Late Empire Life Extension
Western decline, like its bloody ascent, produces anti aging panics. And while people might "yearn for woke" the growing beauty market portends concessions to the right wing.
The following is adapted from my book, if you’d like to read my book, stay tuned for updates here or on my social profiles (@AyeshaASiddiqi and here). For publishing inquiries please contact myself and Erik Hane. Special thanks to Nell Whittaker at Tank Magazine in London who published a shorter version over the summer from which this was expanded
A host of supplements are marketed to combat the nutrient deficiencies now common because apparently depleted soil no longer yields quality produce. Chronic disease can be avoided by better monitoring your hormones which “must be balanced” at all times. Lighting must include early morning sunlight but avoid nighttime bluelight and be supported with sessions of redlight. The polyester in your clothing may be making you infertile or reducing your sperm count. Or it may be the microplastics in your drinks. Skipping breakfast might be making you fat by throwing off your cortisol. Your cortisol could be high from your job, or your childhood, either way you must bring it down. Men must raise their testosterone, women must lower it. Less the mellow urgings to try yoga of the Clinton years, contemporary wellness culture has a wartime discipline, and a propaganda volume as dizzying. Red light therapy, collagen lattes, kbeauty, mewing, looksmaxxing, deep plane face lifts, botox, biomarkers, longevity clinics, avoiding seed oils, adding full fat dairy, saunas, cold plunges, hormone balancing, sleep stats, vitamin IVs, gua sha, lymphatic drainage, creatine, traditional chinese medicine, fascia release, thumbpulling, oilpulling, beef tallow, wellness clubs, supplements, gut health, colon cancer, filler, dissolving filler, pilates, carnivore diet, vibration plates, morning affirmations, night time routine, morning routine, protein, “facial balancing”, golden milk, green juice. Personal health management has never before had so much urgency. The scale and intensity of the sheer labor personal health now demands is worth evaluating given the context from which it emerges. Specifically, anti-aging practices now dominate not just a beauty cabinet, but lifestyle commitments across diet, healthcare, and leisure, across content channels for every age group and income level. The phenomenon is not limited to the “for you” page.
Twice in global history, the Western world has been seized by an era-defining fixation on longevity: the desire to resist ageing, forgo physical and mental decline, and perhaps even escape death. The first was during the inception of “the West” as a region with a coherent identity, after the height of European colonial expansion and before the 1940s Holocaust. The second is unfolding now, as the West declines in the aftermath of the Global War on Terror, and during the holocaust of Palestine. In both cases, an obsession with anti-ageing emerges alongside the pursuit of conquest, steeply growing inequality, and the mainstreaming of bigotry through new media. Whenever the Western powers throw the world into crisis, Western populations turn to “anti aging”. The history of wellness protocols in the West demonstrates how genocidal cultures train their populations to see healthcare as a competitive advantage indicating genetic superiority, rather than collective good arrived at in mutuality. This competition predictably escalates into decreasing tolerance for variation across all metrics; ability, race, class, gender. And that intolerance has an equally predictable outcome. When death is cheaply tolerated no one’s life is spared the devaluation. Ageing and death are the great equalizers. As the contours of inequality grow especially brutal, anti-ageing-focused “wellness” movements offer a theater of exception.
Before the 19th century, old age was linked to the wisdom of perspective for centuries. Sure youth and beauty were occasionally linked and aspired to, but age held authority and power – not the threat of senescence. In The Art of Living Long, published in 1558, Venetian nobleman and architect Luigi Cornaro wrote, “I had never known that the world was beautiful until I reached old age. Indeed, old age is the time to be most coveted, as it is then that prudence is best exercised, and the fruits of all the other virtues are enjoyed with the least opposition; because by that time, the passions are subdued, and man gives himself up wholly to reason.” Cornaro’s view was popularly embraced, republished in over 50 editions by the 19th century. This belief – that while the ageing body may weaken, the ageing mind should be respected – endured for as long as there was little change in the world between generations. Anti-ageing panic also subsided during times of prosperity, which offered strong welfare programmes, such as the post-Second World War period in the US – a period when ageing could again be associated with leisure and security. It’s safe to assume no subsequent generation will ever drink and smoke as much as boomers did. But at the end of the 19th century, the world did not feel secure: it was in intense flux.
By 1900, America had expanded to forty-five states through a 95% elimination of the indigenous population. The US may have reluctantly given up slavery, but still refused to include Black people in the nation’s definition of full and equal citizens. Lynchings, abuse and segregation were enthusiastically enforced (and, arguably, continue today through the police force and self deputizing of modern Americans). In Canada, too, these years were pivotal: 1900 to 1913 marked the greatest economic boom in Canada’s history, and while the Canadians remained British subjects, the path was paved for another white nation on the North American continent. Meanwhile, across the Pacific in 1901, the penal colonies of Australia federated. The Aborigines of what is now Australia were estimated to have numbered 1-1.5 million; by 1900, 100,000 remained. When the Herero and Nama people of Southwest Africa rose up against the brutal German occupation, the Germans opted for exterminating them through the establishment of concentration camps. The campaigns from 1904-1908 against the Nama and the Herero are now considered the first genocide of the 20th century, but as we know, it was hardly alone and not the last. This is how Europe and its unruly settler colonies – the US, Canada and Australia – reached forms that together preserved their common threads of genocidal capitalism, joining Western Europe in a geopolitical formation we now collectively call “the West.”
This was the era that saw the rise of gerontology, the study of aging, alongside a struggle to grapple with the rapid transformation of society. Victorian culture, beyond the rigidity of its social mores, is better understood as the first era of mass culture and industrialised consumption (we’re living through another). Literacy exploded across classes for men and women alike, creating some of the first pop culture trends. Industrial labour required physical strength, but the greatest wealth accumulation occurred for the class of people who did not perform physical labour, creating a self-consciousness resolved by a cosmetic and health-oriented focus on the physical body. Before the modern “pilates princess” or “gym bro”, the turn-of-the-century Europeans enthusiastically established organised sports and exercise programmes. Male fears for their own vitality were quickly foisted onto women, with a premium placed on their youth that could effectively compete against women reaching self-actualized adulthood, and conformed to the imperial era logic of race. Which, in sexualizing black and native children, cued beauty standards in Europe too. In 1888, Pears printed an ad captioned, “I am 50 today, but thanks to Pears Soap my complexion is only 17.” The same soap brand illustrated the soap turning Black children white, linking whiteness with hygiene despite the great disparity in the frequency of washing between the nonwhite people being brutalized at this time versus the white invaders who occupied them. Campaigns such as Pears’ became an important terrain for rehabilitating white identity. The industrial revolution had transformed the nature of labor for millions — aggressively sorting people into the laboring poor and the growing white collar. The bloated administrative state imperialism required, and the easy money it drew, in turn required redefining “productivity” and “vigor”.
Medical doctors promoted anti-ageing therapies including testicle grafts, ovary transplants and semen injections, because vitality was linked to ideas of sexual performance. These procedures were rarely effective and often fatal, but exceedingly popular. Doctors promising Europeans and Americans a reversal in their ageing process hailed the efficacy of gland grafts, and – like today’s medical influencers – presented themselves as test results.
