Instagram has been filled with coaches, mentors and facilitatorsamong other euphemisms that disguise the lack of truly curricular knowledge, and also the lack of formal training and qualifications. Kundalini, tapping, strange amalgams that bear the surname of quantum, rites to attract money or something called family constellations, are some of the things the talking heads talk about. There is no trace left of the glamor Victorian that involved the spectacles of spiritualism and mesmerization at the end of the 19th century. Everything is quite shabby and upstart, because it is easy to see that many of these teachers fake They just got on the bandwagon; a scroleum quickly takes you to the lower galleries of muscle and exaggerated snouts for the photo, before the retreat that changed their lives, or the mentoringor the exotic trip that allowed them to discover “their best version.”
Profiles dedicated to the generation of pseudo-spiritual content proliferate, and even pseudo-scientific content in cases. Generally these are physically attractive people, and seductive in the sense that Lipovetsky poses in The era of emptiness (1983): eroticization is used as a strategy of marketing, and the audiovisual production capacity dominates what is communicated, based on the achievement of monitoring and interaction. For the rest, this type of content tends to form a scrum of hoaxes that are not very new, but are reconfigured with the attributes of a declining postmodernity. It can be agreed that the New Age has reemerged with forceperhaps as a shock express of the disenchantment that grips millions of citizens on the other side of the screens; mirror solitudes, as has been said on some occasions.
“There are hardly any scientific popularizers left among the masses: we have no one like Carl Sagan in the era of the Kardashians“
In a short text titled Journey to the interior of the self (2006), Fernando Álvarez-Uría referred to three sociological vectors of the process of individualization of the homo oeconomicus: the psychological culture inaugurated by mental medicine, the consolidation of the cliché of the trip to the East and the political crisis that ended class consciousness. Of significant relevance, these three guidelines could be inscribed in a context of significant uncertainties, which means that the great philosophical systems would have lost their hegemony, favoring the proliferation of quick remedies and answers for everything. The days of monumental thinkers are over, or at least suspended for a more or less long time. Besides, consider that there are hardly any scientific popularizers left among the masses: we have no one like Carl Sagan in the era of the Kardashians.
In Against influencers (2023), Martin Rodríguez-Gaona displays some concepts that are useful to us here. Apocalyptically, he recognizes that “self-representation, virtual extimacy and virality will always be more powerful than any academic discourse.” Think of virtual poets, but it can be extrapolated to the generality of exhibitionists on the networks, and to facilitators and mentors and others, in particular. Things have gone much further than McLuhan would ever imagine, and it is no longer so much that the medium is the message as that there is no message per se, but rather formulas incapable of penetrating the surface on which they float. The world, says Rodríguez-Gaona, has become an enormous simulation.
“Happiness is an individualistic Xanadú, and those who seek it do not have to take responsibility for anything other than that mere search.“
Everything gravitates around a selfish and more or less desperate idea of self-realization, since the “inner space of the individual appears as the key, the area of resolution of all problems, when in reality it is nothing more than a false escape forward.” ”, Álvarez-Uría tells us. Gurus ignore structural inequalities and shift the node of alienation to the individual, something they need to do in order to sell that all solutions are in their own hands, even the cure of diseases in the most controversial cases. Emotionality supplants the least ambitious of reasons, and any possible notion of us disappear. Happiness is an individualistic Xanadú, and those who seek it do not have to take responsibility for anything other than that mere search.
Let’s say it bluntly: Instagram pseudo-spirituality is unapologetically amoral. In fact, one of the great raw materials that it exploits is that of the discharge of one’s own dubious actions, which are recontextualized in a relativistic framework: everything is fine, because it is explained by a trauma, the unresolved problem of an ancestor or some other most fantastic thing. It is the phenomenon of psychologization that Uría writes about, and that works in the same way on the other great subject, which is that of the dreamed future, and full of topics that barely hide the privilege of a terminal middle class. For the rest, the bourgeoisie has ceased to be cultured, and barely gives voice to reversing its formative possibilities in society. Today, making the world a better place is very French May, and that was a long time ago.
“In short, the rise of spirituality fake It would be one of the many unintended consequences of the failure of the illustrated project.“
On the one hand, salvation has ceased to be otherworldly and has become secularized. On the other hand, it is not policybut idiot in the classic sense of idiotés (ιδιωτης), who were those disaffected with what was common in the area of Athenian democracy; who only cared about their own thing, in a historical precedent of what is today a dominant, homogeneous and illiterate ideology, the latter already bringing us closer to the modern meaning of the adjective. After Spengler and Benjamin, and the theorists of what in the Anglo world now calls declinismit is difficult to refute that we are going through a Western crisis that is difficult to overcomeand it is in this framework that the fakers emerge, sometimes moving their hands over convulsing bodies, other times offering obviously sectarian events, among other things that seem truly obscene in the context of a critical present.
In short, the rise of spirituality fake It would be one of the many unintended consequences of the failure of the Enlightenment project, which, in some way, has only triumphed from a technical point of view, neglecting the emancipatory aspect that was presupposed for science in more naive moments of modern history. . In other words, neither algorithmic logic nor the society of figures are concerned by the thing in itself, and only appearance, which is what can be commodified, makes its way through the virtual arteries of parareality. It is a troubled river for the charlatans who take over the networks and monetize desperation, and fighting them is an intellectual duty.
