What Do Hippies and Far-Right Conspiracists Have in Common?
Absurdism, irony, and the need for meaning all explain the strange overlap between the two groups
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A recently published article entitled Nazi Hippies: When the New Age and Far-Right Overlap, written by Jules Evans for GEN, illustrates how new-age spiritualism and far-right extremism came to be intricately linked in Nazi Germany.
Summarising the research by Eric Kurlander (Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich), Evans points out how the top nazi leaders not only drew from occult theories to justify their twisted worldview but also were fervent believers in pseudo-scientific practices.
Evans concludes his article by pointing out that the current resurgences of new-age occultism, conspiracy theories, and emboldening racism cannot be understood separately. They must be treated as a common, at least partially unified phenomenon.
Extreme ideologies purport to satisfy our most fundamental needs for meaning and sincerity
Evans’ article does a great job highlighting the many connections between early-twentieth-century occultism and nazism, but, in my opinion, fails to answer the key question at stake:
Why would left-leaning, liberal hippies, adhere to far-right, nazi beliefs and conspiracy theories in the first place?
It turns out ideologies, whatever far end of the political spectrum they lean toward, rely on the same human traits to prosper: naivety, blind faith, confirmation bias, and a deep distrust of institutional knowledge.
More importantly, they purport to satisfy our most fundamental needs for meaning and sincerity.
By providing simplistic, often Manicheist answers to complex and ambiguous questions, they reassure us.
By providing us with an unironic perspective on events and people, they reaffirm the validity and authenticity of our beliefs.
We humans cannot accept the absence of meaning. Naturally, we look for patterns, for causality, for an explanation.
