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CONSPIRITUALITY

Name: CONSPIRITUALITY
Author: Derek Beres
ISBN: 9781541702981

HOW NEW AGE CONSPIRACY THEORIES BECAME A HEALTH THREAT

by Derek Beres , Matthew Remski & Julian Walker ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 13, 2023

Useful, timely revelations about the political underbelly of New Age spiritualism.

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A sprawling critique of the dangerous promise and politics of the modern wellness industry.

Beres, Remski, and Walker—three veterans of New Age wellness and co-hosts of the eponymous podcast—attempt to untangle a web of histories connecting yoga, pseudoscience, toxic individualism, and fascism. The titular term, a portmanteau of conspiracy and spirituality, describes the ideological pathway that ushers many wellness-seekers from innocuous self-improvement to political extremism. Conspiritualists generally come to wellness depoliticized and ideologically vulnerable, and they are often desperate for answers to physical or spiritual problems that traditional religion and medicine have failed to provide. Conspiritualists generally assign more agency to individual impurity than systemic injustice. Their faith in charismatic gurus, who unveil the arbitrary forces (karma, “energy”) supposedly governing bodily health, primes them to accept similar myths (Pizzagate, QAnon) about the wider world. This trajectory is bolstered by a lucrative online wellness-influencer industry in which algorithms encourage extremist political content, resulting in “an online religion that strings mysteries together on a compelling narrative arc.” The authors couple their firsthand experiences with well-researched accounts of clairvoyants and cult leaders to criticize the cultural appropriation, disaster profiteering, and moral panic scaffolding the conspirituality economy. Their study locates pieces of this formula across time and space, from present-day Hindu nationalism to Nazi racial ideology and the American eugenics movement. “The timeline is chaotic,” write the authors, “but cryptic hashtags keep it strung together: #savethechildren, #trusttheplan, #enjoytheshow, #WWG1WGA. It’s chilling, because you’ve heard these terms in a news report about QAnon.” If this seems like a lot of threads to weave into a single narrative, it is. The book verges on conspiratorial thinking in trying to neatly connect them all through disparate accounts of sexual, racial, and bodily anxiety. However, the core argument about the contemporary conspirituality pipeline is compelling.

Useful, timely revelations about the political underbelly of New Age spiritualism.

Pub Date: June 13, 2023

ISBN: 9781541702981

Page Count: 384

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023

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THINK YOU'LL BE HAPPY

MOVING THROUGH GRIEF WITH GRIT, GRACE, AND GRATITUDE

by Nicole Avant ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 17, 2023

Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.

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Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.

“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”

Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.

Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023

ISBN: 9780063304413

Page Count: 288

Publisher: HarperOne

Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023

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THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

by Daniel Kahneman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011

Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...

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A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.

The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.

Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.