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With the left depressed in 2025, much of the cultural energy belongs to the right. But where’s it going to go?

One increasing possibility appears to be that newly self-confident right-wingers are getting into various kinds of New Age woo-woo, the occult, gnosticism, RFK Jr. junk science, paganism, Indian esotericism, Chinese numerology, health food fads, etc. In other words, all the old craziness satirized by Umberto Eco in Foucault’s Pendulum, plus some new innovations like AI cults and God knows what else.

G. K. Chesterton supposedly said, “The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything.” (Note that Chesterton never quite said that: This most famous Chestertonian epigram is actually an admirably succinct paraphrased summation of G. K.’s train of thought by his admirer Émile Cammaerts.)

The current right-wing coalition between tech bros and chuds opens up all sorts of possibilities, both highbrow and lowbrow.

For example, Silicon Valley is into psychedelic drugs lately.

And much of New Age is motivated by physical discomforts suffered by aging humans, which they like to blame on poisoning. Hitler blamed race poisons, others blame seed oils and microplastics.

My grandfather was a health food faddist who blamed his annoyances upon store-bought food (a not unreasonable perspective in the early 20th century), so he moved from Oak Park, Ill., to Altadena, Calif., in 1929 to put his children to work growing his health foods.

Altadena burned down last month.

Yet, generally speaking, in the English-speaking world, this sort of stuff has historically been associated with the left, with the friends of Chesterton’s great frenemy George Bernard Shaw. Down through the generations, the left has been more associated with the Big 5 personality trait of “openness.” Shavian socialists drove George Orwell, a leftist with a rightist pro-chud personality, crazy, as Paul Laity notes:

“Socialism,” George Orwell famously wrote in ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’ (1936), draws towards it “with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.” His tirade against such “cranks” is memorably extended in other passages of the book to include “vegetarians with wilting beards,” the “outer-suburban creeping Jesus” eager to begin his yoga exercises, and “that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat.”

I must admit, though, that I like fruit-juice drinking. And women in yoga pants are not the worst thing about the 21st century.

Something else that’s going on, though, is that the global dominance of the English language, plus the internet, is spreading weird Continental European rightist ideas among young Americans.

New Age thinking was largely due to the spread of the study of comparative religion.

For example, the British ruled India and Hong Kong, so they became exposed to a lot of Asian ideas.

Some of them were useful. Consider the Victorian mathematics genius George Boole, whose Boolean algebra, Claude Shannon pointed out almost a century later, could provide the basis for computing—one of the most colossal insights of the 20th century. Boole’s widow attributed her husband’s breakthroughs to esoteric Indian and Jewish influences. (The world’s most famous mountain, Mt. Everest, was named after Mrs. Boole’s uncle George Everest, the Surveyor General of India.)

In contrast, the Germans didn’t enjoy much of an empire, but they were phenomenally diligent scholars.

For example, I was a reasonably well-read youth, but my choices were consciously Anglo-American conservative, with my more ambitious books guided by National Review’s Anglophilia: The summer when I was 14, I read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, at 15 James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and at 16 Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones.

Hence, I never even heard of current Continental favorites of younger rightists like Carl Schmitt until my 40s, Julius Evola until my 50s, and Mircea Eliade until my 60s.

I’m old enough to remember when New Age woo, which traces back at least to 19th-century Britain and America, came roaring back in the late 1960s. One moment, everybody my age was into astronauts and science, then the next:

When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars
This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius
The Age of Aquarius
Aquarius! Aquarius!
Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind’s true liberation
Aquarius! Aquarius!

Keep in mind that the lyrics for “Aquarius” weren’t written by some twentysomething hippie for a rock album, but for Broadway by two thirtysomething traditional theater gays. Hair opened off-Broadway in October 1967 and was a smash on Broadway in 1968. The pop group the 5th Dimension, a favorite of TV variety shows, won the Best Record Grammy for their cover in 1970.

In other words, New Ageism was huge 55-plus years ago.

