For anyone watching the UFO/paranormal/far-right overlaps metastasizing on Twitter and other social media and which are facilitating political extremism, calls to violence and anti-consensus reality meltdowns, the astonishing articles of Jules Evans dealing with spiritual eugenics - the overlap between spiritualist beliefs, largely of the New Age type, and eugenic-racialist ideologies - on his Philosophy for Life blog are a must read. Evans is a practitioner of the Western esoteric tradition. Though I'm not a follower myself, I all the more appreciate his nuanced, critical and humane approach precisely because he demonstrates stewardship and moral responsibility for his belief system and warns others of the pitfalls and dark sides of New Age spirituality. One of these dangers is conspirituality - the convergence of New Age and conspiratorial beliefs. Conspirituality draws forth a heady mix of New Age tropes, Theosophy, UFOs, human-alien hybrids, vibrational frequencies, anti-vaxxer ideology, and 5D woo-woo, all used by cynical and unscrupulous liars and grifters to manipulate the gullible, the mentally ill and the directionless as an entry drug into political extremism, racism, anti-medical science positions, scams, and even outright neo-Nazism.
For those who are scratching their heads and wondering what spirituality might possibly have to do with eugenics, the answer is: A LOT. Basically, spiritualism implies that there is a spiritual elite who are more well "attuned" than other people to receiving a cosmic message or understanding the universe at some deeper level than the average person. This can easily spill over into a supposition that these people - or the broader group of people (namely, a "race") to which this elite belongs - are genetically predisposed to being more spiritually advanced. It is then but a small step to believing that this elite should be given disproportionate power over society in decisions of reproduction, and that a eugenic program should be put in place. One finds, again and again, examples (documented by Evans) of elitist groups that considered themselves not only spiritually but also genetically and racially superior. This, of course, included the Nazis. One also sees that the science of evolution was in some cases turned into a religion with prescriptions about who should and should not reproduce, and that certain groups were seen to be inherently more "evolved" than others, while the "inferior" groups should be managed, curtailed, or left to die, if not outright exterminated. These are just some of the themes that Evans deals with in this disturbing and often deranged landscape.
The articles listed below that are annotated with numbers in the front are part of the series-proper, but I've included some additional articles by Evans that also deal with spiritual eugenics and adjacent themes such as the self-anointed Nietzschean super-spacemen Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, the links between the Nazi occulture and Nazi racialist-spiritualist doctrines, "Starseeds", and the Wellness religion. Please take the time to read all these articles. They're extremely well written, well researched and right on point by cogently articulating the dangers implicit in unchecked spiritual and anti-science beliefs.
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