Politicization of holistic spirituality,mistrust of science and public space in Argentina post COVID-19

Abstract

As many analysts of contemporary spirituality have pointed out, the renewed public presence of alternative non-denominational spirituality, generally identified with those who define it as ‘spiritual, but not religious’, is a process that forces us to rethink the more classical relationships between religion, public sphere, and politics. In this article, the author discusses in detail the relationships between holistic lifestyles and spiritualities in relation to public distrust of COVID-19 in Argentina. The strong presence of discourses and practices related to therapeutic holism in the trajectories and arguments of distrust of official expert politics will lead to establish a relatively unanalyzed and quite unexpected relationship in studies on the politicization of contemporary spirituality.

Introduction

As many analysts of contemporary spirituality have pointed out, the renewed public presence of non-denominational alternative spirituality, generally identified with those who define it as ‘spiritual, but not religious’, is a process that forces us to rethink the more classical relationships between religion, public sphere, and politics. In this context, the COVID-19 pandemic showed how holistic lifestyles play a relevant role in definitions of health and well-being as well as in general interpretations of the health and social crisis. Ways of existence inspired by holism and alternative spirituality are partially connected with a zone of movements of distrust in science, which question public health policies (mass vaccination, existence of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, etc.) and which in their most extreme cases mobilize conspiracy theories about the origin of the health disaster, blaming the world health organization (WHO) or the ‘New World Order’. Likewise, these same grammars inspire the use of scientifically controversial alternative therapies. In Latin America, for example, the most prominent controversies were raised by the use of chloroquine or paracetamol as drugs to treat COVID-19. In this article, I first discuss the views on distrust in science and the need for a decentered view that takes seriously the mode of existence that sustains them. This term follows Latour’s insistence on reality as an ontological performance that must be considered in its own terms and in its multiplicity (without the final guarantee of a common ‘nature’), and then something beyond representations or worldviews socially or culturally constructed on a common world (Latour, 2013). Taking seriously the mode of existence of those who distrust authoritative science and who mobilize alternative explanatory models does not mean that these perspectives should be assumed as our reality. On the contrary, we understand that any health policy that intends to convince the population of the benefits of public health based on authoritative evidence needs to understand in all its consistency the ‘other epistemologies’. Ontological multiplicity is also a political problem and not a naive relativistic dilemma. It is precisely from this knowledge that social policies that improve the communication of the democratic value of science can be derived. Next, I analyze the relationships between holistic ways of life and spiritualities in relation to public distrust of COVID-19 in Argentina. For this purpose, I rely on public statements of the main referents of those who question expert knowledge, records of participation in discussion forums and in-depth interviews with adherents to official scientific mistrust and expert-based politics. The strong presence of discourses and practices related to therapeutic holism in the trajectories and arguments of distrust of official expert politics will allow us to establish a relatively unanalyzed and quite unexpected relationship in studies on the politicization of contemporary spirituality.

A decentered view of distrust in science

Although distrust in authoritative science is not a new issue, it has existed at least since the dawn of the scientific model as a dominant cultural device in the West, the questioning of some of its principles on a massive scale has recently had a significant place. The explanations that pretend to account for the phenomenon are usually far removed from the people involved and assume theories that do not take seriously the arguments that people deploy in their discrediting processes.

The most common perspectives on distrust could be classified in analyses centered on irrationality, in the theory of ‘cognitive biases’ and/or ‘cognitive dissonances’, in ignorance or information deficit and, finally, with the manipulation of ‘fake news’ promoted by social networks.

The diagnosis based on the crisis of ‘rationality’ as the universal and highest model of thought assumes that those who distrust scientific evidence are then identified under a moral and epistemic order characterized by the advance of the irrational, assuming a binary opposition between rationality/irrationality. Often this type of diagnosis associates the supposed ‘irrationality’ with ‘denialism’ or ‘conspiracism’ as forms of the ‘advance of neoliberalism’, that is, with macro-social processes of crisis of a civilizational model (Feierstein, 2021).