Pretty soon everybody was into New Age stuff for about ten or fifteen years. This included some normally conservative personalities. For example, in his memoir Travels, Michael Crichton talks about going to parties with Lockheed engineers where everybody tried bending spoons with their minds like Uri Geller. (Crichton claims he could bend a spoon with his brain, but it was tedious so he got bored and stopped doing it.)

Similarly, the aerospace districts of the suburban San Fernando Valley were really into the hilarious Pyramid Power Pyramid Scam of May 1980.

Pyramid Power had been a growing fad in the 1970s. I recall one fashionable Westwood hair salon where you could pay extra to have your hair cut while sitting under a pyramid-shaped tent suspended from the ceiling. Presumably, the Ancient Egyptian emanations reduced bad hair days. Or something.

I didn’t.

Then again, being a ye of little faith, I did have a lot of bad hair days.

But the peak came in May 1980 when some genius combined the cult of Pyramid Power with a traditional pyramid scam. (This probably wasn’t the first time: In Evelyn Waugh’s 1932 novel Black Mischief, the British ambassador to Azania is captivated by a chain letter he receives about the metaphysical implications of the dimensions of the Great Pyramid of Cheops.)

In the second half of May 1980, there were evening traffic jams on the Ventura Freeway (101) due to all the suburbanites going to Pyramid Power parties to sit under pyramids made out of coat hangers and fabric while they paid cash for their own set of coat hangers.

The downline recruits gave their $1,000 fee to their upline recruiter while sitting under an actual pyramid (or as close as the upline recruiter could come to making a pyramid out of hangers and cloth). In return, the recruits got the Power of the Pyramid (and their own sets of hangers) to go get their own recruits to give them money while sitting under their pyramids.

This was a multilevel marketing pyramid scheme that came pre-debunked. You couldn’t get people to wise up by telling them, “You don’t understand, it’s a pyramid scheme!” because of course it was a pyramid scheme. “Well, duh, yeah, it’s a pyramid scheme,” participants would laugh. “How do you think those Egyptian pharaohs got so rich that they could afford those giant pyramids? Through tapping the secret energy of Pyramid Power!”

What could possibly go wrong?

I got back to L.A. from college in Houston on May 16, 1980, and Pyramid Parties were all anybody could talk about in the San Fernando Valley. I left for a backpacking trip around Europe on May 20; but when I got back to the Valley a few months later, the topic had been firmly deposited in the realm of We Shall Never Speak of This Again.

New Age books became a publishing sensation in about 1968, but suddenly the market dried up around 1982.

You could attribute the decline in New Age nonsense to the hardheaded Reagan Era. Yet, interestingly, Nancy Reagan got into astrology after Ronnie was nearly murdered in 1981, when she hired astrologer Joan Quigley, whom she’d seen on The Merv Griffin Show, to give the First Couple advice.

This situation had been anticipated twenty years before by science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein in his druggie/hippie cult novel Stranger in a Strange Land, when the heroes have to influence the President of the World, so they contact his wife’s astrologer, Becky Vesant (a reference to Annie Besant, who was involved in every single left-wing cult of her long life, including atheism, Marxism, theosophy, feminism, and Indian nationalism).

Weirdly, Heinlein and Reagan were not unassociated. Heinlein was a fan of the sci-fi-ish language reform movement General Semantics. In 1966, Reagan, who was often called by his opponents, not unimperceptibly, Ronnie Raygun (the tragedy of Reagan’s movie career was that science fiction wasn’t yet a major genre), appointed the second most important General Semantics spokesman, Professor S.I. Hayakawa, as president of protest-plagued San Francisco State college.

A decade later Hayakawa was elected to the U.S. Senate (R-CA). My neighbor Jerry Pournelle attested that the elderly Heinlein helped write an early draft of Reagan’s epochal 1983 Star Wars speech.

Due to being old, I’m less in touch with cultural trends than I used to be. But my vague impression is that New Age stuff has come back into fashion in recent years, especially among young women.

Some of this is reasonable. For example, yoga was big among my friends’ moms way back in 1971. Then yoga vanished for decades; but then it came back. Because exercise regimens are repetitive and depressing, it’s good that different types of exercise go in and out of fashion, since it helps that there are seemingly novel exercises over which you can get excited.

But it’s not clear that the future will be so agreeable.