In 1914 Dr Frank Lydston claimed his hair color was restored by transplanting into himself a freshly deceased 18 year old’s testicals. In 1919 Leo Stanley, a physician at San Quentin prison, declared that he had successfully operated on 643 inmates, with results that fixed everything from “acne to asthma.” They advertised the same suite of restorative benefits many supplements promote today, from skin health to organ function to mood. In England, Dr Serge Voronoff sourced testicles from chimpanzees and baboons for his patients. Monkey glands were such a popular anti-ageing therapy that it caused international concern over supply, leading the French government to ban hunting monkeys in its colonies. By 1923 in the US, the enterprising Dr John R. Brinkley was a prototypical content-creating medical influencer who established a radio station in to advertise his work. It featured music, Christian sermons, intense critiques of the medical establishment, and advertisements for goat glands ($750) and human glands ($2,000). By the time the Kansas Medical Board revoked his license (which he’d received after three months of medical school), he had become a millionaire. Meanwhile, in Vienna, Eugen Steinach pioneered a procedure called vasoligation, the fundamental component of a procedure known today as a vasectomy. Promoted as a way to “restore” vitality by allowing semen to circulate in the body, vasoligation was embraced by both Sigmund Freud and William Butler Yeats. Yeats even credits his best work to his “strange second puberty.”
It is no coincidence that the modern vampire, a creature that is neither dead nor alive but somehow still walking among humans, seized pop culture during the same period. As their empires extracted resources and labour from colonised people, European audiences consumed stories of beings who lived forever, and who fed on others to do so. John William Polidori’s The Vampyre established the creature as we now know it in 1819, but it was the many works inspired by it at the end of the 1800s that made vampires synonymous with Victorian fiction. Polidori’s Lord Ruthven was proud, ruthless, selfish: a creature of voracious appetite and refined taste who was cold to the suffering of others, even relishing it. The countless duplicates that came after mythologised the parasitic elite, who drained the vitality from others to maintain their own. Forty-five years before Bram Stoker’s more feeble and decaying vampire capped the terminus of the imperial age, Queen Victoria had already seen Dion Boucicault’s The Vampire performed at the Princess’s Theatre London, twice.
In Late Victorian Holocausts (2000), Mike Davis explores the grim balance of feasts and famines in the 19th century. Davis writes, “Although rice and wheat production in the rest of India (which now included the bonanzas of coarse rice from the recently conquered Irrawaddy Delta) had been above average for the past three years, much of the surplus had been exported to England.” The millions that died from the famines at the end of the 19th century did so in a new era of policy that could produce inequality on a dizzying scale. Literary theory has analysed vampire fiction for decades, and there’s an easily-drawn range of metaphors for invasion or sexual expression that white critics tend to project onto the vampire. But vampires can be understood as simply a reflection of their audience, exaggerated. A reflection that wasn’t otherwise available because the way Europeans were living at the time was historically unique. While English towns bulged with the profits of the Empire, their residents feasting on stolen grain and sipping tea sweetened by slave labour, they could insist in between bites and sips that they weren’t monsters; monsters had fangs. For others, it was perhaps a more titillating escalation of the necrocannibalism they already practised; mummified remains from Egypt were considered a restorative supplement by the English. The focus on vitality was twinned with purity, just as the era saw the world yoked to the whims of the new geopolitical centre of gravity: the Western powers. The European imperial project relied on the violent construction of whiteness and masculinity as superior, any weakening white body contradicted that ideal. As other forms of social reproduction seemingly lost their stability, health and wellness offered a way to recoup the psychological distinction of European and American self concept. Thus ageing became a threat to the imagined purity and strength of the national body.
This created the conditions for wellness movements rooted in eugenic logic: to cleanse, purify and dominate the self as a proxy for the world. And when culture fixates on productivity and purity, ageing is feared as causing weakness and decay. While the popularity of gland grafts at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries indicates how widespread the desire for anti-ageing therapies was, the true extent to which personal wellness became a dominant ideology through which inequality was psychologically metabolised is the “Lebensreform”, or “life reform” movement.
Across Germany, Switzerland and Austria, the middle classes turned to an emphasis on “healthy” living and “natural” medicine. From 1890 to 1930 exhibitions, regional clubs, curriculums, and personal regimens hailed a renewed interest in returning to nature and avoiding the glut of processed foods and lethargy of inactive modern living. All the contemporary interest in detoxing and health foods can be considered the Lebensreform legacy as much as Lebensreform innovations like almond milk and muesli. In fact, many of the wellness fads of the last decade are Lebensreform-coded; raw milk, no seed oils, more probiotics, parasite cleanses, cold plunges, hot saunas, “clean” as a metaphor for nontoxic, “detox” as an activity. In The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany, A Social History (2003), Michael Hau details how much reactionary conservatism was reinstituted in the changing world under the banner of health and wellness. It would lay the ideological groundwork for the Nazi concept of territorial expansion and racial cleansing, but first, it offered immediate succour to the public. As Hau writes, “the experience of personal failure – or perhaps more important, simply the fear of it – underpinned the [turn-of-the-century] obsession with health. With its promise to increase people’s Leistungsfähigkeit (in the dual sense of ability to perform and achieve), life reform gave its supporters a sense of agency in their own future.” Importantly, it was a way to cope with status anxiety during heightened inequality: “Lower-middle-class life reformers … were unable to build their social identity around material success or educational attainment. In their quest for social distinction, they therefore made a virtue out of necessity and turned to bodily discipline.” All the “wellness” was in service of longer, more youthful, lives.
Today, there are two resurrected pillars of the anti-ageing panic which parallel the anti aging panic of the late 1800s-early 1900s. The biomedical interventions favoured by turn-of-the-century wealthy is analogous to the modern tech industry-led longevity boom. While the beauty industry rebranding of anti-ageing as “healthy ageing” combines Victorian ideas of “natural” beauty with life reformers’ zeal towards personal optimisation. As then, today’s anti aging panic is a reaction to challenges to the status quo and concurrent with anxiety over nation states in flux.
The defining traits of the respective panics remain the same. They rely on indicating physical health through narrowing beauty ideals, through which more cosmetic concerns are euphemised as wellness. They reinscribe sexual dimorphism, or the physical distinction between men and women, in an era which had begun agitating for progress on the subjects of race, gender and class. They arrived in the backlash to fights for labor rights, improved working conditions, the abolition of slavery, and recognition of women’s suffrage.
Those fights have been renewed today in the demands for racial justice, gender equality, and policy designed for the working class. We may be a long way from Victorian era pamphlets extolling the urgency of women’s right to work or the abolition of slavery, but today’s backlash too follows from a paradigm shift in mass communication which threatened elite narratives. What’s more, like the turn-of-the-century anti-ageing panic, the contemporary one is also downstream of colonial violence (the Global War on Terror), rising wealth gaps, and fascist reterritorialising of social norms at risk of being ceded to equality – a process now described colloquially as “woke” (or “le wokisme” in France). The fights are ongoing, but the backlash is always double because it benefits from the weight of the establishment. In the face of seemingly lost battles, the priority shifts to signaling membership on the winning side, enter: beauty and wellness (and conservative fashion, music, art etc). We know the first anti aging panic led to genocide within the imperial core, a return to signalling dominance above collective care for the vulnerable primes us to face the same outcome in this century too.
In our modern era, the deciding factor is a belief that public health is immaterial to individual. Strict diets, supplements, biometric tracking, evangelising one’s routine, and self-service medical care rejecting institutional guidance such as vaccines in favour of niche practitioners, are all practices that—like the vampirism of the imperial age—rose significantly while the Western powers were warring against nonwhite people. Like the Lebensreform movement, contemporary wellness is replete with ironies and contradictions about the body’s natural abilities and what constitutes healthy living.
