In the terrifying early days of the pandemic, a concerning development emerged in the wellness space. Chiropractors, health coaches, ayurvedic healers and other mind-body professionals took to the internet in earnest to circulate QAnon content, stories about Hillary Clinton guzzling blood and screeds against social distancing.
It was a puzzling shift for a motley group better known for sharing recipes and stretching tips. Over far-reaching newsletters and palette-perfected Instagram posts, wellness gurus were now peddling plotlines of hidden agendas, secret cabals and the Great Awakening.
Why wellness became a seedbed for the far-right is one of several subjects that Naomi Klein explores in her latest book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.
The book departs from Klein’s growing concern over “Other Naomi”, that being Naomi Wolf, the once-feminist author turned deplatformed conspiracist, with whom she is often confused. Klein came to regard Wolf as her own double in a realm of “conspiracy rabbit holes” and, over hours of podcasts, Twitter feeds, rants and polemics, followed her into a parallel sphere of “upside down politics”.
She observed that people working in the field of bodily care seemed particularly drawn to anti-vax, anti-mask, “plandemic” beliefs. The Center for Countering Digital Hate’s report on the Disinformation Dozen – a list of 12 people responsible for circulating the bulk of anti-vax content online – was populated by a chiropractor, three osteopaths, and essential oil sellers, as well Christine Northrup, the former OB-GYN turned Oprah-endorsed celebrity doctor who claimed the virus was part of a deep state depopulation plot, and Kelly Brogan, the “holistic psychiatrist” and new age panic preacher.
Klein allows that some of this crossover made economic sense: for people working with bodies, social distancing often meant the loss of their livelihoods, and these “grievances set the stage for many wellness workers to see sinister plots in everything having to do with the virus”.
But the spread of misinformation across wellness culture was likely attributable to more complex factors, including the limits of conventional medicine and the areas of health that are understudied or dismissed.
I spoke with Klein over Zoom about the allure of the mirror world, why wellness culture came to mingle with the far-right, and how we might tunnel back out of the rabbit hole. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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You decided to go tunneling down this rabbit hole into the mirror world and, as you recount in the book, your hours were consumed by conspiracist fodder. You’re even on a family vacation and sneaking out to the car to binge-listen to Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. What implications did that have for your own mental health and sense of identity?
Well, I think there’s an obsessive quality to deep research no matter what it is. And it’s not the first family holiday I’ve ruined, you know. My husband still complains that I visited Indonesian sweatshops on our honeymoon. It does become kind of all-consuming, and the line between conspiracy and investigative journalism is not always as clear as we might like to believe. So, yeah, I definitely fell down the rabbit hole and listened to a lot of Steve Bannon.
But, when I was writing The Shock Doctrine, I read a lot of CIA interrogation manuals. To write This Changes Everything, I went to climate change denier conferences. If you want to understand the way the world works, including the role of misinformation, you’re not always going to hang around with the most savory characters.
The parts of listening to Bannon that were most destabilizing were when I heard him saying things that sounded like the left, and when I heard him saying things that I agreed with in part – not in whole, but where I saw that kernel of truth and I realized how effective it was going to be in the mix and match with what I see as a fascist project that he’s engaged in.
I expect Steve Bannon to be monstrous on immigration, on gender. I expect that from him. It’s when he’s talking about corporate control of the media and saying things that are true about big tech that I start to get queasy and ask, wait a minute, why is he saying more about this than a lot of people on the liberal side of the spectrum? Have we ceded this territory?
This point seems central. The mirror world isn’t devoid of truth. Instead, it’s destabilizing because elements of truth are there, but warped.
Absolutely. And the destabilizing piece is not simply that they’re saying something true. It’s when you realize people [on the left] have stopped saying that true thing. That’s when you realize that it has power.