‘Cognitive dissonance’, coined by Leon Festinger in the 1950s, describes the discomfort people feel when two cognitions, or a cognition and a behavior contradict each other. Smoking is dissonant with the knowledge that smoking can kill me. To reduce that dissonance, the smoker must either quit smoking or justify smoking (‘It keeps me thin, and being overweight is also a health risk, you know’). In his Festinger’s theory, he deals with how people strive to make sense of ‘contradictory ideas’ and lead a life that is, at least in their own mind, coherent and meaningful. According to a second, rather important analytical stream of expert views on mistrust, this dynamic is reproduced during the pandemic among the many people who refuse to wear masks or practice social distancing because, some argue, ‘human beings are deeply reluctant to change their minds. And when facts clash with their convictions, some would rather jeopardize their health and the health of others than accept new information or admit they are wrong’ (Aronson and Travis, 2020).

Third, there is a strong tendency to interpret distrust of legitimized science as ignorance or ‘information deficit’. The direct association between vulnerable populations and distrust of authoritative science is highly debatable. While it is a fact that in many social contexts where access to science is restricted, other knowledge is maintained as a source of legitimacy, it has been amply demonstrated that, for example, distrust of vaccines is a priority phenomenon in the educated middle classes of certain North Atlantic countries (the United States, France, and Germany). An example of this appears in the following assertion:

We propose that two main forms of pushback against dominant scientific evidence have become prominent during COVID-19: 1) disinformation propagated at the institutional/federal government level to preserve power and undermine already marginalized groups, and 2) inequality-driven mistrust among communities that have been made vulnerable by historical and ongoing structural inequities. (Jaiswal et al., 2020)

This was the state diagnosis par excellence and associates’ distrust or rejection of ‘objective’ data with disinformation and unfavorable position in the circuits of information dissemination and scientific/public health dissemination. Associated with it, but subtly different is the tendency to interpret disbelief in official science as a phenomenon associated with social networks. While networks occupy a priority place in the amplification of conspiracy theories and other modes of alternative evidence construction, they do not explain the conditions of effectiveness of these discourses and ideas and their impact on real populations. The prototype of this type of interpretation is the journalistic term ‘infodemic’ or ‘post-truth’ (Keyes, 2004). Social networks and mass media as spaces for spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories about the pandemic have mobilized different reactions. The United Nations and the WHO have warned, for example, about an ‘infodemic’, noting that fake news ‘spreads faster and easier than this virus’ (United Nations Department of Global Communications, 2020). There, it is assumed that false information is consolidated through social networks and a low level of reflexivity about it. For example, Parmet and Paul (2020) points out that ‘Viral spread of contradictory information over social media builds a climate of distrust. Rapid cultural change and widening economic inequality have fueled increases in political polarization that cement loyalty to party over a shared search for truth’.

The epistemological and theoretical criteria that inspire this work start from a different position: they assume that irrationality, ignorance, lack of access to information of a part of the population is not the only or the most important cause to explain distrust in scientific authority. However, it does not identify the widespread diffusion of neoliberal ideology, which is commonly understood as a synonym of the entrepreneurial and competitive self of contemporary capitalism, as an ultimate and self-explanatory cause of distrust. On the contrary, we understand that trust in authoritative scientific evidence, produced and debated in the public space, is not the result of the natural evolution of scientific–technical rationality, but the product of situated networks, personal trajectories and modes of existence that are part of historical processes of construction and that involve, in turn, layers of historical sedimentation. This is why it is fundamental in this work to address alternative modes of existence, often linked to holistic forms of subjectivity and conceptions of health that can mobilize positions of distrust in the official biomedical model and deploy alternative therapeutic resources as part of a non-hierarchical access to information. If something of this form of subjectivation and way of life is linked to neoliberalism, it is in any case an aspect to be delved into and analyzed in more detail, but not a single-handed relationship. Such a configuration has a complex and heterogeneous history during the twentieth century. However, it has been characterized by the strong common idea that the cure depends on oneself, so that the knowledge imposed by some kind of external authority is potentially threatening.

The decentered view of distrust means that we must take seriously what skeptics have to say and do, as well as links those discourses and practices to particular grammars of action. The strong presence of discourses and practices related to therapeutic holism in trajectories and arguments of mistrust of official expert policy will allow us to establish a little analyzed and quite unexpected relationship in studies of the politicization of contemporary spirituality (Harding and Stewart, 2003).

