p. 157). Neoliberal governance and self-responsibility are thus stressed as bodily images become imposed as analogous to spiritual conditions. Jain (Citation2020) notes that this type of spiritual subjectivity is crafted around consumer choices and the ritual management of self-care. As neoliberal spiritual subjects, conspiritual life coaches’ clients “must decide, for example, how they exercise their bodies, enrobe their bodies, and feed their bodies” (p. 39). This is a message that dangerously threads eugenics, resembling 19th-­century Britain’s “Muscular Christianity,” in particular, and other 20th-­century forms of fascism that combined physical discipline, sacrifice, patriarchal duty, and nationalism with religious piety. Similarly, these social phenomena equated physical beauty with moral superiority (see Beres et al., Citation2023; Watson et al., Citation2005). Consequently, “single women, queer people, fat people, sick people, people of color, differently abled and disabled people, and poverty-stricken people” (Jain, Citation2020, p. 104) become characterized, by implicature, as lazy and immoral.

Look at this tautological nonsense:

The type of grifting that Kaia Ra and other conspiritual life coaches devise involves financial exploitation and relies on concepts of self-care, personal growth, and freedom, which contribute to the formation of the spiritual neoliberal subject. Consequently, clients may “think they are making choices when they are actually under the influence of multiple authorities” (Funes, Citation2016) beyond that of the conspiritual life coach. Indeed, a myriad of intertwined religious, economic, and institutional discourses operate in collusion with conspiritual life coaches, influencing conspiritualists’ behavior, choices, and identities as spiritual subjects.

The fools!

As conspiritual life coaches’ offerings sidestep critical reflection on how they contribute to a colonial-capitalist complex, what these actors sell can inadvertently contribute to the suffering from which their clients seek to liberate themselves. Jain (Citation2020) observes that followers of certain types of New Age neoliberal practices frequently resist perspectives on the impact of socioeconomic systems on living beings by deliberately selecting specific commodities as a form of opposition. In their eyes, she asserts, New Age spirituality practitioners feel that they are making “‘good choices’ without actually doing anything to prevent inequality, oppression, environmental devastation, or violence” (Jain, Citation2020, p. 8). In this sense, conspiritual life coaching cannot help but perpetuate “dominant valuations that equate salvation and liberation with capitalist class structures, whiteness, patriarchy, and heteronormativity” (Jain, Citation2020, p. 9).

Remember the good old days when the state completely managed your health for you?

The visibility of these “lifestyle gurus” (Baker & Rojek, Citation2020) hints at a broader sociological trend that threatens democratic institutions. As wellness influencers increasingly embrace conspiritual beliefs, we have witnessed the further erosion of public trust in the expertise and authority of science and scientists. Neoliberalism’s infiltration into democratic institutions has exacerbated the deterioration and corruption of once-trusted institutions such as public health and government and has fueled anxieties around their ability to mediate social life and attend to citizens’ needs in fair and equitable ways. The lack of access to affordable healthcare before, during, and after a global crisis has amplified anxieties and skepticism about institutions’ capacity to ensure citizens’ well-being (Jamieson, Citation2023).

The message of the conspiritual life coach can offer a seductive alternative in how it champions autonomy and invites individuals to take responsibility for their own lives. Once government systems fail the citizenry, assuming personal responsibility for one’s health and well-being, without the advice of experts, can feel empowering.

Improve yourself? Curious, yet you ignore all the problems in the world:

Operating under the tortured logic of the White Savior Industrial Complex, conspiritual life coaches produce a curriculum of enlightenment that seeks to relieve Western clients of guilt and accountability by creating an experience where one’s spiritual search excuses them from direct engagement with the world and its structural problems. Teal Swan’s statement, “there is nothing more important when it comes to helping other people than to improve YOUR internal condition,” illustrates this idea. Although well­intended, this message has the unfortunate consequence of reinstating a cognitive version of reality in which the world exists, as Cole (Citation2012) ironically puts it, to “satisfy the needs—including, importantly, the sentimental needs—of white people and Oprah.” In other words, according to conspiritual life coaches’ pedagogies, social injustice is a problem to be solved by and within the self, which remains aligned with its own optimism, without concurrently striving for systemic change. The individual is seen as the beginning and end of all problems, and if any conflict arises from ineffective models of communal living, it is believed to resolve itself magically if one simply continues to meditate, practice expansive self-care routines to cope with the agony of living in late capitalism, and remain in alignment with gratitude. Conspiritual life coaching, at its core, sells willful ignorance under the guise of spiritual well-being.

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

Audiences seeking simplistic and emotionally satisfying ways to navigate a complex world embrace the conspiritual life coach’s approach as affectively commonsensical. Through the vagaries of a hodgepodge of spiritual esotericism, conspiritual coaches provide stability in an unpredictable world where ideological fragmentation has become the sine qua non of the zeitgeist.