Alternative Lost: How Esotericism was Assimilated into Capitalism
Enjoying a week off college, I spent seven days camping in an ecological center three hours by bus of where I live. The place was small and basically all of its structure was built by a team of four or five people who reside in the plot. Throughout the process of building the place up, they are being helped by a group of volunteers (like me!) who can stay in the camping area using their tents up to 3 months. The volunteers are expected to help on mornings (except on Mondays) and afternoons (except on Fridays) and we have weekends off. The work can't be considered light, since it involves digging up earth, lifting wood, hoeing, etc. After all, we were doing real bioconstruction! In just my one week there, we went from zero to almost completely lifting an entire dry toilet cabin – which was a lot, considering the work was mainly done by one team member with actual expertise along with 3 completely novice volunteers. We were building it with wood, empty glass bottles, clay and sawdust. On evenings, after the two periods of work, I just couldn't wait to take a bath. It made me feel clean up to the soul, really. The nights got really dark and the camping area had no electricity. Night in the countryside like this really makes you feel God didn't create the world for humans to enjoy. During evenings, we basically stayed in this wooden shack everyone called the Hut until it was time to bed, since there were electric lights there. My free time was dedicated to reading books and playing guitar. Even though I'm not used to sleep in tents, nights passed by super fast since I was so exhausted. It was such a chill and exotic week. I really enjoyed my time there.
I also enjoyed the people a lot. Everyone in the team was so nice and patient, even when I felt I was more disturbing than helping as a volunteer due to my absolute lack of past experience doing bioconstruction. Listening to them talking about their feelings and opinions was a real pleasure. They were mostly young people who had left the same big city I now live in to establish themselves in a quiet, easygoing countryside ruled by other values and other rhythms. They had all in some way or another taken part in the brutal, growth-at-all-costs ethos of our current neoliberal economy and were all harmed by it. So they decided to build out of their own hands an alternative. I reckon one week isn't really enough to get to the bottom of all their believes and motives, but I talked a lot with them in the time I had and now I want to reflect: if neoliberal capitalism is the idiomatic "root of all evil", then how much of a revolutionary alternative the believes and lifestyles I saw there really are?
I. Doing the Dishes and Enjoying It
One of the main annoyances I have with the discourse of people in big cities, mainly those who were born and raised in these great and accelerated concrete jungle metropolis, is how much they are keen on asserting "facts" about the supposed true and immutable character of human nature without recognizing that the "factual" reality they are pointing to is deeply ideological. These people hold a certain view of our species that is strongly informed by what liberalism (as the main ideological force in our politics and economics, so present that it became basically naturalised in all fields of life) preconizes as logical, rational and universal for humans. Often, in an attempt to portray certain personality traits as undeniable aspects of our nature, they go as far as pointing that atribute in other primates and justifying it with evolutionary psychology, making the case that acting in this or that way is a biological imperative of our species as animals. The thing is one can't pinpoint the supposed source of a human trait in a natural genealogy if one doesn't even know how nature truly works. Take for example the claim that humans, like chimpanzees, may be divided into alpha and beta males (a distinction taken straight out of primatology) and the former is characterized by empowerment through hoarding of sparse resources and brutal domination of opponents (evolutionary ideas with emphasis on competition and scarcity). Now compare that with claims of genetic basis for altruism, like the greenbeard genes hypothesis or kin selection (evolutionary ideas with emphasis on cooperation). If you can't decide which version of the wild human life is correct, then how can you know what is natural for the human character? And if you're going to choose one of them, what is guiding your choice? Your political opinions, your moral ideals of right and wrong, your idea of our "natural" behaviours derived from your own restricted experience and framework of conceptualization? Then, in the end, the "reality" you point to when you talk about the real nature of the human being isn't real or natural at all, it is merely an ideological projection of your desires in our biology.
Among the diagnosis this sort of evolutionary psychology likes to make of our animals dispositions is that some occupations are universally less noble than others and thus a society where every responsibility is shared by everyone would be an utopian vision doomed to failure for this flaw in design. It's a Calvinist-like idea we are fed since birth: good, valuable work is that which rewards the worker (who worked hard enough to deserve it, of course) with good, valuable money enough to buy services. Everyone who still isn't trying hard enough has to get used to work serving others – but only until they themselves start gaining money (again, solely through the merit of their hard work). Like the old saying goes: "Everybody wants a revolution, but nobody wants to do the dishes".
