Stephen Dinan: how the New Age descended into darkness
Above is an interview I did with Stephen Dinan, the CEO of the Shift Network, which is the biggest platform of online wisdom courses, with around three million customers.
Like me, Stephen has been dismayed by what’s happened to our culture (New Age spirituality) in the last 18 months. He wrote an essay on this called ‘Anatomy of Delusion: How Otherwise Conscious People Descended into Darkness’.
He wrote:
If you’re like many of my friends, colleagues and allies, you’ve been baffled by the number of otherwise conscious people who have begun spouting extreme conspiracy memes, joining the anti-mask rebellion, or attacking people for the sin of watching CNN.
“I thought I knew these people?” you might think. “How in the world did that person go from promoting detox regimens to calling the worst pandemic of our lives a hoax?” You might find yourself unfriending people on Facebook and writing off people you once respected. It’s frankly been painful.
Underneath any outrage on the surface, you may feel a deep dismay and, if you’re honest, a bit of genuine questioning of what it is in our collective movement that made such a large percentage of people susceptible to this descent into rather extreme positions, what some are calling “conspirituality” as the confluence of extreme conspiracy ideas and spirituality.
He identifies six systemic weaknesses in New Age culture, which we discuss in the interview.
1) Privileging the individual over the collective, and personal freedom over the good of society
We talk about the libertarianism and hyper-individualism of New Age culture, with its constant emphasis on ‘sovereignty’ — which actually makes it a prime target for far-right politics, or what I call the New Age Tea Party (or DMT Party?).
He’s very funny about a phenomenon he calls the ‘flowboy’, a type he says is endemic in New Age culture:
The Flow Boy is often exceptionally good at dancing, romancing, and wandering the world. They often do so well into their fifties. They eschew commitments, often champion polyamory and economically don’t tend to build much of enduring value. They pride themselves on how conscious they are but when it comes to employment, family, or institutional or civic responsibilities, they are basically evasive. Their freedom is defined by their ability to follow the impulse of the moment. The dance and festival scene is filled with folks like this and there’s a great lament among spiritual women that there simply aren’t enough solid, reliable men to go around.
So what happens when a global pandemic comes along that demands the ability to constrain movement, activities, and socializing in the service of protecting the most vulnerable and slowing the spread? The Flow Boy blows it off, calls it a hoax, dabbles in conspiracy memes, dismisses the “control” of the mainstream or generally just keeps doing what he wants. And, in doing so, he contributes to endangering many lives.
In the interview, he admits that he himself was something of a ‘flowboy’ in the past, until his father-in-law forced him to grow up and study martial arts!
2) Privileging your own intuition over expert advice and peer-reviewed science
We’ve obviously seen how spiritual culture — which has always been into alternative health — has been a hotbed for anti-vax anti-mask disinformation and COVID denialism. I ask him in the interview about his close friend Marianne Williamson, leading self-help guru and 2019 presidential candidate, who received a lot of stick for her previous comments on vaccines. Does Stephen think she was unfairly criticized? Should spiritual leaders come out more strongly in favour of COVID vaccines?
3) Esoteric self-inflation
Again, he has an interesting novelistic take on why spiritual people sometimes become holier than thou and somewhat narcissist. He suggests it’s because when people ‘become spiritual’ their worldly status often takes a bit of a hit — he was a Stanford grad who then went off searching and staying in ashrams, so obviously wasn’t earning the usual post-Stanford salary (I can relate). So there’s a temptation, in that niggling feeling of worldly inferiority, to respond with a defensive sense of spiritual superiority.
Now, the Shift Network is a big promoter of ‘evolutionary spirituality’ — the idea that humans are evolving into superhumans, which one often finds in western spirituality. I ask him if that worldview doesn’t often lead to a rather unpleasant spiritual elitism, and the sense ‘we — my friends and I — are the spiritually evolved homo superior, while most humans are subhuman’. We discuss that.