Holistic spirituality and post-pluralism

Practitioners of Eastern gymnastics, alternative therapies, vegetarians and those concerned about global warming are no longer just sympathizers of the 1970s counterculture. Today, they are diverse and pluralistic, ranging from the corporate world concerned with self-empowerment to environmental activists, ecofeminist militancy and New Age spiritualities that claim GAIA, Pachamama and cosmic balance. As many analysts of contemporary spirituality have pointed out, the renewed public presence of post-Christian spirituality, usually identified with those who define themselves as ‘spiritual, but not religious’, is a process that forces us to rethink the more classical relationships between religion, the public sphere and politics (Bender and McRoberts, 2012; Fedele and Knibbe, 2020; Heelas and Woodhead, 2005).

Thus, a renewed look at the subject of spirituality implies questioning the classical model that assumes an opposition between a social logic, proper to religion, and an atomistic one, proper to spirituality. The questioning of the modern meta-narrative of individualization as a crisis of social and cosmic relations does not imply renouncing to understand the historical forms of individuation that really exist, but to put in tension the dualisms associated with the individual/social, body/spirit, which acquires in contexts strict meanings and particular effects (Wood, 2009).

An example of this is the reflection on post-pluralism developed by Bender and Klassen (2010). For them, it is not only a temporary stage (which would continue a moment of pluralism), although this is not entirely ruled out, but a theoretical operation, a way of imagining religious/spiritual adherence and ways of life in an open way and not in a prescriptive/normative way ideally associated to that of world religions. The current emergence of spirituality as a central term of adhesions with non-exclusively human agencies and forces is precisely a questioning of this restricted idea of pluralism, as it shows to what extent it is elaborated in a specific moment associated with the pluralism of world religions as hierarchical devices. ¹

In Argentina, María Julia Carozzi (2006) drew attention some time ago to the form of politics that is inscribed in post-Christian spiritualities and how the network and autonomy model, far from producing depoliticization, organizes new forms of public action that go unnoticed when we assume a restricted model of religion and politics as autonomous spheres and rigidly structured social forms.

In this context, the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated how holistic ways of life and spiritualities could play a relevant role in definitions of well-being as well as in general interpretations of public health. Aware that the holistic milieu is complex and diverse, we are interested in seeing how some grammars of action inspired by holism and alternative spirituality traverse a gray zone close to movements of scientific mistrust, which question public health policy (mass vaccination, existence of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, among other things) and in their most extreme cases mobilize conspiracy theories, an aspect that Ward and Voas (2011) defined as ‘conspirituality’, about the origin of the health crisis, blaming the WHO or the ‘New World Order’. Likewise, these same grammars inspire the use of scientifically controversial alternative therapies, building a strong ontological current in the wider conspiracy milieu (Harambam and Aupers, 2015, 2017) and affect the new COVID-19 and post COVID-19 social contexts (Griera et al., 2022; Halaffof et al., 2022).

Post-Christian spiritualities and alternative health during COVID-19

In Argentina, the multiplicity of religious and spiritual resources as a way of managing personal well-being in daily life is part of a much longer historical process than the circuits associated with the so-called New Age, which consolidated at the end of the 1970s. Spiritism, homeopathy, natural medicine, hydrotherapy have existed since the beginning of the twentieth century, deploying various ways of constructing the body, the person, and well-being in the public space regulated by Catholicism and the public medical system.

At least, since the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, we already find therapeutic ideas inspired by non-mechanistic ways of understanding health that coexisted with medical models consolidated as dominant. Vegetarianism or therapies that promoted a change in the way of life such as naturism arrived in Argentina with European immigration, bringing ideas and practices inspired by the romantic tradition of the nineteenth century, its valuation of ‘nature’ and its emphasis on the need to understand the whole person. Homeopathy, hydrotherapy and spiritualisms of various kinds that flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century in the Río de la Plata were associated with a new cultural model. Thus, they were important within the anarchist way of life and utopian socialisms, proposing not only a therapy but a life project based on another definition of therapeutic relationships between humanity, organism and nature (Quereillac, 2016).

Many of these definitions of illness and wellness passed through vitalistic conceptions about the meanings of ‘being sick’ and ‘being healthy’. Likewise, the so-called naturopathic medicine distrusted public vaccination systems and homogenizing models of mass vaccination, showing arguments against mass vaccination as early as the beginning of the twentieth century. Despite the centrality of official medicine, images of tonics and special herbs ran through the common-sense imaginary well into the twentieth century. This was based on ‘naturalistic’ scientific models that saw in certain herbs and in a non-mechanistic understanding of the person, the possibility of prophylaxis. A model that relied more on self-treatment than on State action.

