Skip to contentWillowOne's PositionsTagsWhat’s newMediaStatisticsSearch
WillowOne's Positions

New Age Beliefs

My Positions

  1. The New Age (crystals, energy healing, reiki, chakras, the law of attraction, manifesting, quantum mysticism, detoxes) is religion with the institution removed and the invoice retained.
  2. None of it works beyond placebo. Where it is sold as treatment, it kills people, mostly by delay.
  3. Its characteristic doctrine, that you create your own reality, is karma for people who own a juicer: the sick attracted their illness, the poor their poverty, and the believer's good fortune is to their credit. It is victim-blaming with a smile.

Notes

  1. The tests. Crystals: in a 2001 study, participants given real quartz and glass fakes reported identical "energy" sensations, predicted by their prior belief and nothing else. Therapeutic touch, the claim that practitioners can feel a patient's "energy field", was tested in 1998 by a nine-year-old for her school science fair: twenty-one practitioners, hands through a screen, asked which hand the child's was near; they scored 44 per cent, below chance. The study was published in JAMA. Reiki, in the Cochrane reviews, has no effect beyond the attention of a calm person in a quiet room. Homeopathy is dealt with under Homeopathy.
  2. Quantum. "Quantum" in New Age writing means "magic, but with a word from physics". The observer effect does not mean that consciousness creates reality; it means that measuring a particle disturbs it. Deepak Chopra has made a career from sentences that use physics vocabulary in a grammatical order with no content, and in 2015 a study found that people could not reliably distinguish his tweets from randomly generated sentences built from the same words; the paper's title was "On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit". This is Equivocation run as a business model.
  3. The law of attraction. The Secret (2006) taught tens of millions of readers that thoughts emit frequencies which the universe answers, so that wanting a thing hard enough brings it. The corollary is drawn in the book: illness, accidents and poverty are attracted by negative thinking. In 2009 a "self-help" guru who had appeared in the film ran a sweat lodge in Arizona in which three participants died; he was convicted of negligent homicide. The doctrine is the just-world intuition sold back to the people it comforts, and it sits, not accidentally, at the upper end of the income scale.
  4. The harm. Cancer patients who choose alternative medicine in place of conventional treatment die at roughly two and a half times the rate of those who do not, in a 2018 study of American registry data. The founder of Apple delayed surgery on a treatable pancreatic tumour for nine months while trying juice, acupuncture and a spiritualist. A lifestyle company settled with California prosecutors in 2018 over claims for a jade egg to be worn internally. The "wellness" sector was also the main on-ramp to anti-vaccine belief and to the conspiracy culture of 2020, because the habit of trusting intuition over evidence transfers cleanly from supplements to vaccines to 5G Towers.
  5. Why it spreads. Appeal to Nature: natural is good, chemical is bad, as if water were not a chemical. Placebo effect and Regression to the mean: people seek help when they feel worst and improve anyway. The Forer Effect: readings and diagnoses that fit everyone. A marketplace without gatekeepers, aimed at affluent, anxious and mostly female customers whom conventional medicine has often treated badly, which is the one legitimate grievance in the whole area and the one the industry exploits most. And the whole thing is spiritual, which makes doubting it feel like cynicism rather than sense.
  6. What it has in common with the older religions. A soul (now "energy"), a providence (now "the universe"), a sin (now "negativity"), a priesthood (now "practitioners"), and a sale. The furniture has been rearranged; the room is the same. See The human need for religion.

Sources

  • French, C. C., O'Donnell, H. and Williams, L., "Hypnotic susceptibility, paranormal belief and reports of 'crystal power'", British Psychological Society Centenary Conference (2001)
  • Rosa, L. et al., "A Close Look at Therapeutic Touch", JAMA 279 (1998)
  • Pennycook, G. et al., "On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit", Judgment and Decision Making 10 (2015)
  • Johnson, S. B. et al., "Use of Alternative Medicine for Cancer and Its Impact on Survival", Journal of the National Cancer Institute 110 (2018)
  • Byrne, R., The Secret (2006), for the doctrine in its own words
  • Isaacson, W., Steve Jobs (2011), chapter 35

Also see