First, I have to say this kind of absurd egalitarian superlative (a world where every responsibility belongs to everyone indistinctly, like in this case where all of the dishes are to be equally washed by all of the people) is a gross misrepresentation of socialism/communism. But that isn't really the point I want to get into here. My point is that, once you get past this kind of dumb individualism that portrays a noble and valuable person as one who can pay services to themselves, it's very easy to see that people may just as well "do the dishes" without complaining. I saw this firsthand during my week in the ecological center, in a pretty literal example.
Inside the Hut, there was this big communal kitchen with a lot of utensils and ingredients. A couple of people usually decided to do something and everybody wanted a bit of it, so they ended up cooking for five or six. This way everybody could eat fresh and warm food every night. And people there didn't mind doing the dishes afterwards. Everyone washed their own plate, sure. But if someone felt like they didn't help out enough in the cooking, they would grab a used frying pan or bowl and contribute by washing it too. It didn't matter if they weren't the ones to get it dirty in the first place. Everyone needs to eat, so they all felt compelled to make their own little contribution to accomplish this daily, communal mission. So, at least in the aspect of neoliberalism's individualist ethos, I can say for sure the community-focused lifestyle of the ecological center is a pretty valid – and actually noble – transvaluation. People are pretty capable of putting on some extra effort for the collective good and not only for their own benefit: you just need to stop discourage them from doing so.
Seeing everyone so eager to contribute made me sad as hell that, even thought the collective labour needed to run a communal kitchen would be impossible under neoliberal individualism, it's still socialists/communists the ones being pointed in the face for their proverbial "laziness". A common critic of these systems deal with how there is "no incentive" to production in them – but could there be an incentive greater than caring? Some people, when intoxicated by the red scare mentality (a thing that, as I explained using the movie Ninotchka in my anti-AI text, can only come out of ignorance), straight up say that "socialists don't like to/never have and never will work" – examples galore, and really exact ones: it was literally what Trump said about Mamdani earlier this year. They love to recite the "they pretend to pay us, we pretend to do our jobs" anedocte. But what I clearly saw in this example of communal effort – of food being cooked and dishes being washed by a selected few each day to the overall benefit of everybody – was that it's actually capitalism with its selfish, power-to-the-individual mentality that makes a distinction between honorable and disgraceful jobs. It's capitalism, through the lens of praising only what may accumulate capital or enhance performance, that downsizes the values of some efforts and even deem them unworthy.
"Everybody wants a revolution, but nobody wants to do the dishes", they have been repeating at least since the Summer of Love. The thing is: the people who are so opposed to doing the dishes are exactly the ones who don't want a revolution in the first place! It's a great example of what I talked about above – an universal generalization about the "nature" of ourselves as human that actually only applies to the reality of our liberal-wired world.
II. So is Summer of Love The Solution to Our Socialist Problems?
The Summer of Love, a gathering of members from the hippie/counterculture movement in the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco during 1967, was a somewhat recent and very conspicuous instance in United States' long history of alternative communities. Since the first pilgrims set foot in its soil, the New World has been a popular spot for groups that lived in the margins of mainstream European society at the time – especially due to religious believes. But this specific kind of egalitarian and esoteric rural communities we think of today when we discuss alternative lifestyles was outlined mainly during the nineteenth century, when utopian ideas by early socialists thinkers like Charles Fourier and Robert Owen were imported to the young continent.
Owen and Fourier both agreed that rural workers and urban proletariat were living under undignified conditions due to exploitation and that society was overall taken by petty values and cheap opportunism. Also, they both thought that a better world would demand not only social and material changes to this order of things, but also spiritual ones. Talking about Henri de Saint-Simon – a French utopian thinker really influential for European socialism – and his followers, the Saint-Simonians, a recent Jacobin article written by Meagan Day says the following:
"The emergence of capitalism corresponded with a process of disenchantment that seemed to suck all the magic out of the world. The Saint-Simonians were, in protest and defiance of this icy alienation, interested in mounting a counteroffensive suffused with warm, romantic feeling."