This alternative therapeutic imaginary persists to this day in the advanced versions of homeopathy and in current alternative therapies based on non-hegemonic medical models. However, since the 1960s and 1970s, new resources for the management of personal well-being, linked to oriental gymnastics (like Yoga or Tai-Chi) and influenced by the counterculture, have been added to the vitalist conceptions of health in Argentina (Carozzi, 1999, 2000). Several elements of the old naturopathic therapies were maintained, incorporating with greater emphasis the work with oneself of psycho-emotional techniques (Viotti, 2022). Thus, in a few years, the holistic ethos, along with other techniques that assume a ‘holistic’ definition of the person, went from being a heterodox resource to occupying more and more centrality in everyday life. The utopia of life change became a reality, but at the cost of a process of massification and social capillarity.

The last decades of the twentieth century were the time frame of processes of wide diffusion of the so-called ‘therapeutic cultures’ that are often combined with contemporary forms of post-Christian spiritualities; however, this was not a top–down overflow, or from the ‘center’ of the North to the ‘peripheral’ modernities of the global South. It was in fact a simultaneous process that was distributed through the social capillarity with different intensities and according to specific contexts and socio-cultural ecologies, articulating with other resources of subjectivation already available in specific Latin American contexts (Csuri et al., 2022; de la Torre et al., 2013; Toniol, 2022).

The COVID-19 crisis erupted right in the middle of a context of wide diffusion of unconventional resources for thinking and living illness and health. The alternative therapeutic imaginary, thus, became one of the possible tools for interpreting and managing care, stipulating the causes of contagion and developing a series of interpretations of the origin of the pandemic. In this sense, many people involved in contemporary holistic sociality developed a critical device to the public health policies carried out by the State: the models of prophylaxis, prevention, and cure based on official biomedicine (social distancing, use of masks, and vaccination). They also developed alternative models of understanding contagion and prevention, as well as the resources of cure that defended their own ‘evidence’ and their own criteria of veracity. In the following, we are interested in displaying some of the possible forms of these alternative models and their intensities.

In order to account for this, two stories that can be read as complementary will be described below. First, that of Mauro, owner of a small industrial workshop in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, who has become an active questioner of the COVID-19 pandemic, which he perceives as a ‘global control plan’, and a strong opponent of mass vaccination. Second, Carolina, a physician from Buenos Aires, who, without rejecting the policies of care and accepting vaccination, displays a series of doubts and a certain skepticism about the urgency with which vaccines have been incorporated into the policies of combat during the pandemic. Both show different shades of skeptical arguments, yet both are participants in alternative modes of existence and, in different ways, bring down the alternative imaginary of health/disease based on their own trajectories.

Intense mistrust and alternative therapeutic entrepreneurship

Mauro is in his 40s and is very active in social networks in what he considers a ‘fight for the truth’ and against the ‘Covid 19 lie’. His Facebook was closed more than four times for posting sensitive information, which according to his perspective confirms that he is on the right path and that the media are part of the ‘lie’. After his mother’s illness, an episode that he defines as ‘traumatic’, because of the shock it brought to his life he approached different therapies that he himself defines as ‘alternative’. This search began, among many things, in a feeling of disappointment with the doctors, who, as he tells us, mistreated his mother and his whole family. ‘You have a couple of months to live, go prepare your will’, one of the doctors who treated her told her without warning. Among the techniques she experimented with was the HANSI method, developed by Juan Hirschman, an Argentine physiologist, which promoted an intervention based on the ‘natural activation of the immune system’. Currently, the HANSI method has institutions all over Argentina focused on what they define as ‘integral medicine’ and with a proposal based on a homeopathic approach. Although today it is integrated to the offers of alternative assistance, without official recognition, it was part of a series of controversies at the end of the twentieth century around the ‘cure of cancer’.

After that ‘traumatic’ experience with his mother, Mauro became an experimenter of various techniques that he accessed through the Internet and by studying independently. However, this interest can be traced in a whole sensibility that Mauro adheres to since much earlier and that he defines as ‘interest in crazy things’ such as ‘radiofrequency’ or the functioning of the ‘chakras’. Since he was a child, Mauro has been attracted to this type of knowledge, reading in magazines and books about the workings of the universe and the body. For example, among his interests were popular publications on ‘reincarnation’ and ‘magnetism’: ‘Certain things happened to me as a child that are difficult to explain. I believe in reincarnation, I believe in vibration, I believe in magnetism, many things that are very crazy’.

