Psychology

A Newly Burning Brand

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“I’m X, Y, and Z” some religious person or spiritual seeker will exclaim proudly, touting their supposed morals and ethics.. However they are neither X,Y, or Z in your humble opinion – yet if you call them on it they get very offended. You yourself are offended that they are making such statements while clearly not living up to what they profess.

We’ve seen this before, with gun-toting Lightworkers, compassionate Christians who want homeless people dead, and so on. People are very emphatic about who they are while being absolutely nothing like they say they are.

So are they just lying? Well, it would seem as much, but drifting among various conversations I’ve had and heard, I’d like to suggest something different. These people have a brand.

A brand. A set of labels and images and so on that define them. It doesn’t mean they are these things, but they say they are. The human equivalent of a corporation touting their love of the environment while pumping toxic waste into it, or financial responsibility being part of their image until the CIO suddenly flies to a country without an extradition treaty.

At least with corporations we have the comfort of assuming people in them are lying to us, but I think these “spiritually branded” people who don’t live up to their brand may be serious. They may actually think they’re what they say they are.

Why do I say that? Am I going soft? No, they’re still destructive assholes, but we can learn from them. In fact I think I have a pretty good idea of how we got here.

Ages ago, “personal branding” was all the rage in the career world. Initially I kind of liked it because it felt like a vision quest – figure who you are and sum it up! I’ll even argue that early on it was a good thing as it helped people figure out how to communicate in their careers!

But of course, it became corrupted into bullshit-spewing self-marketing. The internet didn’t help because it encouraged everyone to brand themselves. Start this youtube channel! Start this podcast! Do this etsy store! Try this on your LinkedIn. We all got branding dumped down our throat, and even if we didn’t respond we saw all those people who found brands and wondered . . .

Now slather all of this on top of religion and spirituality, which has had PLENTY of inaccurate branding over the ages. The result is something far worse than the usual religions toxicity. We’ve taken the problems humanity has always had and added market-tested, keyword-enabled branding on top of it. It’s somewhere between marketing and toxic fandom.

So when you tell someone they’re a religious hypocrite and they insist they aren’t with buzzword bingo, remember this is branding. This is a lie people are so used to telling it’s not a lie.

(As how we deal with it, well, that I gotta put some thought into . . .)

– Xenofact

The Monsters They Brought With Them

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There’s something wrong with so many famous people, rich people, and famous rich people. They’re ranting about conspiracy theories and weird reproductive obsessions. There’s talk of aliens and hallucinatory trips, drug usage, and secret history from people supposedly directing our future.. Something is off with these folks.

It’s not just things they say or believe for a profit or fame – I mean they do say these things for profit and fame. But it seems they really believe some of this crap, at least before they find something else to freak out about. There is some real fear there under the usual isolated-rich-famous-weirdo delusions.

It seems weird to be so afraid of everything. I mean you got money and fame and everything, why be so terrified? Why be so terrified of things that are clearly bullshit?

Well beyond daddy issues and the usual problems that make people fall into conspiracy thinking, I think one issue is these people are so isolated.

You’re rich, you can do anything you want. But also you depend on other people, people who say what you want to here so they stay on the gravy train. You are flattered and complimented. You are isolated and detached from reality.

You’re famous. People love you, talk about you, follow you (often for almost no good reason). Of course that means once again you exist in an isolated world. You are of course flattered and complimented, probably even moreso if you were just rich.

If you’re rich, famous, or both you exist in a kind of bubble, separate from reality. You’re in a kind of virtual reality crossed with an isolation tank. There’s no reality, there’s just what you brought with you.

And many people bring monsters with them.

Fears and delusions rampage through their minds, echoing off of the walls of their strange isolation. No one is going to correct them or even help them. That might make them angry and cut off the money train.

Told what they want to hear, they operate in unreality. Reality will shift to what they want to hear, delivered by hangers-on, investors, and an adoring public. But that also means their own terrors and insecurities can find root in their fallow minds. People who want to get ahead may also play off of their concerns.

Most of all, I suspect many of them know this isn’t real. You know people are lying, are flattering you. The news cycle constantly reminds you of your mistakes and fallabilities. You’re out there, famous, rich, exposed to the eye of reality and the eye of yourself. Every day, maybe every minute on social media, someone is reminding you you’re not right, you’re not perfect, you’re just a bank account and a PR department wrapped in flesh.

The rich, the famous in our world are so disconnected I wonder how much of their strange paranoia is just their own bouncing off the walls of their own unreal prison.

Unfortunately they make decisions about our lives.

–Xenofact

Understanding Addressing The Pain

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Writing this in 2024 it seems that conspiracy theories flourish in spiritual and mystical communities we’d not expect to see them in. To flip through Instagram or podcasts and hear some “crunchy” New Age yoga teacher swing from positions to WHO conspiracies and Hillary-Clinton-Is-A-Clone is disturbing. Worse, like the more standard conspiracy theories we’re used, to there’s a violent trend in these communities.

The Starseeds are buying guns, the Yoga enthusiasts want to hang doctors, and we’re wondering what the shit is going on.

Well first, if you’re surprised metaphysical communities have issues with conspiracies, fascism, and violent imagery, you’re not paying attention. This has always happened, from grifters to cultic spinoffs to political manipulation. We’re just a bit surprised by it since too many of us still, unconsciously, think of these as some fusion of hippies and peace-and-love New Agers.

But let us not forget that many people seek out magical and metaphysical practices out of pain.

That ache that won’t go away so you try yoga. The spiritual void from consumer culture that leads you to a Buddhist church. The bad year that leads you to magic in hope for understanding and influence. So many of us take to the mystical out of ennui or agony or need.

This is not always a bad thing of course. Those moments of waking up are vital for us to get what’s going on and realize what we have to do differently. But sometimes, the pain leads you down terrible paths, to grift, to fanaticism, to worse.

Conspiracy theories for many are an attempt to soothe pain as well. To explain problems you can’t explain easily. To seek assurance of meaning, even if the meaning is horrible. To give you some way to channel that rage inside you left from your bad job or bad family. Conspiracy theories, used by grifters and manipulators, are also something that can make people feel better for awhile.

So many of us turn to “The Big Picture” in a moment of pain. But it might not be waking up, just finding new ways to numb ourselves.

As much as the conspiracism and tilts towards revenge fantasies bother me in many communities of the metaphysical, keeping this in mind helps. It helps us understand how to handle people better, protect them from falling into traps, and maybe avoid the traps ourselves.

It also reminds us that these days, some of these folks might turn violent as we’ve seen, and we can keep an eye out.

– Xenofact