The antivax movement has had the worst impact. In the year 2000, vaccinations had eradicated measles in the US. By 2012, the antivax movement had restored outbreaks. 2025 marked more measles cases in the US than in any previous point in the last 30 years, with the majority stemming from an outbreak in Texas. In 2024 England logged the highest number of cases since 2012. Amidst a desire by some to prove the body’s strengths through exposure, is a desire by others to secure the body’s strengths through constant monitoring. As vaccine denial grew, the rise of wearable tech devices normalised data-driven personal health monitoring.
The earliest was the Fitbit in 2009; in 2015, the Finnish Oura ring transformed the field with its sleek gunmetal casing capable of monitoring “sleep quality”. Now in its fourth edition, Oura has sold more than 2.5 million rings, inspiring new entrants into the field of ring-style personal health monitoring devices like the Evie ring, designed for women, and Samsung’s new Galaxy ring. All offer “wellness tracking” which covers step counts, heart rate and heart rate variability, activity levels, body temperature, and how soundly you sleep. It’s funny to consult a third-party resource for one’s own “activity level”, you don’t need to be wearing a thermometer 24/7 to be healthy, and I imagine learning to tell whether or not you’ve slept well would be more valuable to one’s well-being than the habit of believing what you’re told. The vagueness and imprecision of how these devices ascribe numbers to “sleep quality” hasn’t deterred anyone, from the tech millionaires who sport the rings at longevity conferences to the suburban parents who wear them on commutes.
The emergence of data visualization during these years, from infographics to these wearable devices, produced an illusion of rationality that could paper over increasingly irrational norms. It was then, under President Barack Obama, that the War on Terror grew “covert”, conducted through night raids, indiscriminately pouring soldiers into Iraqi homes where some acted out their Call of Duty fantasies of valor and others raped minors and slaughtered innocents – innocents who died without hearing the speeches which urged these actions as both necessary and successful. More and more “missions” were completed by unaccountable “special operatives” with faulty intel, pulled together by artificially connected narratives sometimes based on as little as scraps of paper with Arabic on them or the fact that many individuals can have similar names. The more violent and unorganized the War on Terror became, the more the US produced an illusion of it being data driven and strategy based, an endless series of acronyms were launched to describe the goals and approach. The “intelligence” gathering was security theater and the more people died under spurious circumstances, the greater the impulse to project order and intent on the military missions.
The US government began defining a combatant as any “military aged male” while drones began raining on Yemeni weddings, Pakistani farmland, Somali coastlines. Still, tens of thousands died who fell outside even that wide parameter. The avatar of the age became tech, not the sedentary grunts that operated it. The image of the war became the ruthless “efficiency” of sleek drones, not the lethargic beneficiaries of America’s main social benefits program (the armed forces) sitting in Nevada trailers pressing buttons that had the power to destroy lives on the other side of the planet. Drone operators called the muslims they killed “bug splats.”
Displaced confidence in the power and validity of button based “war” displaced responsibility too. I don’t know the names of every American who pressed the buttons that killed the estimated 50,000 people through drones over the last twenty years. But I know one of those killed was a three year old also named Ayesha. I don’t have access to the “covert intelligence” that justified her death, but I would wager it wouldn’t be very convincing. I watched the Americans around me continue living as if the world hadn’t stopped for someone, many times over. But we aren’t as disconnected as we’d like to believe. The reliance on tech to shrug off the psychic burden of ambient violence proved useful to even Western civilians growing alienated by the grind of their societies that, while not yet destroying them, would only continue to bear down harder as their leaders focused on war and tech profiteering to the exclusion of anything that could be considered in the public interest. In the years the War on Terror continued, America and England grew poorer and weaker. Their jingoism kept a rightwing in power (regardless of party affiliation) that stripped their public for parts – enriching a group one could accurately describe as a social circle small enough to fit into a single little black book.
In America and across Europe, the more effort was required to access a lifestyle previous generations could secure for less, the more lives became dotted with self-soothing. Those who can afford the expensive personal health monitoring devices have just enough money to worry about losing their ability to earn more. Gently working in the background, working even and especially while you rest, Oura rings and the like are like a captcha code your body performs while you’re not online – tethering you to the side of the digital divide where you already spend so much time that offline time may risk its sense of reality. Wearable devices function like a child’s security blanket that, through its consistent presence, affirms your own. The sleep data you can look at first thing in the morning offers proof – you exist, and your life need not have much meaning or fulfilment to produce reams of metrics. Being able to run diagnostics like an operating system is akin to the attempts at resolving bodily inadequacy post industrial Europeans felt during the rise of efficient machines before they too sprang into doing jumping jacks on hillsides. The amount of data these devices collect and display is a talisman of body sovereignty, but it isn’t yet the escape from ageing currently being pursued. How stupefying the power of Western hegemony must be when you can identify with it. The US once seemingly conquered even time – its wars are “Forever” Wars. It’s only fitting that Westerners are now scrambling to evade the indignities of their lifespans.
Over the last decade, scores of tech millionaires have hoovered up gerontologists, doctors and scientists to pursue longevity research they hope will speedrun a biomedical solution to ageing. There were fewer than 100 such clinics in 2013; today, there are more than 3,000. They hope to distill ageing to a handful of elements that can be bottled and sold. Elysium, for example, was founded in 2014 and focuses on a cellular compound called sirtuins whose absence has been linked to ageing. Sirtuins require nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, or NAD, which is why you may have seen influencers recommending NAD supplements that many celebrities are now already taking. But neither the benefits of NAD nor the role of sirtuins have been conclusively demonstrated, just linked to a series of processes connected to cell repair. Longevity clinics are privately funded business ventures. They often rush to launch products without much depth of research or even scientific consensus, making their methodologies only slightly more sophisticated than stapling on an animal’s glands and hoping for the best. With the Trump administration defunding food and drug research and deregulating its marketing, Americans are likely to discover the effects of longevity clinic products not in clinical research but through customer experience.
The customer model of health is not unique to the US. Preventative care franchises are part of the contemporary investment boom in longevity. These facilities are answering a growing demand for personalised preventative care that hinges on full body diagnostics, comprehensive testing, and care plans that are difficult to come by from traditional health care providers. Clinque La Prairie, a Swiss longevity clinic founded during the original Lebensreform, recently launched their own line of supplements. Blue Longevity Clinic raised €2million to launch “health centres” across Southeast Europe, promising “diagnostics, lifestyle medicine, and regenerative therapies.” Texas-based Humanaut Health has been so successful that they just opened a branch in Florida offering “biomarker testing, medical therapies and lifestyle support under one roof”, and they’re looking to expand further. They currently offer “Shiftwave (a vibration device designed to regulate the nervous system), PEMF (pulsed electromagnetic field therapy for treating chronic pain and inflammation), hormone, IV and ozone therapies including EBO2 (extracorporeal blood oxygenation and ozonation – where blood is removed via a vein, passed it through a machine that adds a ozone and then returned to the body).”
