Thread by @DocMCohen

For many ppl – me included – it was a shock when the pandemic sparked an affinity b/w wellness culture and the far right. The two seemed opposites, what common ground could there be?

The truth is wellness & fascism have more than just a modern connection.
Settle in for a long🧵

We think of wellness culture as nature-loving hippie liberalism originating in the 60s. This image clung even as wellness grew into $-driven industry by the 90s.

But Boomers didn’t create wellness, it goes back to the 19th C and shares elements with the 20th C worst ideologies.

Wellness came out of a movement called physical culture, created by history’s first fitspo influencer, Bernarr Macfadden.

He used aspirational images of his own rippling physique to sell followers on a lifestyle of regimented diet and exercise.

One of Macfadden’s most significant impacts was to bind the concept of good health to the glossy perfectionism of celebrity and beauty culture.

Macfadden framed health as a physical project: eating a restrictive diet & exercising by a strict regimen.

Health as a series of virtuous activities in perpetuity, a devotional practice. Where virtue is visible on the body as a muscular physique and lack of obvious disease.

It shouldn’t be surprising that early 20th C fascists were fans of physical culture. Macfadden and Mussolini spent time together in mutual admiration.

They shared a view of nationalism as embodied in physicality – the virtues of a country manifested in the muscles of its men.

More on Macfadden and Mussolini:
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

Macfadden’s health ideology leaned into eugenics, such as his teaching that strong parents produced strong children.

For him, individual devotion to fitness and diet was not only a personal project, but a way to improve the human race and bolster the power of the nation state.

It’s hard to understate Macfadden’s influence on fitness and diet culture.

The glamorization of health, sold through glossy, aspirational imagery of a narrow physical ideal traces its origin to him.

Likewise, Macfadden’s conception of health as individual pursuit and visible demonstration of morality was important to the fitness movement.

I wrote about how we moralize health:
elemental.medium.com/being-healthy-…

Macfadden’s ideology clearly veers into body fascism - which in the intolerance to bodies that deviate from a set standard.

Of course, all modern society is hostile to bodies that don’t conform to narrow ideals. But wellness is *saturated* with Western beauty culture.

Images of thin, white women lacking wrinkles are inescapable in wellness. Western beauty ideals are just as common in these spaces as stereotypical woo ideology.

It’s very common for alt-health practitioners to sell beauty products/services and these are mainly aimed at women.

I’ve written about Goop’s success in ♀️-targeted wellness. They’ve staked out a lucrative spot at the nexus of multiple movements. Using feminist language, Goop caught the wave of alt-health popularity and married it to aspirational lifestyle marketing.
cbc.ca/news/opinion/g…

I used to think the focus on (ageless, thin, white) beauty in wellness culture was a capitalist inevitability. Simply the way the movement monetized itself in a world already obsessed with appearance.

But now I understand how cardinal it is in wellness that health = glamourous beauty within a narrow set of standards.

It’s not just marketing, it’s a form of body fascism that ties health to Western beauty ideals.

Another area of overlap between wellness & fascism is the obsession with purity. This shared fixation inspires similar-sounding conspiracy theories about contamination.

Often there is a hearkening back to an ancestral time when humanity lived in a mythologized state of purity.

This brings us to another similarity: the idea that we are poisoned by modern life – indeed by modernity itself, often depicted as a toxin that spoils the natural human state of purity.

Both wellness & fascism are deeply invested in myth-making about pre-historic humanity.

The food ideology Macfadden preached – obsessed with purity, ahistorical, restrictive, seeing food as medicine – inspired many others.

His influence can be felt among contemporaries like Harvey Kellogg and also as a throughline in wellness leading to today’s fad diet gurus.

This health ideology is very deterministic, framed as virtuous attainment in eating & exercising. The impact of social forces or plain luck are minimized.

This is an appealing fantasy of control - a semi-magical ability to forestall the inevitable through physical devotion.

It makes sense that ppl who believe the individual determines their health are hostile to public health measures and sympathetic to anti-government ideas.

As @gorskon details, the anti-vax movement has long courted the far right.

https://twitter.com/gorskon/status/1378718897776553994

Now, I want to be careful not to overstate the wellness/fascism connection. The fact that it came as a surprise to so many to see overlap between these communities means this is not a perfect political alignment.
washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/…

After hippie counterculture became associated with wellness, liberalism became the dominant social/cultural association for rest of the 20th C. The earlier history faded from view and the lefty political affiliation seemed most relevant.

It’s this association I grew up with in a very alt-health influenced household at the end of the 20th C. What I knew of wellness in my youth was generally left-leaning, and I had no reason to question it.

Even after I rejected the blatant anti-science, wellness still had appeal

But for me the appeal was mainly where wellness overlapped with environmentalism and anti-capitalism. In the condemnation of modernity for poisoning the planet and creating a culture of compulsive exploitation and plunder.

Like the booth selling healing crystals outside the seed saving seminar, wellness floated in & out of my peripheral view as we explored leaving the city to start farming (which we eventually did).

The wellness industry continues to benefit from an association with food & nature

The intersection of farming, food and health is fascinating and feels urgently important. But at the same time, it’s undeniably a space where pseudoscience, snake oil and certain deterministic ideas about health are common, often facing little pushback.

Being around wellness since childhood, I thought I was decently familiar with it. But I was FLOORED in 2020 to see a connection to the far right.

This was at odds with my understanding of wellness. I struggled to make sense of it - is this some kind of horseshoe theory shit?

To some degree I do think horseshoe theory (the idea that political extremes bend around to meet) is relevant.

Anti-government attitudes peak at the extremes, so it’s not unimaginable that opposite ends of the spectrum could find common cause against public health authorities.

Pause for a couple of good articles:
motherjones.com/politics/2020/…

theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2…

But the speed with which wellness adopted Qanon ideas early in the pandemic and the long history of anti-vax engagement in far right spaces implies a more elemental connection than horseshoe-shaped platitudes can explain.
vox.com/the-goods/2257…

I’m grateful to #Conspirituality podcast for exploring many of the histories & ideologies animating these movements. Highly recommend for anyone looking to understand WTF the connection is between wellness & far right conspiracism.
vice.com/en/article/93w…

If you’re interested in learning more about the origins of wellness culture, you should listen to this @bastardspod series on Bernarr Macfadden.
iheart.com/podcast/105-be…

Understanding the larger context helped me make sense of what at first seemed incomprehensible.

And this thread can only hope to be a shallow dive into the complex ideologies, histories and cultures involved, so I encourage anyone who made it this far to keep learning!

FIN