From “Troofers” to “Truth-Seekers

The shift towards reflexive criticality can be understood in emic terms as the transition from unsane, to “troofer”, to truth-seeker. As discussed in the previous chapter, “troofers” refer to those who reject the dominant nomos and subsequently inhabit, uncritically, a worldview informed by alternative sources. They thus represent an inauthentic awakening by persons who fail to practice the very liberation of consciousness that their new sources of information talk about. This resembles the split between intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity, with troofers exhibiting the latter type. The pejorative nature of the “troofer” designation illustrates the way that this development of personhood is celebrated and valued; to be a true truth-seeker, in other words, is to become critical of the truth movement.

Troofers are thought to be detrimental to the spread of the message, because they think, uncritically, that the truth can be disseminated via forceful fanaticism. Truth-seekers, on the other

343 Ibid., p. 200.

344 Ibid., p. 5.

129 hand, perceive “waking up” as an internal process, by virtue of their own experiences of the total process:

My basic philosophy is that you cannot tell somebody “the truth”. You cannot. The truth has to be realised, it has to come from deep within you, and there’s that realisation. Really, the biggest shock, is that everything you thought you knew is a crock of crap. […] It’s that decision, then, that you’re actually going to make an effort to re-educate yourself.

But it has to come from the individual, it’s no good asking someone else to trigger it.

The vital importance of the intellectual mode of active personal research comes through again.

Individuals can move inside the truth movement; individuals can then move away from the movement. In both cases we find evidence of identity sacralisation, primarily one as a seeker. The

“second awakening” – or a general penchant for criticism – serves to confirm this status by reaffirming a dissatisfaction with institutional supports including the secondary institution of alternative knowledge.

5.7 Concluding Comments

“Waking up”, then, is a multi-linear process. It accords better with Rambo’s multi-directional stage model than the sequential one of Lofland and Stark, although many of the relative stages identified by the latter match the data presented here. In terms of the conversion motifs, the self-narratives are all comprised of intellectual, affectional, mystical, and experimental components;

the dominance of the intellectual reflects the rationalistic basis for truth-seeker discourse. The journey is one from a position of primary socialisation into society’s nomos – even if this has not always been firmly established for idiosyncratic reasons – into a state of anomie, where social reality is perceived to be unreality. The social mechanisms of universe-maintenance reaffirm this (un)truth whilst simultaneously establishing a counter-definition of reality – an alternative nomos, comprised of a subjective understanding of the total body of alternative knowledge – in the online and/or offline company of other (un)likeminded, awakened selves.

130 Chapter Six: Heterodox Health: Self-Healing in an Unhealthy World

Death does not come now at the end of life: it is there from the start, calling for constant surveillance and forbidding even a momentary relaxation of vigil. Death is watching (and is to be watched) when we work, eat, love, rest. Through its many deputies, death presides over life.³⁴⁵

6.1 Introduction

Visually and materially dominant, health matters to affiliates of the truth movement; issues relating to human health are of vital importance. When the variegated elements making up this broad field are catalogued and analysed major themes of the cultic milieu are brought into focus.

The subject of health brings together the ideational (in the form of conspiracy narratives and notions of a holistic universe), the phenomenological (in the form of individual and collective experiences of the world), and human action (in the practical responses rooted in the material world).

In this chapter I want to explore the assortment of beliefs and practice I have met amongst the truthers relating to this diverse field. Completely untrained as a biomedical physician, and line with the social constructivist approach to knowledge, I avoid questions of objective medical truth.

My perspective as an ethnographer indeed differs from that of ‘the traditional medical perspective [where] lay beliefs are at best unreliable and at worst irrational’; rather, as an anthropologist, I wish to demonstrate ‘their coherence and validity in terms of the purposes they fulfil for the person who holds them’.³⁴⁶ Health practices that appear at first to be disparate or even contradictory (such as foraging for hedgerow medicine considered alongside the use of scalar technology to unblock the energy channels flowing through the body’s meridian lines) will be reconciled in light of fieldwork and analysis. As will be explored below, the validity of these alternative practices derives partly from the perceived invalidity (in numerous ways) of medical orthodoxy, the subject of all health-related conspiracy theories.

This chapter will proceed through two broad sections, exploring the ideational sphere followed by the responses mandated by these ideas, making the organisational logic apparent. In the first section I will first look to the conspiracy theories, or counter-narratives, applied to Britain’s dominant medical establishment. These will then be contextualised within a much wider counter-narrative that extends beyond medicine and incorporates many facets of social life perceived as harmful. Following these negative beliefs concerning the perceived orthodoxy I will introduce the positive content; the ‘new physics’ and the truth movement’s reconceptualisation of the human body and relationship with health and illness. The second half looks to the responses, firstly at the

345 Zygmunt Bauman, Immortality, Mortality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), p. 139.

346 Gareth Williams and Jennie Popay, ‘Lay knowledge and the privilege of experience’, in ed. by Gabe, Kelleher and Williams, Challenging Medicine (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 122.

131 level of individual practices in terms of patterns of consumption and self-healing, and then at the field of holistic therapists who constitute a vital, and revealing, networked cohort of individual practitioners.