I have been part of big social movements that were talking about corporate free trade, about Davos, about why there is this meeting of elites that get to decide how to fix the world that they broke. Or talking about why there are patents on life-saving medications, and why there is a rule at the World Trade Organization protecting those patents and keeping life-saving drugs out of the hands of the many millions of people who need them. And that anti-corporate, anti-capitalist movement is not ascendant on the left. So it’s really the one-two punch of knowing that Bannon’s talking about it, Giorgia Meloni is talking about it. RFK Jr is talking about it.
If we were building multiracial, intergenerational social movements that were really rooted in confronting corporate power, then they could say whatever they want and it wouldn’t really bother me. But we’re talking about it less, and the more [conspiracists] talk about it, the more reticent we become. So it’s a dialectic that makes me queasy.
We are in this moment where some of these distorted projections are also showing up in wellness culture. You’ve noted that there are a number of people who are in the business of bodies who appear to have been especially seduced by the mirror world. Chiropractors, juice enthusiasts, yogis – they’ve portaged their interests in health towards rabid, far-right belief systems.
First of all, we have to be clear that it’s not everyone – but fitness really was kind of on the front line. I was in New Jersey for the first few months of the pandemic and the two groups that were organizing most in those early days were the very religious, and the very fit.
Some of the first protests against lockdowns were outside of gyms. And I was trying to understand what was going on with that. Why were these super buff folks having these protests, doing push-ups outside of their gyms?
And I came to the conclusion that there was something similar to the way in which some ultra-religious people were reacting, where they were insisting no matter what this was, they had to go pray. They had to be in these collective spaces, because that was their force field. Prayer was their protection against death or what happens after death.
I vividly remember watching the news one night, and there was a story about a megachurch that had broken lockdown. Journalists were interviewing people as they were streaming out of the megachurch. And they said: “Aren’t you afraid of Covid? You’ve just been in a room with thousands of unmasked people singing.” And the answer from one worshipper was: “No way! I’m bathed in the blood of the Lord.”
I saw these gym protests as a similar idea: my body is my temple. What I’m doing here is my protection; I’m keeping myself strong. I’m building up my immune system, my body is my force field against whatever is coming.
Kneeling before the temple of the body also has fascist roots. Historically, certain ideals of human fitness were a way to communicate the value of citizens.
Whenever you are working within a system of a hierarchy of humans and bodies, then you’re in fascism territory. I think that it made perfect sense that Nazis were body obsessives who fetishized the natural and the hyper-fit form and genes.
There is a connection between certain kinds of new age ideas and health fads and the fascist project. After the second world war, a lot of people in the world of wellness ran in the opposite direction. But there are some ways in which they are natural affinities and they’re finding each other again. And it makes sense that they found each other rather quickly during a pandemic, where you had all of these wellness influencers coaching people into this idea that they could turn their body into a kind of fortress against a virus that we didn’t understand and were really afraid of.
It’s just that there’s a flip side to it. When we moved back to Canada and started doing election campaigning, my partner Avi knocked on a door and met a very fit person who looked like I could have taken an Ashtanga class with her. And all she wanted to talk about was vaccine passports and how she was opposed to vaccines. She said: “I have a strong immune system.” And he, very tentatively, said: “Well, yes, but not everybody does.” And she said: “I think those people should die.”
So, why are figures in health and wellness slipping so readily into this other construction of reality?
There are lots of people who have a healthy attitude towards health and fitness and they aren’t trying obsessively to reach towards an idealized self. But there is a way the quest for wellness and hyper-fitness becomes obsessive.
Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about this really beautifully in her book about wellness culture, where she talks about the silence of the gyms. This is a collective space, right? Why aren’t people chitchatting? But often gyms are very silent and she speculates that maybe it’s because people are talking to someone, it’s just not the other people in the gym, it’s somebody in their head. They’re trying to tame their body into being another kind of body, a perfected body.
I engage with a lot of different doppelganger works of art, and one that really speaks to this is Carmen Maria Machado’s short story Eight Bites, which is a doppelganger story of a woman who decides to have bariatric surgery because she can’t stand her own body. She starts experiencing this elation of having a body that more closely fits idealized social norms. And then she becomes haunted by this presence that at first she thinks is a ghost, but it turns out to be the 100 lbs of fat that she shed. It’s her. It’s a kind of fat golem. And she beats it with terrible violence.
