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Hello my friends. You are listening to Liberatory Business and I'm Simone Sol, your host. Thank you so much for listening. So I recently posted something on Instagram that was kind of random. I, it was a spontaneous bit of writing that I did and it kind of went a little bit viral and there were so many people asking to, um, turn that into a podcast episode. So. And in the, in the response to popular request, I'm doing this and what I wanna do is explain what I call the spiritual to MAGA pipeline. Why there are so many people who call themselves spiritual, that flock towards authoritarianism, white supremacy, and fascism, and. It doesn't seem to make sense, right? These spiritual people, healers, light workers, people who talk about love and unity and oneness and peace and transcendence and all these things, these beautiful sounding things, people who even look and sound progressive in many other ways, turn, can turn out to be apologists for these horrible, destructive, oppressive. Forces, and in many cases they're not just apologists, they are some of the biggest foot soldiers. And so I wanted to explain how this happens because this is 0% surprising to me. And the answer lies in understanding two fundamentally different approaches to spirituality and how one of them creates the perfect psychological conditions for fascism and. If you are someone who considers your, considers yourself spiritual or you work in wellness spaces, or if you're just trying to understand how the hell we got here politically, I think this is really important. So let me start by talking about something that I call traditional spiritual practices. Um, ones that are. Stewarded by indigenous societies, uh, the ones with intact lineages of transmission, the spirit of the, the traditional practices, cultures, they understand that the transcendent is accessed through the material world. By the material world, I mean relationship with land. Ancestors, elders, community, historical consciousness, and the cycles of life and death. This is the materiality of life, and the divine is found in the complexity of these interwoven relationships and your accountability to these imminent and material realities. So let me give you some examples, starting with my own. My own tradition, the one that I have inherited, which is the Korean Shamanic tradition, which centers the, the Ang, which is the Korean shaman, and the Ang is someone who serves the community spiritual needs, and. They are not there for their own personal growth. Uh, even though personal growth might happen, that is not the point. It's not about you at all. And in fact, people don't want to become shamans. They fight initiation because it's painful. It brings no glory. Um, it's not prestigious, it's not, uh, high paying, right? It's, it's a hard work and a lifetime of dedication for comparatively low, low, low pay, and low standing in society. And so even, um, and even when they do accept the calling to into Shaman Shaman Hood, their authority and their esteem are only recognized through how they participate within the committee, within the framework of the existing cultural tradition. Like you can't just wake up one day, declare yourself a shaman, and then just like go out into the world and get respect. Another example from a very different part of the world, Catholic monastic traditions. They, these, you know, require. That you submit to vows of obedience, you're not doing it by yourself and you're not, um, taking a, a vow of obedience just to God, but also to an Abbott, to a rule, a community, a tradition, a monk cannot simply declare themselves initiated. Their spiritual development is measured by their ability to live in harmony with others in their community, to serve the poor and submit to collective discernment. And coming back to Asia, different parts of Asia, including Korea, where I'm from, Buddhist traditions, um, around the Sangha, which is the, the, uh, monastic community, right? Each individual is embedded and each individual practice is embedded within community. That involvement is essential to your path. Monks and teachers are validated through lineage transmission, an ongoing relationship with elders in the tradition with other peer teachers and students. And, um, devotees are accountable to their teacher and their community and indigenous traditions worldwide. As far as I know, ground spiritual experience and relationship with land ancestors, elders, community spiritual authority comes from service. To the people and demonstrated wisdom in maintaining these relationships, not through claims of individual transcendence, not by being initiated via a retreat that you took in an exotic location. You see the pattern here? Accountability, community service, lineage, the spiritual path makes you more connected. To the material world and your obligations within it, not less. Now, let me tell you about what I call colonial spirituality, which inverts the, the patterns of this traditional spirituality. Completely. Colonial spirituality seeks transcendence by rejecting the material world, by rising above the body, rising above the earth, rising above lineage, rising above history, rising above community obligations. It extracts spiritual practices from their cultural context and repackages them for individual consumption, for