4) Love and Light Bias
The New Age clearly has a rather sappy bias towards love, light and positivity. Nothing But Love! Positive vibes only! Think happy thoughts! And so on. This is a rather flimsy theology of suffering and evil. I suggest that this hyper-positive world view sometimes emerges from trauma — there is an overlap between traumatized people and spiritual people, and sometimes people respond to their early life wounds by spiritual bypassing — basically curling up in a ball and saying ‘positive vibes only!’
What happens when the world turns out to be less rosy than they imagined? A splitting occurs. There must be some evil forces out there stopping the world from transcending into 5D. So the love and light bias can lead to conspiratorial worldviews — WE are love and light, but THEY — the evil cabal — are demons.
As Stephen says, it’s a very simplistic theology. Light and dark run through every human being.
5) Holy Warriors Battling Darkness
So your worldview can split into simplistic binaries — you’re the light warrior, totally good and pure, and anyone who disagrees is Evil and Demonic. The New Age is far more Christian and even evangelical than it realizes, and we’ve seen the rise of Christian-style apocalyptic myths like Qanon.
I ask Stephen if he didn’t fall prey to apocalyptic rapture style thinking with his support for the whole 2012 ‘Harmonic Convergence’ thing, which he got behind. Wasn’t that a Rapture delusion?
6) Your beliefs create reality
The last systemic bias he identified is the idea, which is really at the heart of the New Age, that your thoughts create reality. It’s a tricky one, because in some ways this idea is also at the heart of Buddhism, Hinduism, Stoicism, and most religious traditions. So is it bullshit?
No, but it can be expressed unsubtly, into the philosophy that all you need to do to change the world is shift your mind and presto! No more poverty, no more climate change. |I wanted to discuss with him his work on spiritual activism, and his recent book ‘Sacred America, Sacred World’, where he tries to join together spirituality and left-wing politics.
I wondered….do spirituality and politics mix? Is the idea of ‘sacred politics’ a little dangerous, because it leads to (or can lead to) sacred violence? Whenever you bring in the sacred, doesn’t that lead to inflexibility and a lack of pragmatism and compromise, to virtue signalling and grandstanding? Do we really need a more enchanted politics?
A difficult question….
I guess the type of spirituality I would like to see is one that quietly gets on with serving society, serving the poorest and most vulnerable.
I say that, having arrived in Los Angeles a week ago, and really been kind of horrified by the homelessness situation in the city. I went for a walk yesterday, and I was listening to an Oprah Winfrey ;soul sunday’ podcast (I’m going to write a piece on her) and suddenly I was almost hit by a shoe that a homeless guy threw! I leave you with that image — me listening to Soul Sunday then getting hit by a homeless guy’s shoe. It’s a metaphor!
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In other news:
Infowars host Alex Jones, who spreads conspiracy theories to his millions of viewers, has been found liable for damages against the families of the children killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting, which he claimed was faked. Good. The suffering that scumbag has caused.
The French government agency Miviludes, which protects ssociety against sects and cults, has warned that yoga has become a breeding ground for conspiracy theories, as this article outlines (in French).
CBS also has a 30-min documentary on ‘conspirituality’
On Sunday October 31st I’m doing a talk on the history and future of psychedelic therapy for The Weekend University, which is doing a day on transpersonal psychology. You can get tickets here — use the code LPC for a discount.
My co-editor for Breaking Open, Tim Read, and my former therapist, Maria Papaspyrou, have a new edited collection of essays on psychedelic therapy coming out. The launch event is on October 4 — tickets and details here.
The video of the workshop on Socrates is now available on my Sellfy page. Tickets are now available for the next workshop, on the Buddha, on Wednesday October 27. Patreons get access to all recordings, and Gold Patreons ($10 a month) get a free ticket to the live recordings. Sign up to be a Patreon here. and welcome and thanks to new Patreons!
Are you in Los Angeles and could tell me about the wellness / spirituality scene here? Get in touch.