Please give part one a read if you haven’t yet.

So… how is it that people involved in a culture premised on love, sharing and inclusivity become a spiritual narcissist, charlatan, anti-vaccer creep, or Jordan Peterson fanboy seemingly overnight? One problem is that people with inherent internal contradictions get caught up in an aesthetic that allows them to deny contradictions without ever developing an analysis of where they come from. This enables them to believe they are creating change when the are really reinforcing dominant power structures. I know these are annoying fifty cent words, but hear me out.

What often gets romanticized and commodified in the rave and festival scene is not the collective resistance, deep inclusiveness, or hard work. It is an aesthetic elevating individual liberty, disregard for norms, and a belief that you are somehow unique. This triumph of aesthetic over content is an essential part of the commodification of all “countercultures.” It is how narratives are transformed and histories lost. It happened to the new left, hippies, punks, and B-Boys, and It’s happening to some youth subculture right now. In the festival scene in particular, it opened a door for the (normally white, male, middle class) hippie Libertarians and Conspiritualists to enter the picture.

Fetishizing liberty and distrusting norms without an analysis of power or change generally has a right-wing drift, even in “progressive” scenes. This is how we saw Washington State party promoters who funded events from illegal marijuana operations voting against decriminalization in 2012. They were more concerned about profits and taxation than they were about keeping Black folks out of jail. Add in borrowed spirituality, pseudo science or Youtube holery and you get an explosive cocktail of ignorance and privilege. This is how we saw leaders in festival communities posting the “Plandemic” video and ranting about impending martial law for months last year, without ever supporting Black Lives Matter.

But why were these folks caught up in COVID denial, vaccine paranoia and promoting willfully ignorant, self-righteous plague raves instead of joining the most important uprising for racial justice in a generation? The simplest answer is that many of them were always this way, but none of them -and none of us- were in social situations where we had to confront such tendencies. We just got to party together and say lots of weird fun shit, assuming that because we’re aesthetically aligned, we must be personally and politically as well. Crises reveal people’s underlying interests. It probably didn’t help that this one also included bountiful free time on Youtube.

But aesthetics VS. beliefs and too much Youtube only cover part of the problem. So what are the other contributors?  There are tons, but from my vantage point, the three biggest are:

1. No analysis of how power or change actually work.
2. An inflated sense of self importance, often to the degree of  narcissism, and a belief that others are ignorant
3. Distrust in institutions and misunderstanding of science, but belief in abstractions

Despite believing otherwise, most people don’t operate from some central organizing ideological or analytical principles. Instead, they have a hodgepodge of contradictory political, economic and spiritual views. Even avowed lefties like me wrestle with many contradictions. As our hippie friends and therapists like to say, we all contain multitudes… right? This can be beautiful. But -as we live in a liberal society based on individuality– most people’s views are at the level of the person, rather than the system. When combined with pseudo-science or magical thinking, this mixed bag can lead to ideas that are convoluted and deeply reductivist, while appearing expansive and enticing.

Take COVID conspiracy theories, and in particular ones about government implants, 5G, or anything with the word “Bill” within a mile of the word “Gates.” They were rampant in the early days and had shockingly deep reach, and they’ve echoed throughout the pandemic. I was on multiple message threads with people believing that martial law and FEMA camps were coming tomorrow, that the global supply chain was on the brink of collapse, or that the virus was fabricated for profit or to kill of XX% of the world’s population at once. Even people like John Stewart seem to believe some of this shit. JP Sears certainly does.

All of these “theories” weave complex, often contradictory notions together to something vaguely resembling a cohesive narrative. They almost always come down to specific individuals with power, or small elite cadres that need to be removed to save the planet. Many contain small smidgens of truth, and yet all are basically bonkers. In the end, they all miss some fundamental points about how power in society actually works. Ironically, it’s both much more simple and more insidious than most people want to acknowledge.

I’m an “Occam’s Razor” kind of guy. I believe in parsimony (despite my pedantic writing). I generally think the simplest explanation is the best. This is connected to my history working in social science research and my identity as a Socialist. The many terrifying things we’re experiencing right now are the logical results of an irrational Capitalist system. Yes, there are small handfuls of billionaires controlling much of the world. Yes, they coordinate on some things. Yes, they take advantage of crises. Yes, they have disgustingly huge influence on governments.

But, for the most part, elites don’t intentionally create crises, they don’t give a shit about things at our level, and for fuck’s sakes they’re not all Jewish. Individual leaders, no matter how terrible, will never be the problem. It’s the class structure of society, the incentives to power, and the ideologies generated to justify material conditions that are at issue. Individual elites are opportunistic feeders. The more ideological ones may have a Milton Freedman bent of popularizing “whatever ideas that are lying around”, but even that is taking advantage of crisis, not creating it. Naomi Klein has a whole book about this called Disaster Capitalism.

This materialist stuff may seem ranty, but it’s important. When people don’t have an analysis of power, it opens space for all types of beliefs. We are pattern seekers. We’re also pro-social, generally trusting, and inclined to “go with the flow,” particularly in subcultures like mine. This creates opportunities for “gaslightworkers” and “Conspiritualists” to manipulate people into believing some real weird shit, often for profit or self aggrandizement. It comes in waves and is likely to have a major resurgence in coming years, particularly in areas such as spiritual healing, “trauma treatment” and unlicensed psychedelic therapies. There are a lot of charlatans out there who will tell you they can solve your and the world’s problems. Please watch out.

The irony here is that the folks espousing paranoid, reductivist views or advocating for their ideas as a cure to all social or spiritual woes are much more like the individual elites they want to critique than they are the rest of us. They tend to be self serving, see themselves as more informed, treat relations as transactional, and possibly have tendencies towards narcissism or sociopathy. To be clear, I am not an accredited mental health professional and will never claim to be. I am basically a lay person who has read a bunch of pop science, knows enough jargon to get by and has strong opinions. But I readily admit that and will not pretend to be something else, whereas I’ve known way too many people who use a philosophical word salad to front on the regular.

Ravers of the world, unite.

In short