individual optimization, individual healing, individual growth, or individual business success. Colonial spirituality mistakes. Its ability to avoid difficulties for spiritual achievement, and this makes people who are spiritually unmoored and dangerous. People who feel they have access to the ultimate truth while being accountable to no one and nothing. There's also what I wanna call the fallacy of what is quote unquote un uh, natural unnatural, right? Colonial spirituality's, obsession with what's considered natural when it's detached from any specific cultural context or intact wisdom tradition. It creates particularly fertile ground for fascist ideology because why? When it's divorced from Lineage, natural becomes whatever the fuck you want it to mean. When people embrace vague notions of natural wellbeing without connection to impact traditions that have actually sustained relationships with land and ecological knowledge for generations. They're left with their own projections about what quote unquote nature means. This creates a dangerous vacuum where personal ignorance and projection get conflated with some kind of noble truth. You've seen this, right? People obsess over individual food, quote unquote toxins, while ignoring the systematic unavailability of healthy food. Or they claim that depression is something that can be fixed with plant medicine while remaining completely oblivious to how traditional cultures understand mental health as utterly inseparable from con community connection, spiritual relationship, and accountability to those you are in relationship with. And they project fantasies about quote unquote natural gender roles onto the biological world. While knowing nothing about the actual diversity of reproductive strategies and social UCT social structures across species, they romanticize quote unquote natural childbirth while having no connection to the actual traditional knowledge and structures that supported mothers and. Here's how this connects to fascism. Fascism has always justified itself through the appeals of what they called natural law. Whatever they want, wanted that to mean. It claimed that social hierarchies, racial h uh, you know, categories and hierarchies, gender roles, and national ethnic superiority are simply. Natural order that we must submit to rather than human constructions became examined and changed. This is literally what Hitler did. Hitler was obsessed with the quote unquote natural. He was a vegetarian. He. And he connected his dietary choices to ideas about racial purity and bodily cleanliness, and he used that to contrast himself with supposedly decadent democratic leaders. He promoted the idea he really, he loved, he extolled German. Nature, right? He promoted the idea that Germans had a special natural connection to their landscape and soil, and used words like blood and soil, um, in his rhetoric linking race to land as natural destiny. And he really used these appeals to traditional natural ways of life to justify rejecting modern democratic values. And of course, he thought that women's natural role was domestic and bearing children for the state. Does any of this sound familiar? Because Colonial spirituality with its imprint of Protestant Christianity often does this. It carries fantasies about returning to some imagined pure state, whether that's natural health, natural gender roles, or natural social hierarchy. There's fascism has an obsession with mythologized, golden ages and pure blood bloodlines. So of course, people who consume colonial spirituality flock to maga. Fascism offers the same thing politically, that colonial spirituality. Spirituality offers individually, which is the promise of transcendence. Both movements attract people who want power without the responsibility. Specialness without service, transcendence, without the humbling work of relationship tending. Now, before you think this is just about manga people, let me be clear. This isn't solely a right wing phenomenon, progressive and quote unquote liberal. White people and some not White people do the same thing. Um, these liberal spiritual people who've also consumed colonial spirituality will tell you that they're against oppression or like, they're like, oh, we hate Trump. I'm a feminist. I vote for progressive candidates. I support queer people. All that. They co-opt spiritual language. Once again about love and lightness and oneness and high vibrations to bypass and shut down and dismiss and tone. Police. Any real discussion of historical accountability or systemic oppression? I can't count the number of times I've been told that talking about racism is divisive and that. Naming white supremacy is reverse racism, and the number of times that I've been told, you know, it's really about class, not race by people who tell me that they don't see race. I've seen people use the language of oneness and transcendence to bypass having to engage with the very real ways they perpetuate and benefit from white supremacy, western supremacy, English speaking supremacy. They'll tell you that we're all one. Let's not be divisive while they are practicing yoga. In a studio that has never had a teacher of color, they'll post love wins on Instagram while gentrifying neighborhoods and pricing out the communities of color who have lived there for generations. They'll say, let's focus on what unites us. When