Some of the elements present in Mauro’s narrative account for a particular current, particularly extremist, within the broader scenario of holistic modes of existence. In this case, the dominant logic is that of explanations that show alternative forms of ‘evidence’ to the hegemonic scientific model that appears as an order to be fought against. Radical distrust of the dominant scientific model is accompanied by conspiracy theories and a radical distrust that is simultaneously epistemological and political. As Mauro points out, there is an association between medical experts and political leaders. The critique, in line with Harding and Stewart (2003), is symptomatic of a form of social anxiety that is radically opposed to all forms of authority: scientific and political.

Mauro’s story condenses a whole imaginary and a way of being in the world that is prior to the search for alternative therapies in the context of his mother’s illness. Against a certain common sense that pretends to explain the search for alternative health techniques in terms of situations of suffering and despair, Mauro shows us to what extent these searches are in fact already available in a horizon of reality that is prior to the situations of affliction and that, in any case, constitutes their symbolic and practical condition of existence. In sum, people do not resort to alternative or unconventional therapeutic practices out of desperation, but because those resources are already available in a mode of existence that is taken for granted. In Mauro’s story, these references are linked to holistic ways of understanding the world and to a mixture between the spiritual language of Western esotericism (which includes references to reincarnation or the chakras) with the ‘profane’ scientistic language, that is, enunciated in a scientific paradigm, making references to an experimental basis and claiming a verifiable truth in nature, which nevertheless constructs a knowledge that moves on the borders of the expert and the layman, between elite, mass, and alternative knowledge. ‘Magnetism’ or ‘radiofrequency’ appears in the way Mauro constructs his world as a language that ‘scientifically’ sustains his affirmations about the functioning of the body and the world. Far from being an arbitrary gaze or a personal singularity, this way of being in the world that mixes scientific knowledge with ‘enchanted’ appropriations is connected to a great tradition that has been described for the first decades of the twentieth century in the first chapter.

The esoteric-spiritual elements at the crossroads with the versions of a ‘profane’ scientism unfold a critical moral diagnosis of Western societies and their way of life. The conspiratorial model is a significant element that, as in Mauro’s case, can come to organize a historical narrative that explains situations of suffering and discomfort. For example, Mauro once referred to a secret plan to alter the modes of ‘vibration’ associated with music, which, according to him, condition the well-being of humanity.

For example, I don’t know if you know, but when there was Nazism… at world level there was a change in the tuning of the music, it went from 432 to 440. In 432 our organisms vibrate in balance (it has to do with our chakras), they vibrate in a harmonic, spiritual way that has to do with love. It is the harmony of the whole universe. Nazism made us vibrate in 8 harmonics, we started to vibrate like machines, that is why our society is materialistic, we are very robotic, very consumerist. Based on that system is where things start to get complicated. ²

If Mauro represents one of the possible alternative modes of existence, it is not the only one. In fact, perhaps his form allows us to describe the most extreme positions in the adherence to the alternative. Carolina’s story will allow us to understand to what extent we should qualify this relationship between radical distrust of official science, conspiracy theories, and alternative ways of life.

Soft mistrust and reconfiguration of medical knowledge

Carolina is a physician working in teaching and research in the area of mental health. She postponed her vaccination until the last minute but affirms that during the Covid pandemic, it is necessary to be vaccinated. However, she makes a clear distinction between ‘being anti-vaccination’ and ‘having some doubts’. She considers mass vaccination to be one of the great achievements of medicine in the twentieth century, but when referring to the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, she states that she has some doubts for the following two reasons:

First, it is a vaccine that had to be made very quickly, it was not reviewed based on the criteria that we usually have for the rest of the vaccines. That already worried me. At the same time, they use new technologies, which were not tested in the long term either. These two factors worried me about the Covid vaccine in particular. Also, the fact that it was launched in phase 3…. It seemed to me that it was a vaccine that, due to a health emergency, was given in an atypical way. I understood that this was what had to be done, but at the same time I was reluctant to be vaccinated because I understood that it had not respected the same protocols and controls as the other vaccines for which I have always been in favor. In that sense, I am going to receive the necessary dose, though with certain fear and distrust.