And both Fourierists and Owenites were following in the same trail. It's easy to imagine how, specially in a land so abounding in religious fervor from all kinds of denominations as the USA, communities built under the ideas of these thinkers were often fertile ground for esoteric practices. When the material conditions of life are too frugal, maybe it's easier to imagine revolution in spiritual terms. And that seems to be exactly what was going on in socialist-inspired communities all around the USA. As the same article quoted above reads further in the text:
"For several decades in American socialist history, certain self-identified socialists were more likely to hand you a book by Andrew Jackson Davis, a famous clairvoyant and spiritualist author also known as the “Poughkeepsie seer,” than a copy of The Communist Manifesto.
But capitalism, with its always amusing power of hollowing popular revolutionary symbols and returning it as empty, tamed, inoffensive market products, couldn't let occultism stay out of the radar for too long. The idea here was making spiritualism not something you could live instead of liberalism, but something you had to buy out of it. Esoteric/occultist practices nowadays still exist pretty much out of mainstream discourse and tend to be rather critical of it. But for all the criticism, this sort of alternative lifestyle isn't capable anymore of pinpointing the problem in the mainstream society it disdains.
III. Troubles in Paradise
In the least bad scenarios, esotericism seems to degenerate into a coward, weirdly magical form of apoliticism that acts too innocuous to pose any threat to capital – for example, I've heard people who reside in the ecological villa literally telling me reading/watching the news causes stress and thus is bad for your health, so you shouldn't do it. This behaviour completely empties the revolutionary content of the once socialist-inspired spiritualism and puts in its place... nothing at all. A vague, gravely unscientific, naturalistic-fallacy-coded version of healthcare, maybe. Also, despite all the dishes mentioned previously, this sort of belief really surprised me as deeply individualist. Let's just remind ourselves that a huge deal of the first labour movements were about setting national and international webs of communication to exchange information and experience in matters of revolution – they even called themselves stuff like International Workingmen Association. That was only natural, after all the members of these organizations were interested in the working CLASS and the CLASS struggle. You can't really get to know an ontological entity external to you, such as a social class or its struggle, if you don't turn your senses to the outside world. And, to do so, you need to get informed, to research and read, to collect information. In other words, you need to get the news. Even if it was true that stress caused by news was bad for one's individual health, I still think that, when we put the two options in a weighing scale, our choice should be more inclined to the unhealthy alternative.
In most cases, though, esotericism was reduced to something even pettier than this naïve eulogy to apoliticism: spiritualist believes end up reproducing the capitalist systems they used to be an alternative to and are exploited to improve either forces of production or forces of consumption, thus further perpetuating the capital in its never-ending accumulation process. One evident example is the overwhelming amount of products being sold specially for this commercial niche: just think about the intensely overvalued market of gemstones and crystals which, apart from their aesthetic attributes, are sold to the general public pretty much exclusively on the basis of mystical properties; or about expensive and weirdly mixed essential oils being sold for anything from stress relief to bacteria infection (there are even supposedly scientific articles written about this!); or even astrology-based therapies to further boost your healthcare (for maximum efficiency, I'd recommend trying it with an AI chatbot therapist). And the real problem here isn't even the mere use of these alternatives as complementary treatments. That would honestly be fine. Evidence-based medicine depends on large samples and narrow statistical analysis and its results are usually better interpreted when applied to the general population, but you can't expect every single individual to be in the accounted 2 standard deviation of every Gauss curve. If someone feels their mind less distressed when making use of aromatherapy, there is no need trying to back this individual feeling with science: one may freely enjoy this resource in spite of anything the numbers have to say about its effectiveness. The real problem is that those alternative products – in being supposedly "natural" and "free from the disadvantages of mainstream medicine" such as adverse effects – are marketed as the preferable and exclusive way to healing. And just like that, people who adopt these believes are held hostage by this very strict and overpriced universe who preaches your mental, physical and spiritual health will be punished for not using their products. One astonishing example I saw in the ecological center was a woman who routinely bought Swanson's "Certified 100% Organic Extra Virgin Coconut Oil" (which as you may expect is as expensive as oil can get, and this woman payed even more with import duties and taxes since she had to bring this product from overseas) instead of any cheap and easily accessible seed oil. She justified herself saying seed oil was high in Omega-6 essential fatty acids that provoked inflammation and thus were bad for your health, an argument that – albeit kidnapping scientific language in a way hard for a layman to disprove – is simply unscientific.