If anyone outside of these businesses has heard the terms “biomarker” before, it’s likely because of Bryan Johnson. Of all tech millionaires investing in longevity research, he is the one simultaneously pursuing celebrity and influence. Through a wellness protocol he calls Project Blueprint, with himself as its founding subject, he claims he has “reversed” his age by five and a half years already. In 2023, Johnson even took a litre of plasma from his 17-year-old son’s blood to imbue himself with youth. He quotes 50 “perfect” biomarkers and 100 biomarkers that are below his “chronological age” that he updates and broadcasts regularly across his many social media channels. In the documentary Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever (2025), Johnson claims, “For every twelve months, I age eight months.” While he no longer supports blood transfusions (they yielded no difference), he still believes in the mission of what he calls the “Don’t Die” movement. His supporters have joined him in a competition called the “Rejuvenation Olympics”, where their biomarkers compete against each other on a leaderboard. The Don’t Die acolytes attach their health, more overtly framed as “competitive advantage” in their case, to a range of supplements consumed daily. Johnson himself takes and benefits from sales of even more through affiliate links connected to an Amazon storefront. In the last decade a range of direct to consumer powders touting health benefits have emerged. They market themselves as able to fill the gap between our diets and our nutritional needs. The first wave was green. The second wave has focused on less tangible goals than nutrient deficiencies. They claim to add in “alertness”, “combat fatigue”, provide “glow”, “support” everything from digestion to hair growth. Some are meant for the morning, some at night. Chief among these waves has been protein powders. Like the homes of Victorians, these were recently discovered to also be mainly doses of lead.
Much of what we know about the human body, and even our models for public health, was inherited from the Nazis and fascist Japanese scientists who took a similar interest in the body, and researched on prisoners unhindered by ethical concerns. The late 19th-century gland grafts became the foundation for modern endocrinology. All the contemporary research and experimentation will doubtlessly lead to useful innovations in the field of health management. The growing focus on metabolic function and a greater awareness of insulin resistance as a frame for understanding physical decline has started to help people defer diabetes and make healthier lifestyle choices. That’s been the rare signal amidst the noise of social content pushing contradictory and unsubstantiated rituals of hope disguised as medical interventions.
Some content touts the liver cleansing benefits of coffee, others urge avoiding caffeine for anti aging purposes. Some push trough-sized salads for meeting fiber and protein goals, while others insist the Chinese would never eat a vegetable raw and all of us should take heed of that. Complicated and time consuming “lymphatic drainage” routines ignore the fact that walking activates motion in the same clusters of lymph nodes and you likely don’t need to “drain” more than what regular movement would already achieve. So far, there has been no major breakthrough that holds promise for the future of medicine and public health, just numbers obsessively observed going up or down or staying the same, and frenzied consumption; practices reflexively adopted and discarded. Western anti-ageing anxiety, or longevity fixation, is as reactionary as the Victorians.
It is all the health that can fit in a blended drink, bathroom cabinet, or wellness session at a private longevity clinic. It is public health without a public. This type of “health” is discerned mainly via mirror. The private pursuit of health has grown more narcissistic in response. Whether the hope is placed in a gritty powder gulped down in the morning or a slimy cream applied at night, the personal routine model of health marks the entrenched abdication of a public commons for which a concept of public health can be demanded. Genocidal cultures cannot produce an investment in public health because they never reached a committed consensus on who belongs.
During Covid-19, the University of Georgia conducted a study that discovered white people stopped caring about Covid-19 once news media emphasised it was disproportionately impacting people of colour. Rather than registering that people in service industries were getting sick and dying from higher repeated exposure, white people internalised the information as proof of their own invulnerability, and began going out more frequently and with less precaution. A withheld social obligation of wellness, trained on racism and eventually deployed against everyone, is why the trauma of gun violence or the value of masking isn’t given the same public and commercial attention as nutritional supplements and “biohacking.” The commitment to policing potentially insurgent populations, once in colonies, now in a globally integrated world, has kept nations in tension with the idea of a commons.
The total human toll of the Global War on Terror – between the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the drone war across Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan – is estimated to be almost 5 million, with 38 million displaced. That number doesn’t include the millions that later fled the Syrian civil war. The response to the resulting migration away from the Middle East was to identify immigration as the crisis.
In 2011, Anders Breivik killed 77 people in a bombing and a shooting rampage in Norway he claimed was to “stop the Muslim takeover”, citing Fox News. Lately white Americans have started noticing their parents watch too much of it. But that was already a decade after the same network was cited by the man that firebombed my childhood mosque too. There would be still another decade of Fox News urging we must, “kill them all”. Former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro said so on the network in January 2015, “We need to kill them. We need to kill them”.
In February 2015 three muslim UNC students were killed - “execution style” - in their home by their neighbor who had long been harassing them over their faith. In 2017, an average of two mosques a week were burned down in the United States. In 2019 in New Zealand, 51 muslims were massacred in a mass shooting inside their mosques. Last summer, armed white British men attempted to instigate pogroms in South Asian neighborhoods. Last month a mosque in East Sussex was set on fire while people worshipped inside. This is not an exhaustive list, and would quickly be outdated even if it was. Like London, New York was able to elect a muslim mayor. This has only prompted more right wing hysteria validating the conspiracy theory that muslims constitute a secret cabal seeking to infiltrate and control the West (what happened the last time such a conspiracy theory was vollied at a semitic group?).
At the time she said them, none of my white peers in media or journalism found Jeanine Pirro’s words worth commenting on — dismissing her as fringe despite speaking on the most viewed news network in America. Today she is the US Attorney for D.C.
The view that muslims constituted a monolith large and homogenous enough to challenge “Western norms” was laundered by publications and news outlets that framed suspicion and contempt as the logical result of neutral intellectual inquiry. By insisting that scepticism was the normative view, and that being non-muslim was thereby the more trustworthy perspective on the subject, the socio-political dispossession of muslims was enforced before any of the supposedly neutral questions were answered. It’s a rhetorical model that has since been repeated beat for beat against trans people, often by the same figures and outlets.
As soon as the War on Terror allowed a re-expression of the barely dormant antisemitism that had been so central to the European character for centuries (this time, against muslims), white nationalism reorganised with all the cell memory of an organ repairing itself. Last year’s elections offered a view of the results. In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is now the second strongest party, and the first white nationalist party to win a plurality of seats since the Nazi party. In Sweden, where the Socialist Democrats had been the leading political party since the 1930s, the second largest spot was taken last year by the white nationalist Sweden Democrats. Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) secured the highest percentage of the election results for the first time in history. FPÖ was formed by a former SS officer and is so racist that when it first made an appearance in national elections, Belgium issued sanctions on Austria – since then, Belgium has elected its most right-wing government too and, like other white nationalist parties across the continent, is on track to keep them in office. In the UK, leading Conservatives and voters are rushing to the newly established white nationalist Reform party; its immigration policy, invented by the Conservatives and inherited enthusiastically by Starmer’s Labour, is titled the “hostile environment”.
Regardless of who enforces it, racial hierarchy is central to European and settler-colonial self-conceptualisation, but there’s never been a concerted effort to remove it from white culture because white people do not admit to being a demographic with distinct values or interests that are politically expressed. The right wing whites do, and their kin across the political spectrum scratch their heads in denial at what is a very coherent logic of supremacy that they too benefit from and to which their skepticism is useful. Every time those unadmitted values climax violently, pundits are incredulous. How could a people that once held zoos of captured Africans fail to stop Nazi Germany? How could countries that spent the last 20 years debating the incompatibility of muslims with civilisation allow the holocaust in Palestine? How could countries that devote their media and governance to minimising the impact of leftists fall under right-wing extremism? Do you think it was Churchill or Hitler who said we must “flush out the vermin”, referring to largely muslim urban youth? Neither – it was the campaign-winning promise of the 2007 French president Nicolas Sarkozy. But it could have been Emmanuel Macron; it could’ve been any US politician about the 2020 uprising against police occupation and violence, or any German politician about the 2024 anti-genocide protests.