The flip side of the desire for perfection is a hatred of what is perceived as less than perfect. And this is where wellness takes a sinister turn.
In wellness, we also see the stamp of neoliberalism – it’s all about the individual. Ehrenreich was trying to figure out why there was this renewed interest in perfecting the body at this particular moment in time.
Ehrenreich is trying to understand why this exploded in the 1980s. The whole aerobics craze, the whole jogging craze. You know, how does somebody like Jerry Rubin, a member of the Yippies, turn into a health evangelist in the 1980s?
This is interesting to me because in lots of ways this is what Naomi Wolf was trying to understand in the Beauty Myth. Why was there so much more of a focus in the 1980s on personal appearance? She makes the case that beauty became a third shift for women: there was the work shift, there was the home shift, and on top of that, women were now also expected to look like professional beauties.
Beauty ideals for women were not invented in the 1980s, but it is true that standards did rise from the 70s to the 80s, in terms of thinness and fitness and so on. She makes the argument, which, in retrospect, some people have said is more conspiratorial, that there was almost a plot to keep women down, to keep them busy so they couldn’t compete with their male counterparts at this moment when they’re entering the workforce and smashing through glass ceilings.
Ehrenreich has a completely different theory, which I think is much more plausible, which is this is the 1980s: people are in the wreckage of the failures of these huge social movements in the 60s and 70s. There had been this glimpse of collective power that a lot of people really thought was going to change the world, and suddenly they’re living through Thatcherism and Reaganism. And there is this turn towards the self, towards the body as the site of control.
Then you have all of these entrepreneurial wellness figures who come in and say, individuals must take charge of their own bodies as their primary sites of influence, control and competitive edge.
And so the flip side of the idea that your competitive edge is your body is that the people who don’t have bodies as fit or strong as yours somehow did something wrong or are less deserving of access, less deserving even of life. And that is unfortunately all too compatible with far-right notions of natural hierarchies, genetic superiority and disposable people.
I want to return to this idea of the doppelganger as something that we refuse to behold or acknowledge. I can see that it serves as a guard against, say, the constant proximity of death and exploitation. It’s a defense mechanism, and yet it’s also wounding us. And so, I wonder, what is our way out?
We should be compassionate with ourselves in terms of why we look away. There are lots of ways of distracting oneself from unbearable realities. Conspiracy theories are a kind of distraction. So is hyper-fitness, this turn towards the self.
The compassion comes in where we acknowledge that there’s a reason why it is so hard to look at the reality of what has been unveiled by these overlapping crises – you could call it a polycrisis: of the pandemic, climate change, massive racial and economic inequality, realizing that your country was founded on a lie, that the national narratives that you grew up on left out huge parts in the story.
All of this is hard to bear. It’s hard to realize that it’s quicksand.
Because we live in a hyper-individualist culture, we try to bear it on our own and we should not be surprised that we’re cracking under the weight of that, because we can’t bear it alone.
I think the world is pretty awesome right now – not in a good sense. I mean awe in the sense of just being awestruck by the weight of our historical moment. We really are alive on the knife’s edge of whether or not this earth is going to be habitable for our species. That is not something that we can handle just on our own.
So we need to reach towards each other. That’s really tricky work. It’s a lot easier to come together and agree on things that are not working and things that are bad than it is to come together and develop a horizon of how things could be better.
That’s the only thing that’s gonna let us get out of the mirror world and the reactivity of dumping everything that we can’t stand about ourselves on to other people.
Things could be beautiful, things could be livable. There could be a world where everyone belongs. But I don’t think we can bear the reality of our moment unless we can imagine something else.
Katherine Rowland is the author of The Pleasure Gap: American Women and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution and was the host of the podcast Seeking. Previously, she was the executive director of Guernica Magazine.
• This article was amended on 15 November 2023 to correct the spelling of Giorgia Meloni’s name.