Now, this only covers the "forces of consumption" aspect I mentioned above. What about the forces of production? You see, one of the great victories of liberalism when assimilating spiritualist/esoteric movements was shifting the focus of exploring the occult for the enhancement of society and instead promoting these practices for the enhancement of the individual. The man who started the ecological villa himself told me when I was there that the raison d'être of the project was "all about self-improvement". Really? So I was volunteering to the benefit of myself? In my week working there, putting effort into things I'll never make use of (unless I go back there, which I'd love to do), I felt it was all more about building a community, sharing experiences and knowledge, meeting people. This is a form of self-improvement too, but one that doesn't put the self in the first place. Anyway, I think it's easy to perceive how this focus on self-improvement may bring these ideas together with stuff like self-help books and inspirational publications. And it really did, in this one ecological center I visited. One of the project's pillars was this thing called Nonviolent Communication (NVC, for short), a concept and a field of study created by American psychologist Marshall Rosenberg. It was actually a fun thing to learn about, and there may be a lot to take out of it from a philosophical standpoint. There was a book there by Rosenberg himself where he presented his theory to the general public (a book not-so-creatively titled "Nonviolent Communication"). In the front cover of the volume, we could read the subtitle "Find common grounds with anyone, anywhere, at any time, both personally and professionally [my emphasis]". So the self-improvement gets marketed as a way to work better and produce more. But it's not only that, no: self-help, inspirational and occultist publications nowadays are filled with economic discourse and are closely tied to a huge material basis, in spite of all their spiritual jargon. In some meditation circles we had during my week there, the speaker guiding it asked us to think on how we were investing our time. And, later on, when we were asked to think about things we were grateful for, people on the team were quick to point out they were grateful for seeing the center finally returning a profit.
To really tie the knot on these two aspects of how esotericism degraded into commercial practices and self-help gibberish: the Marshall Rosenberg book on NVC had, also announced in the front cover, a foreword by (you won't believe it) Deepak Chopra. Chopra, despite penning the foreword to an inspirational psychology book, is no mere motivational speaker at all. He is one of the main names in alternative medicine today, an Indian-American endocrinologist who made a career out of preaching Ayurveda and other forms of new-age therapies. He established himself as a famous character in alternative medicine through appearing on TV and writing books such as The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success [again, my emphasis, but just checking the titles to these works you really get to see how spiritualism was manipulated to serve capitalist forces of production], which spent 72 weeks in the New York Times Best Seller list. Enjoying the popularity achieved with his work, Deepak Chopra was quick to cofound the Chopra Center for Wellbeing, an institutionalized way to exploit his ideas for maximum repercussion and profit. According to the 2013 book Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine by Paul A. Offit – a pediatrician associated with the University of Pennsylvania –, the Chopra Center sells, beyond "ayurvedic supplements, oils, massages and herbs",
"[...] books, videos, clothes, aromatherapies, jewelry, gifts, and music. Customers can attend courses run by Dr. Chopra titled 'Journey into Healing,' 'Free to Love, Free to Heal,' and 'Summoning the Sacred,' for between $1,000 and $5,000 each. If customers want to participate in a sacrificial ceremony to please the Vedic gods, it costs between $3,000 and $12,000. One year of anti-aging medicines can cost as much as $10,000. If CEOs want Deepak Chopra to speak at a corporate event, it costs $25,000 (...). Chopra's center grosses about $20 million a year."