Western populism-oriented leftists discuss the potential of incremental change through consumer media, urging their audiences to ignore the markers of difference that have shaped the world for centuries, to strive only for their slice of the imperial profits. While from Chicago to Liverpool armed gangs of men seek out targets based on skin color – not tax bracket. I am told we must understand their grievance is economic. A taste for exercising violent dominance over others doesn’t develop or disappear in response to income threshold, a fact which scales to the history of nations too and matches the range of wealth found within nazi (previous and current) membership. However long we’re asked to co-exist with these elements we will be throttled by them.
The commentators’ remain unperturbed as the body count grows, attachment to their own authority keeps them from learning from the work of revolutionaries that, while not becoming podcasting celebrities, did confront slavery and occupation. The fascism of the Western world did not begin or end with Hitler or Trump. The people who saw Trump coming could and did point to the maneuvers of right wing school boards or the anti vaxx movement long before the extremes went mainstream. But at the critical juncture there were always those useful many who failed to apprehend the danger of the right because they find more validation combatting those with fewer allies. People who considered “wokeness”, or the “social justice warrior” before that, or “political correctness” before that, to be the worthier target of social pressure now wonder “how did we get here” and desire a cultural reset. But that would require a political compass beyond Bernie Sanders and historical memory past last week. The only official effort against the expansion of the Florida concentration camp known as Alligator Alcatraz came from the Miccosukee Tribe challenging its location in court, alleging it constituted a threat to the lands and water, meanwhile the white left still feels “identity politics” is immaterial while the right uses it to activate and grow its ranks.
The liberal elements of these societies don’t have a plan against this reality, and neither do the democratic socialists excited at healthcare being mentioned at the klan rally. The recent reveal that a number of online accounts pushing right wing white supremacist propaganda are based in the global south does not mean Western white nationalism is fake. It proves it’s in such high demand, and with such a guaranteed engagement rate, that it’s a popular revenue stream — just in former colonies where the low monetization in dollars still has ROI. The more damning reveal would be the IP addresses of the account followers, which are not Indians and Nigerians. The beliefs of those followers are not problems for electoralism or memes to shrug off. An adequate response to them would require viewing oneself as available to a political project that exists whether or not there is an election. The right understands this for their own goals. Their attacks and hateful propaganda are not the vagaries of an ill mind, they’re an effective disciplining force.
The worst-case scenario, where negative stereotyping from political leaders and media figures results in the violent mobilisation of civilians against minorities, has already occurred. The same consolidations of power that Western nations rely on to produce their borders and protect their “security interests” funnel their people into being either the agents or victims of fascism. Today, the rights and visibility of trans people, queer people, women and children are all being debated in ways that tacitly sanction violence against them too.
Misogyny motivated stabbings have since occurred at concerts, ballet classes, and school yards. The public spent years deriding the audacity of pronouns and debating the agency young people can exercise over their own bodies, now it must bury trans students who have been beaten or stabbed to death by their peers in the US and UK. 2018 saw the highest recorded rates of trans people murdered, every subsequent year has seen an increase. What the rest of us must realize, what the “too sensitive” “folx” urging a higher standard of tolerance for one another did realize, is that the risk we all face isn’t just in replaceable state figureheads who can propagandize a hateful base. It’s in the members of the base who have always held the power to exercise political violence. And against them the pathetic but nearly effectual weapon was a growing social stigma. Now they wield both social stigma and political violence. Defending people who it’s easier to look down on requires far less courage than freeing people from concentration camps. I don’t think people who weren’t able to do the former are prepared to do the latter. And the passive fealty to social regression is naturally present in the approach to public health too.
Effective public health would require valuing the public, consistently and without concession, which modern society repeatedly demonstrates it cannot do as long as the public contains devalued populations, even if that results in adversity for everyone else too. Eventually, to suffer in such societies is to mark yourself outside their social contract, because if you were among those that belonged you wouldn’t be struggling.
That is the real reason why aesthetic-driven physical fitness and anti-ageing beauty routines are the personal manifestation of Western border securitisation and not just say, social media-driven self-consciousness. About extensive fitness programmes, people jokingly ask, “What’s everyone training for”? The workouts are not preparatory; they are the main event. Beauty labour and wellness routines disguise suffering. Whether you’re working out after a break-up or during the breakdown of the imperial core, it demonstrates that you’re free to focus on yourself; you’re not someone with suspicious solidarities or needs. The very act can mimic security, temporarily, at least. This is why the response to rising fascism has been to salute in advance, through the entry-level (body) fascism of beauty labour. The people might “yearn for woke” but the growing beauty market portends concessions to the right wing
The annual growth rate of the cosmetic surgery and procedure market in the UK is 16.3%, with medical spas projected to earn 3.2 trillion USD by 2030, up from 1.1 trillion USD in 2023. The most cited global wellness spending number is $6.3 trillion, which is what the Global Wellness Institute claims the “wellness industry” is worth. That is more than what all of NATO spent on military expenditures in 2023. But the market is projected to continue growing. The reason why “wellness spending” numbers are rising so aggressively is that a new category of consumer spending is being treated as a health expense – physical appearance.
The disease model of ageing has led to a Protestant-work-ethic model of beauty: as the avenues through which to pursue beauty are increasing, so is the mandate that the results appear to be a God-given blessing or, in other words, genetic. Far from exploiting insecurities, the beauty industry is racing to keep up with the developing ones. Pharmaceutical-grade ingredients are marketed as part of “healthy skin” routines. Today’s skincare doesn’t just moisturise the cells you have, it may coerce their behaviour (retinols), alter their function (pigmentation blockers like tranexamic acid), or provide parts for cell growth (peptides and exosomes). These regimens are no longer limited to topical products, either. They are now likely to include microcurrent devices that lift skin and muscles, red light devices that prompt mitochondrial activation, or microneedling devices that coax skin to repair through inducing injury.
The hypercompetitive skincare market now serves a much more educated consumer, who expects higher-performing products that offer clinical results. The next generation of skincare is well past Korean serum-drenched sheet masks – it’s looking to stem cells and growth factors. The changes of ageing skin are described in more clinical terms, as the consequence of “collagen reduction” – a process which adverts often remind us occurs rapidly. And to “ensure laxity”, a host of high-powered creams and supplements now “support healthy ageing”. The medicalisation of beauty standards has been concurrent with the euphemisation of the goal being pursued: it’s gauche to call a wrinkle cream “anti-ageing” (Allure magazine, for example, banned the phrase), but the result is still desired, so the confluence of “self-care” terminology collapses any difference between beauty and health care. Beauty stores now carry vitamins and collagen supplements next to hair spray and lipstick. Social signalling drives beauty standards and the modern cost of living crisis has ascribed a new currency to the appearance of health.
Consumer fluency in skin-supporting ingredients is just one dimension of this broader cultural shift that treats health as a status symbol – one of the few differences between today and the turn of the century (and one of the many similarities between Weimar Germany and modern America). It’s not just that beauty signals status through signalling health, but that routine itself is now a mark of status, over marriage or homeownership. Time and resources dedicated to personal wellness, in pursuit of a more desirable appearance, are now the hallmark of successful adulthood. Goop and Gwyneth Paltrow’s image of luxury wellness was attuned to this. But luxury is still niche, and lifestyle brands don’t resonate widely enough to satisfy a now much broader and more pronounced cultural demand. For more affordable and better quality beauty and skincare products, Westerners are turning to East Asia.
Japan and Korea offer much more advanced products because they already cater to more high beauty labor societies. In the more racially homogenous post-empire societies of East Asia, standards could narrow more quickly, and the more the beauty ideal narrows, the more beauty labour it requires. In Korea, including professional headshots with your job resume has long been standard; some companies even require height and weight. As the West hearkens back to the stability of racial hierarchy and a rejection of diversity, beauty standards are another front through which to reassert the “order” and access personal “discipline.” Every border implies the violence of its maintenance. What follows the rejection of racial diversity is an emphasis on the gender binary.