This subtle distrust is not only the result of a strictly scientific problem or of a debate among experts. It is also part of a way of thinking and living in which Carolina is immersed, which favors an autonomous and integrated conception of the person that ‘integrates mind and body’.

A series of aspects of her life allows us to reconstruct a whole way of understanding and experiencing the world that is in continuity with ways of being that can be traced in the processes of mass dissemination of alternative modes of existence after the 1980s. In this sense, Carolina claims a humanistic view in medical work and allows herself to investigate other experiences of knowledge and self-exploration such as astrology, which she has been seriously studying for some years now, and conscious nutrition.

Her relationship with astrology and more ‘holistic’ experiences began in her life when she set out to explore in areas that medicine or psychoanalysis did not reach. In fact, she came to astrology because her psychoanalytic therapist started to study it and it opened up a new path for her. With psychoanalysis, she maintains, she felt there was something missing. Thus, she opened up to holistic-oriented language and with astrology, new paths of self-inquiry and knowledge opened up. The relationship between astrology and medicine is for Carolina impossible to reconcile, however she understands that there are points in common that are still difficult to put in dialogue. On the contrary, as part of this new interest, she explored osteopathy and Tibetan medicine, which is based on herbal treatments. She considers herself a very ‘healthy’ person and rejects the abuse of drugs as part of what she understands as a medicine that has to be more and more humane. She experienced that in her own body only when she took birth control pills, a practice she now rejects and would not recommend to anyone.

For Carolina, ‘conscious eating’, that is, paying attention to the quality and diversity of what we eat, is a fundamental theme in her own life. She declares herself very concerned about how often the obsession with food is the new religion and becomes a cult of the body, which is dangerous. It seems to her to be something very puritanical where pleasure is put aside. In relation to this, she is struck by the whole discourse of ‘toxic’ and ‘healthy’, a discourse of fear in relation to food. She consumes organic products such as organic coffee, kombucha, kefir, meals with vegetables and legumes without pesticides, however she does not deprive herself of eating things she considers ‘not so healthy’, though enjoyable: ‘I try to be super conscious and meet my own desire in food, to be able to eat what my body asks for while maintaining diversity. Food cannot go against pleasure’, she says.

Carolina’s experience connects with other similar experiences that characterize versions of holistic modes of existence within a general framework of acceptance of the scientific model. As pointed out for Brazil by Toniol (2022) or for Argentina by Saizar and Bordes (2019), the grammar of holism in many cases relates to a scientific paradigm that must be nuanced but not questioned. Her specialization in psychiatry, which she left after a year, showed her the cruelty of medicine and the abuse of drugs. She argues that many times these types of medical practices should be forbidden. Likewise, without agreeing with what she calls ‘alternative views on vaccines’, she sympathizes with some ideas such as that it is often preferable for the body to produce its own antibodies and that forms of biological self-regulation should be valued over the more invasive views of biomedicine. In line with this, she also argues that the use of alternative substances such as CDS to treat SARS-CoV-2 needs to be investigated before being rejected. She also believes that it is important to make crossovers between Western medicine, acupuncture, and Ayurvedic medicine, especially since the latter, although it involves another paradigm, when done seriously, is also evidence-based. She considers that ‘hegemonic Western medicine’ has many ‘super weak’ areas and that there are techniques and knowledge that often complement conventional work and allow avoiding drugs that are very aggressive.

Conclusion

Dominant interpretations of distrust of authoritative science vis-à-vis COVID-19 have focused on arguments such as irrationality, ‘cognitive dissonance’ or linked to the ignorance of specific social groups. Distrust of COVID-19 has also been interpreted as part of a process of neoliberalization of society. On the contrary, in this article, we purported to explore the possibility of thinking of distrust as positivity, that is, as a counterpart of trust: any process of distrust must be understood as coextensive with other forms of trust. Trust is always a problem of ‘evidence’, so we consider the construction of alternative evidence as a fundamental dimension for understanding contemporary distrust of vaccine hesitancy or COVID-19 in general. This leads us to consider the productivity of a ‘button up perspective’ for understanding the relationship between lifestyles of holistic spirituality and distrust of science: the importance of ‘taking seriously’ what COVID-19 skeptics have to say.

