The Right's Weird New Age
With the right suddenly on top, why are rightists drifting toward the occult, junk science, health food fads, and the like?
From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:
Steve Sailer
February 12, 2025
With the left depressed in 2025, much of the cultural energy belongs to the right. But where’s it going to go?
One increasing possibility appears to be that newly self-confident right-wingers are getting into various kinds of New Age woo-woo, the occult, gnosticism, RFK Jr. junk science, paganism, Indian esotericism, Chinese numerology, health food fads, etc. In other words, all the old craziness satirized by Umberto Eco in Foucault’s Pendulum, plus some new innovations like AI cults and God knows what else.
G. K. Chesterton supposedly said, “The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything.” (Note that Chesterton never quite said that: This most famous Chestertonian epigram is actually an admirably succinct paraphrased summation of G. K.’s train of thought by his admirer Émile Cammaerts.)
The current right-wing coalition between tech bros and chuds opens up all sorts of possibilities, both highbrow and lowbrow.
Read the whole thing there.
Well, a large part of the issue is that between the ever-shifting "official" diet recommendations, the embrace of transgenderism, and the COVID fiasco, among other things, "official" medicine has done a good job of discrediting itself.
See also Robin Hanson's critique of medicine: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/medical-doubts-opedhtml
People who haven't experienced the "good old days" tend to harken back to them. Once commented during a Boomer-Bashing thread that our system is based on raising your family in your 20s, peaking in your 40s, and dying in your 60s. Lots of people began protesting that the last part was "inaccurate". So it's not surprising so many on the Right are believing various "you'll live forever with our program" crap.