As the reactionary backlash fuels a greater social disciplining of women, whose attainment of college education has in the last decade outpaced men in more than 139 countries, the natural look is not actually an embrace of naturally occurring women – it’s a demand to conform. This summer, SKIMS, Kim Kardashian’s undergarment and loungewear company, launched a version of the face contouring bandages common in East Asia. It uses the same logic as a corset, an attempt to push your face into a smaller frame, a low-tech version of the electronic facial contouring and skin rejuvenating devices from Korea and Japan that Western consumers have started buying through companies like Medicube and Ya-Man. You may have seen “get ready with me” videos showing young women dragging these glowing wands across their faces to push serums deeper into the skin.
Normalising this level of dedicated beauty labour lowers the threshold for acceptance of appearances that don’t adhere to the narrowing standards. American makeup trends until the last few years favoured looks with obvious cosmetics: heavy contour and eye makeup, dyed hair and piercings. It took cues from reality tv stars who took cues from drag queens and black and latino youth in cities. Bold makeup communicates a personal sovereignty over one’s body. It’s the reason the more right-wing a man is, the greater his distaste for tattoos or unconventional haircuts — they’re interpreted as signs a woman exercises a high degree of personal agency. Today the mainstream trending inspiration is the underdone aesthetic of a (white) upper east side mom or a traditional (white) Western bride; soft, muted tones favoring low contrast features.
The right-wing backlash that rejects more overt and complex beauty styles has met the rising influence of East Asian beauty care. Makeup increasingly insists on an “undetectable” application to create more “natural” looks that imply conformity and genetic privilege. Foundation is eschewed in favor of “lightweight skin tints” that “let your skin show”. Makeup meant to look like a lack of makeup is makeup that’s meant to either be worn at all times, or not required at all, because the face itself has achieved the desired result.
The most popular celebrity makeup artists young people are trying to emulate are those who have mastered the same narrow aesthetic across all types of faces, like the talented Nina Park. Even attendees of glamorous events like red carpets or photo shoots display the preference. The beauty ideal of “perfected” faces that don’t use many cosmetics doesn’t limit beauty spending; it raises it by raising the social expectations for perfect faces. This is something Korean and Japanese women know well, which is why their cities have such a high density of cosmetic clinics and why their skincare products perform so much better than Western brands. They’re made for longer wear and post-procedure skin.
Today’s “beauty” based fascism isn’t limited to women, men are ascribing to regimens and procedures for aesthetic purposes. Beauty is famously subjective, subject to the anxieties and values of any given point in time. Lately gymbros aren’t just talking about creatine, they’re talking about jaw symmetry. Beauty influencers aren’t just talking about switching to a thicker moisturizer in the winter, they’re urging avoiding cold drinks to better accord with traditional Chinese medicine wisdom on womb health. Like the acolytes of Lebensreform before them, today’s Lebensreformers are obsessed with ideals of sexual dimorphism.
The young people participating in #looksmaxxing are focusing on traits that produce hypermasculine and hyperfeminine features, exchanging protocols and update photos across social media. “Looksmaxxing” is often pursued without expensive clinical interventions, but aspires to surgical results. Apps targeting teens push content that looks user generated to funnel sign ups to their paid portals. They’re tinged with beauty nationalism, offering comparisons on different nationalities’s features and encouraging people to evaluate themselves by the same metrics. Like many of the ideas leaking out of digital spaces to transform offline interactions and behavior, looksmaxxing has fascist origins.
Incel forums fixate on phenotype and physical appeal. 19th century phrenologists, exemplerary in the shallowness of their intellect, would be in awe at the graphs and lines today’s race scientists are drawing on AI generated images. The men of these spaces convince each other that the rest of the world is as judgemental and superficial as they are, and in their rankings often treat physical beauty as a matter of national pride or shame. They popularized the work of British orthodontist Dr. John Mew who argued that maxillofacial development has been thwarted by modern diets and can be remedied by a focus on facial muscle training.
Mew and his son Mike rejected braces as costly and ineffective and insisted traditional orthodontia prevented developing faces from growing into a more appealing ideal. Mike Mew began sharing the ideas online and the pair were soon invited to men’s rights conferences, which nurture an interest in science-washing phenotypic analysis. As Mike Mew faced hearings by the General Dental Council over the risk of harm his practice caused children between 2013 to 2019, his techniques amassed over 2 billion views on tiktok. Both Mews have been discredited by experts in their field, John is now dead and his son suspended by the GDC. But their ideas bedrock an emerging genre of “jaw development orthodontics” when an internet savvy dentist is posting, or “mewing” when a looksmaxxer is. A popular mewing influencer’s website argues that by exerting pressure on the facial bones you can change your face shape, towards sharper, more forward projecting features. The methods include pulling hard on your palate in order to expand it. Some are even using hammers against their cheekbones to encourage regrowth. The dangers of doing this, like cracking an eye socket, are not mentioned. Most of the before and afters are from individuals in their teen years who are already in the process of their features changing.
Myofacial fixation is a prominent content category for parent directed accounts too, who post before and afters of (white) children and gush about how they “naturally” corrected their bite by teaching them not to mouth breath. This would be unremarkable if it weren’t for the tenor of their diagnoses and recommendations. Like mewing accounts, these parent-focused accounts also speak of nasal cavities and midface projection in the context of Western decline of good looks, attributed to soft foods that stunt muscle development. And like beauty content, they treat the interventions as preventative healthcare—claiming it can forestall sinus issues, improve sleep, enhance school performance, cure back pain, prevent scoliosis, and most importantly, “correct” looks. You can make anything, even edited photos, look like “evidence” as long as you display it side by side.
The aesthetic advantages are recommended the way saving for college once was (another arena tinged with the race based status anxiety for white people who believe they’re being outperfomed), and the results are framed as an achievement demonstrating superior knowledge and ability. Some accounts offer “analysis” of myofacial structure in models and celebrities, many others urge controlling it in children. One influencer orthodontist describes it as “the first step towards effective interventions: nasal breathing training, myofunctional therapy, orthodontic expansion early in life, and lifestyle changes that support healthy craniofacial growth.” His account is not rare, but it is new and rapidly growing. The hashtags surfacing his content to the public are: NasalBReathing, AirwayDentistry, FacialGrowth, ModernSkullProblems, CraniofacialDevelopment, AncestralHealth, HumanPerformance. It’s easy to see how the German Nazis emerged from the life reformers who viewed health and appearance as evidence of success and prowess.
“Mewing” exemplifies the lifecycle of many dodgy ideas about health which have gone mainstream seemingly overnight, like linking autism to (first vaccines and now) Tylenol or the entire Make America Healthy Again platform of RFK. They gain traction because they affirm skepticism of expensive establishment institutions, connect observable fact to latent biases, offer a course of action narrativized as self rescue, and possess the allure of insider knowledge; “what your doctor won’t tell you about”. In other words, hacks.