The modes of adherence to contemporary alternative worlds that Mauro and Carolina represent are framed in a genealogy that can be projected to the experiments of naturism of the first decades of the twentieth century, passing through more recent countercultures. However, many of their therapeutic and vital resources are amplified by the cultural industry, digital networks, and mass culture. Therapeutic holism unfolds as a discourse and practice of trust in an alternative model of scientificity and knowledge with a focus on working with oneself and around a discussion with authority, especially official medicine. ‘Nature’, ‘balance’, and ‘organic’ become elements of a language of their own that delimit old ideas about health and disease and that circulate through new formats: social networks, mass media and the cultural industry. Influencers who call for confidence in self-care, websites, YouTube channels, Facebook, Twitter, and television programs incorporate do-it-yourself therapeutic criteria and are both mediators and spaces for interaction that multiply data, techniques and make available to a mass public the practices and ideas that circulated until a few decades ago in the bosom of small groups.

The expanded diffusion of this therapeutic-spiritual language, however, does not work in the abstract but is appropriated and recreated according to specific trajectories, social groups and worlds. Unlike Mauro, Carolina feels very close to the official medical model. However, her doubts are framed in a way of understanding the world that in a certain sense resembles Mauro’s: both deploy, with different intensities, critiques of the mechanization and commodification of medicine. This critique is not only an ideological critique of the functioning of current medicine; it is part of a mode of existence that manifests a more general critique of contemporary life. Both examples may be representative of a number of similar interventions among those who present some degree of distrust in official scientific models, far beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. Some central aspects are the integrated or holistic view between mind, body and spirit, skepticism toward authoritarian and invasive models of knowledge, the centrality of autonomy in the management of well-being and health, the intersection between spiritual languages of self-knowledge and science. However, there are also nuances. Unlike Mauro’s esotericism and his conception of a ‘profane science’, which is based on very personal appropriations of knowledge collected in social networks and mass publications, involving intense adherence to conspiratorial explanations, Carolina shows components closer to a mainstream scientific model, possibly due to her own training as a physician, and a therapeutic sensibility closer to the new age code, that is, a code based on working with oneself as a form of personal development. Both examples show, in an embodied form and in personal trajectories, how the alternative culture spread during the twentieth century, though with greater levels of intensity in the last decades, is part of concrete experiences and shapes particular modes of existence: ideas and practices about health, well-being, and life itself.

In both examples, ‘experience’ is a locus of evidence. However, they use models of justification that prioritize distrust and suspicion over the official evidence of experts who are far from the ‘real truth’. To this end, they exchange and frequent a large amount of written material on social networks that functions as a reality stabilization network on their own terms. At the same time, they legitimize their positions based on ‘alternative evidence’ criteria: emotional experience based on personal autonomy and ‘internal states’ as well as close, everyday relationships.

Anti-vaccine positions, alternative treatments against COVID such as chlorine dioxide (CDC), and the refusal to follow health recommendations during the pandemic, are often consistent with specific logics of understanding the relationship between pathology and emotion, where the body is understood as something more than a mechanism, and holistic conceptions of health where the relationship with oneself plays a key role. In these ways of living and explaining well-being, the biological substrate of the person is by no means the last and most important dimension of health (as biomedicine tends to consider, albeit with wide heterogeneity), and the body is not understood as a set of physicochemical relationships that process external stimuli and produce results. Rather, immunity is an effect of the harmonious integration of two separate strata, the body and the soul, and not a mechanical response to the insertion of a material agent (such as a vaccine) into the physical organism.

The above allows us to understand that, for example, when one of our interviewees says, ‘I trust my immune system more than any politician or vaccine in the world’, she is mobilizing other kinds of ideas about the origin of disease and the possibility of prevention and cure, which differ greatly from the biomedical regime. From all this, our intention is to point out how holistic ways of life and spirituality come out into the public space to dispute meanings, questioning the more classical and conventional images of New Age spirituality as typically depoliticized and part of a ‘narcissistic world’. On the contrary, it is also essential to underline some central grammars of these modes of public action, recognizing the political productivity of the principles of mistrust and personal experience, generally scorned as infra-social elements. Therapeutic holism and spirituality seem to become today a form of public action that the conventional religious pluralism model fails to capture.