you ask them to examine how their own quote unquote, colorblindness has always just keeps. Landing them in all white spaces, in white dominant spaces. And when you persist in talking about these realities, you become the problem. You are bringing down the vibration. You are stuck in victim consciousness, you're being divisive. You're not being spiritually evolved enough. You are living in the past. When you're talking about ongoing harm, they position themselves as more enlightened than both. Quote unquote angry activists and also those unaware MAGA people like we're higher than all of them. While doing the exact same extractive supremacist shit. And the thing is, this isn't accidental. This is how supremacy adapts and survives.'cause empire has always required people who feel no accountability to place ancestors, elders, or the communities that they harm when you have no connection to your own lineage of harm. Then oneness becomes a tool for erasing the specific histories that created current inequalities. The right wing version of this says natural order and traditional values. The liberal version of this says Love and light, and we are all one, and vaccines are unnatural, but both are using the same colonial concepts to avoid dealing with the very real. Very material systems of harm that they both participate in and benefit from. So what's the antidote? First, recognize that stolen medicine is not medicine at all. Stolen medicine equals poison. And if you're practicing spirituality without a lineage of elders. And a community of tradition keepers and tenders that you are in relationship with to whom you are accountable. You are working with stolen medicine. Be deeply suspicious of any spiritual practice that claims to know what's quote unquote natural without connection to traditional ecological knowledge held by intact. Collectivistic communities. True understanding of natural systems comes from generations of careful observation with specific within specific places and relationships, not through individual intuition or researching the internet. Understand that true spiritual maturity. Is becoming more porous, more responsive, more woven into the fabric of earthly life with all the mess and pain that involves not rising above it to cha chase transcendent sounding, ideas, ideas, and escape from this messy material world and be available. To the grief and wounding inherent in this process, both for the communities whose practices are stolen, and for those who think they're practicing spirituality, but are really being spiritually malnourished on counterfeit goods. Now, a word to people who have been racialized as white, if you're thinking. Oh, but my ancestors were, they had traditions that were destroyed too, or, oh, I don't, I can't find a community around me. There's no elders that I can find. I have to go at it alone, or I don't need all that. I just trust my intuition to guide me. You're probably doing reproducing more of the same colonial spirituality and all the extraction that comes with that. This approach of skipping human teachers and communities and accountability to them in order to connect directly with their intuition or nature or whatever. Sounds nice, but it's just another form of taking what feels good while avoiding the messy relational work that actual spiritual growth requires. And. What can you do with your intuition when your intuition was shaped by white supremacy culture and your idea of nature comes through a colonial lens that treats the natural world like a resource to consume rather than a relationship to tend. And guess what? There are wisdom traditions, and intact lineages you can learn from. It's not gonna be as simple as. You know, researching a course on the internet and paying for it, it's not gonna be as simple as saying, Hey, can I come be a part of this? And then showing up. It's not gonna be that easy or simple for the most part. But intact wisdom traditions are still here. They, these are the ones that survived even after your ancestors tried their absolute best to violently erase them. But being able to learn from them means you gotta bring humility. Learn from the people of the global majority without making be about you, without stealing or appropriating, or without putting your own needs above their autonomy and their leadership. This means dealing with how colonialism is still happening and seeing how you contribute to it and benefit from it regardless of your intentions, it means putting your money and your body on the line for indigenous sovereignty and reparations, not just feeling enlightened about your personal growth. Your spiritual growth and collective healing aren't two separate things. Real spiritual maturity for white people means getting accountable to the communities that your people have harmed, not finding clever new ways to avoid that accountability. Skip this work and you're gonna, you're gonna keep intensifying your own spiritual malnourishment. This is deep and challenging work. But one that matters profoundly for your work and your soul. If you've ever felt something was off about healing and wellness spaces, if you've ever wondered how people who can, who talk about love and beautiful things can support such harmful politics. Well, I hope this provided an explanation. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll talk to you next week.