The prevailing rhetorical frame to beauty and health content, indeed to much content online today, is the “hack”. It’s the preferred unit of information inevitable to an era of increasing desperation. If you cannot afford to get sick, get married to the wrong partner, or even gently lose status among peers, the illusion that there is some gatekept knowledge (or dupe, or correct trend to quickly follow, or manipulation tactic to deploy to potential romantic partner) that will save you is another addictive and maladjusted coping mechanism. We’ve seen the graphs, the arrows have been pointing down since Reagan and Thatcher. Individualist cultures are less able to see themselves in negative forecasts because as long as there are some wealthy, people believe they could be among them. The exceptional Americans of “American exceptionalism” are not just the “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” John Steinbeck identified, awaiting their lucky fate. They’re perpetually trying to outrun the bad fate. Post corporate social media, where the influencer economy offers the illusion of a lottery ticket through a life of audience generated supplemental income, or at least respect and admiration from peers, physical beauty becomes synonymous with career goals and routes towards achieving it are algorithmically incentivized.
Much of the content in the collapsed genre of health/beauty/wellness is pushed by people offering digital guides and personal coaching sessions. Centering a person as an agent of change is extraordinarily powerful, and the rise of uncredentialed “coaches” reveals the extent to which this is otherwise so absent in people’s lives that the main element people are responding to is the simplicity of being told what to do. Unfortunately for our body politic, for millions this has been limited to aesthetic interventions in their bodies.
Many now save up not to see the wonders of the world, but for beauty tourism. There’s Turkey for hair restoration, Mexico for veneers or a deep plane face lift, and Korea for skin rejuvenating lasers and injectable beauty treatments, all at a fraction of Western prices. If travel is out of budget, don’t worry, there’s a Library of Alexandria’s worth of videos demonstrating how to massage, train and tone your facial muscles into a more aesthetically desirable arrangement. While “mewing” trains your facial posture, jaw exercise tools promise to develop square jaws for men, while for women targeted exercises aim to increase the waist to hip ratio. Disordered eating towards weight loss is urged on both. At the extreme ends, leg lengthening surgery increases height for men and leg shortening surgeries offer women a more petite stature. Several influencers sell courses on elaborate fascia manipulation techniques for more “lifted” features. One has over two million instagram followers, another posts new before and afters weekly of clients who have purchased his mewing course. I don’t think it’s a good idea to promote them by naming or linking to them. The traits being encouraged are all variations on larger, more prominent, features for men, and smaller, softer, more neotenous features for women. For many men, and young boys, these physical goals are valid enough to overturn conventional wisdom around drug use and self administered hormone therapy. Boys barely out of their teens are recommending each other “looksmaxxing protocols” that encourage taking testosterone and microdosing meth. Anti trans panic means everyone’s gender is subject to scrutiny, giving even cis people a desperation to pass as their preferred identity. Both the anti trans panic and looksmaxxing pretends there is normativity and consistency in appearance within genders, or at least that there “should” be.
Explanations being pushed across social media treat “hormones” as esoterically as a tarot reading, conjuring narratives that align the gap between how people feel and how they wish to be feeling instead. While men’s beauty goals are framed in terms of high or low testosterone, women are being told that their cycling hormones make them incompatible with jobs outside the home. This rejects thousands of years of human history dependent on female labor with the evidence of sitcoms and tv ads from the 1950s featuring actresses that one can imagine didn’t experience bloating. (That imagery was also reactionary programming. In response to post war female participation in the workforce, it pushed a disciplinary ideal onto women who had begun experiencing the freedom only financial independence can provide.) Access to paid labor, indeed to a public life at all and a sovereign private life, is still a hardwon recent development that has yet to reach all women of the world.
That hasn’t stopped women from embracing the bias and ignorance of the view that their exhaustion is uniquely female, rather than navigate the bias and ignorance of a healthcare provider that has little to offer them in remedy. Blaming your feminine nature offers the illusion of insight on the problem, which can almost feel like a grip. It’s a less fraught affirmation of the fact that there are disproportionately female problems, namely sexual violence. But MeToo failed and the backlash to it is succeeding. Extreme narratives of sexual dimorphism offer a way to voice the fact that being a woman constitutes unique challenges – without the intellectual rigor of a political solidarity or the effort and potential backlash of real complaint against a prevailing order. It is easier to apply silicon tape every night to guard against wrinkles than admit the full scope of threat targeting women.
The high volume stream of contradictory messages makes you pay less attention to your body, not more. Similar to politically radicalizing content these healthwashed feeds pull you out of your direct environment into the one of the blaring feed; alarmist, permanently present. You might feel fine. But several reels later you’re worried you’ve been upsetting the balance of your hormones by the order you eat your breakfast in, or that your chin doesn’t project enough, and now that you’ve seen a video on barbie botox do your traps look extra large to you? Dysphoria is a full time job and expensive skincare and beauty treatments are framed as “investments.” We already know that our appearances can dictate how we’re treated, but there’s no lipstick or contouring method that guarantees fair and equal treatment for anyone. Those are societal values, demanded politically and achieved in collaboration and mutual commitment. Raising the burden of beauty labor for everyone doesn’t earn those who successfully looksmaxx a safe place in the future, it sanctions resentment towards those who aren’t keeping up.
Traits like textured skin, or a fat body, even a “weak chin”, are all being reproblematised not solely so people can address them as health concerns, but so that socially we are allowed to view lapses in physical appearance as negligence, lack of intelligence, and lack of finances – in other words, as constituting an undesirable person. Weren’t we warned about societies that fostered hostility towards people deemed undesirable? A waning tolerance for personal divergence from a beauty ideal secures in society a waning tolerance for human diversity more broadly. This is not a sign of a healthy society; it is a sign of a profoundly anxious one. All of us are better served developing a tolerance for variation, in others and ourselves. Your skin may not look the same year to year or even day to day, but it’s still holding you together. It hasn’t failed you by displaying change. But you are being failed, can you still not tell by who?
As record executive profits drain the compensation and purchasing power of workers, competing factions each urge their own single social issue safety raft to ferry people across the chaos of the contemporary moment. Recent changes to the status quo are framed as crises. The decline of teen pregnancy and growth of lifestyle options for adult women beyond motherhood is now the “fertility crisis”. Straight men’s desire for marriage and children as a social subsidy imposed through adverse conditions for women, as opposed to romantic partnership with willing equals, is framed as “the male loneliness epidemic”. The inability of neoliberalism to sustain improvements in Western quality of life is blamed on immigration; the decline in the social reproduction of white supremacist patriarchal values generationally within white families, is also being blamed on (queer baristas, marxist college professors and) immigration. The latter, at least, is being solved in America with a novel jobs programme that simultaneously deals with the American surplus of men whose education and skill level cannot compete with better-educated and more highly skilled women and immigrants: ICE has already institutionalised an ad hoc and amateur version of the previously more bureaucratic forced separation of nonwhite (or white but poor) families by Child Protective Services and the foster system. Being an ICE agent offers a competitive salary without requiring a college degree. Rather than participating in a refusal of such fascist impositions on the social order, Westerners are focused on their face and body.
The zeal of personal wellness is just productive enough to occupy oneself with a manageable urgency and just satisfying enough to anesthetise oneself against looming global polycrisis. We are currently living through a mass extinction event, with 40-60% of the world’s species at risk of extinction at current rates of climate change. The attitude towards climate refugees will likely be no different from the current attitudes towards refugees, a doubling down on border violence that sanctions violence inside the borders too. Biohacking the body and obsessing over their youth is Westerners trying to access a vision of the future for themselves, a vision their nations no longer provide. For these consumers, time-stopping beauty protocols preserve them quite literally, retaining their place as the world moves on. Even affording the sense that they have time to keep scrolling and shopping.