To further boost its reputation, of course, Chopra had to legitimize his products by way of science somehow, since science has the monopoly of truth in our post-Enlightenment era. To do this, he fused Ayurvedic practices with ideas of forces and energies taken straight out of quantum physics (he even authored a book back in 1989 literally called Quantum Healing). This appropriation and misuse of scientific terms to endorse and market an unscientific practice was ostracized by critics both in and out of the academic field. But, despite that, the idea seems to have achieved great reception among the general public, as we can see by the numbers Paul Offit cites above. Being an opportunist and a charlatan: that's the real spiritual law to success that neither Deepak Chopra nor Marshall Rosenberg nor Napoleon Hill nor whoever is telling you about.
IV. Occultism's Worrysome Younger Brother
This is the petty and coward state occultism has been reduced to in our positivist-technocratic era: a puppet for capital that needs to constantly validate itself through pseudoscientific language. It is an alternative to mainstream capitalism markets, yes, but one that simply alienates its believers in another – often problematic, commonly overpriced – commercial web. Its political origins among Saint-Simonians socialists, as described in the abovementioned Jacobin article, have been distorted to the point of being unidentifiable. After assimilation by the capital, spiritualism became, as shown, basically apolitical – what is further affirmed by its constant and monomaniac focus on the self, despite its flourishing in communal experiments.
There is still, however, a darker, more problematic facet of recent esoteric currents, as illustrated by this editorial of the Aries, a journal for the study of Western esotericism, published earlier this year. In it, academics Egil Asprem and Julian Strube discuss how Hans Thomas Hakl, an important figure in the institutionalization of Western esotericism as a serious field of academic studies, helped to spread the work and teachings of far-right philosopher and occultist Julius Evola, who lived in Fascist Italy and later escaped to Nazi German when fascism fell. Hakl's translations of and writing on Evola were regularly published in far-right publications, what – along with the spread of a conspiracy-like theory that a Frankfurt School-influenced Establishment was trying to suppress the studies of esotericism in Academia – ended up making a lot of Western esotericism scholars really close to major right-wing figures and ideologues of sort to far-right circles.
This association of occultism with the far-right wasn't only a post-War oddity that took shape with Hakl's work, though. It was already present in Europe since at least the end of the 19th century in ways that greatly informed Nazi German, like exemplified in the Völkisch movement, a school of thought that brought together ethno-nationalist views of German purity – with clear race associations, already presenting antisemite tones – with Nordic traditional folklore, including paganism. Völkisch was making use of paganism in its attempt to return to an original, strictly German tradition of spirituality. It was in this landscape that philosophical movements like traditionalism and the type of conservationism associated with the Alt-Right emerged – what is really ironical to think about because, for all of Christianity endorsement of new right's "conservationism", the trend of thought itself is blatantly anti-Christian. During this time, some esoteric movements that were making rounds in Europe took advantage of the ethno-mysticism craze and adopted a jargon very similar to that being used by "scientific" racists and ultranationalists: Helena Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society had a lot to say about the "glorious" Aryan race and, influenced by Eastern traditions like Buddhism and Hinduism, also made great use of the swastika as a symbol. Ariosophy (lit. "the wisdom of the Aryans"), an esoteric system developed in Austria by Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, also portrayed the swastika as a symbol of the ancestral master-class of Aryans. These occultist movements celebrating a supposedly great race of the past with Germanic/Nordic associations – and with phenotypical attributes that really resembled German people – gifted Hitler with a great symbolic and pseudo-historic base for his own believes.
V. Alternative Lost
Of course, none of the people I talked with in my week at the ecological center presented in their speeches no shadow of this evil trend of occultism. But even so, as I argued above, the spiritualism I saw being practiced there – there and everywhere else I saw it – was still too coward, too inoffensive to really present itself as a powerful, revolutionary alternative to neoliberal capitalism. People there seemed so convinced they were living outside of "the system" somehow – and, in a way, living in a communal experiment in a rural area building houses with your own hands really is kind of as outside of the system as you can get. But the fact that this impersonal and great "system" can still fit peacefully in itself people living so much in its margins just goes to show how assimilating and alienating capitalism really is. For an ideological system forged inside of the first major socialist upheaval in Europe, occultism now seems to be too much of an alternative lost. The answer to our socialist problems, sadly, will now need to be far more complicated and nuanced than that.