All of this is compounded by genuine medical concerns. Metabolic diseases abound. Colon cancer is becoming the leading cause of death for young people who were, in previous eras, considered ineligible even for screenings. The gut health imbalances people are collectively diagnosing and ameliorating through social web content may be attributed to trauma (if your algorithm leans left) or not enough red meat and butter (if your algorithm leans right), but they’re not hallucinogenic. For generations, mainstream Americans believed their system wasn’t worth examining because the apparent abundance around them implied a calculus in their favour. Today, they’re beginning to realise that the illusion of choice via grocery lanes replete with colourful packages was set dressing atop a reality that a handful of companies own every brand, and all of them have agreed to douse the land with the perticide glyphosate.
To create a vacuum that fascism will fill, all you must do is cause overwhelm and confusion – which the scale of our problems and volume of information about them has easily accomplished – and then offer a solution that requires hypervigilance and inflexibility, like a routine based model of health and beauty, forcing people to grow unadaptable and therefore easily threatened, and unavailable to political engagement. You can convince people to do anything, even look away, when you convince them that any action otherwise will be a threat to their meticulously maintained zone of comfort.
The right wing benefited from a more consumerist society, and it benefits even more so when consumerism becomes too complex and high stakes to navigate without becoming an amateur researcher. Sourcing the nontoxic version of common household items, even food, requires exhausting attention to ingredients and supply chains. The displacement of public health into a private responsibility makes earning money more urgent, even for those who can afford food and shelter, further inhibiting political action that draws attention, takes risks, or simply requires availability. But no microcurrent device can shield you from the next mass shooting. No protein shake can mitigate what happens when people around you refuse vaccinations and masking. You cannot buy your way out of cancer. And there are no gated communities with gates that can keep out climate collapse. Everyone knows this, hence the unease, which is why the array of market solutions and purchases as prayerful bets won’t pause anytime soon.
There is no political incentive for our governing elite to insist on regulatory mechanisms that would make food and product safety, efficacy and value widely available to all as a matter of standard. Instead, Americans who are growing chronically ill are falling down radicalising rabbit holes that social web platforms are incentivised to organise by extremes of affect and content. Women have been vulnerable to it for ages, as their health concerns are not adequately addressed by the medical establishment, forcing them into communities with affirming content but dubious research and politics.
What people demand of medical care reflects what they value. Who the medical field treats defines who is valued. In 2022 research revealed that those born “in the poorest areas of England will have almost 20 fewer years of good health compared with those in the wealthiest, according to figures that also reveal overall life expectancy in the most deprived areas has dropped significantly.” Another study found that women in the poorest areas of England were “dying earlier than the average female in almost every comparable country.” In the US there is a twelve year lifespan gap between the richest and poorest (before the Civil Rights movement it was about four years). The US is the only country where immigrating with your family lowers the lifespan of your children, because of the high rate of school shootings. The US is also the only country with a rising maternal death rate, which everywhere else fell 44% from 1990 to 2015 and increased here by 16.7%. These are not the longevity gaps capturing the national imagination. The field of medicine, its specializations, and its methods are a constant treatise on the priorities of any given time period. As the demand to adequately treat all patients, regardless of race or gender, grew pronounced, the response has been to treat the rich above all. Every aging celebrity’s latest face, every new “longevity” clinic, every shift in the Overton window of normalized aesthetic medicine declares the current health mandate in the West.
At a time when the world desperately needs to grow more disciplined, more attentive to consumption habits and exacting in their focus on the future, we are faced with resounding proof that we do have a critical mass capable of meticulous and radical lifestyle intervention. However, it is not towards a collective resilience against climate change or political violence, just a more singular end – an extension of life, not all life, just their own, and for no other end than itself. More days in front of red light panels, more hours logged to morning and nighttime routines, increasingly sequestered as the world burns, shocked when the heat reaches our doors. These lifestyles make no compromise. The only “destructive” behaviours being overhauled are the ones that begin and end with replacing sodas with probiotic fizzy drinks, chips with protein snacks, and polyester with organic cotton leggings, regardless of whether the Earth will be able to continue growing cotton much longer. Athleisure may now finally be over as a fashion trend, but those piles of polyester leggings will outlast us all. Livestock production is responsible for almost 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The last time Americans were as fixated on their protein intake as they are now was during the Bush era, the height of the protein and fat based Atkins diet.
You cannot have any kind of diet, clean or otherwise, on a planet that can no longer support agriculture. People know this, but they’ve decided they would rather live at their current rate of consumption for however long they can. It’s a stunning rejection of the basic reality of global interdependence. You cannot continue Amazon-ing your personal wellness supplies if the actual, original Amazon, which has made so much pharmaceutical development possible, is allowed to be destroyed. This is wellness as lifestyle, fully integrated into the foundational death cult logic of Western states, where the rest of the world can only ever be a resource or an inconvenience to be eliminated.
The rest of the world, for its part, has followed suit. You don’t need whiteness for myopic selfishness, just any logic of dominion. Hindu Indians want to purge Muslim Indians. Pakistanis want to purge the Afghan and Baloch. South Korean men want to purge South Korean women. El Salvador wants to be a penal colony. Everyone wants to be Dubai. And Dubai is a theme park gated community made possible by indentured slavery. We can definitively claim that the notion of a “Muslim world” was just an Orientalist myth, as Saudi Arabia supplies Israel with weapons used to exterminate Palestinians. Rather than resist the logic of conquest and domination, people are betting they’ll be among those dominating.
It is the core of fascism that what force accomplishes is what the force-bearer is entitled to. This logic not only justifies the exploitation of the vulnerable, and the vulnerabilisation of those who should be sovereign; it also requires the maintenance of a population that believes itself invulnerable. As the status quo embeds itself further and further into our lifestyles, the neurotic compulsion towards wellness grows. When health and wellness are a private pursuit and personal responsibility, it is sufficiently delineated from being considered a collective and mutually dependent objective, which is strictly discouraged in societies dependent on hierarchies. A world that refuses to meet the needs of all its people likewise needs hierarchies to continue functioning undisturbed.
The current famines in Gaza and Sudan are, like the “late Victorian holocausts”, entirely preventable. No one is preventing them. The axis of global power is shifting East, and Western powers are spending the final years of their hegemony to punish condemnation of the current genocide of Palestinians. Pakistan and China are already toadying up to Israel to accept the mandate a weakening US may not guarantee much longer. Challenges to fascism are seen as a greater threat than fascism itself, because challenges emerge from beyond its authority and prompt a corrective impulse that registers as decorum even to liberals. This is why protestors are being arrested instead of war criminals.
As climate devastation makes more of the Earth unliveable, Fortress Europe and Fourth Reich America are formalizing their anti immigration policies. Both are pouring resources into detention capacity, as they did across the War On Terror and during imperialism; building holding centers and expanding the ranks of those eager and willing to find people to fill them, financially incentivizing them to do so. Individuals are being picked off the street or from their homes, detained or deported, regardless of immigration status. While others are being relegated to statelessness through policy updates designed not to be navigable.
Across the Western world, people unable to seize the opportunities for robust political change–provided by the uprisings against police violence and genocide–allow the horizon of possibility to once again recede more deeply into fascism. If the War On Terror refurbished the tolerance for genocidal foreign policy, and Covid refurbished the tolerance for eugenicist domestic policy, then all that’s left, all who is left, is a growing category of people who would pull the trigger on another and an ever dwindling, and thus refreshed, category of people to take aim at. Do know which you are? Which one you could pass as? For how much longer?
The longevity movements outlining the history of the West share eerily similar expressions. They are consumer-driven and biomedical, rooted in the commercial promise of extending youth. At the core is an obsession with sexual viability, making health synonymous with a look and libido linked to youth. This, in turn, relies on significant investment in the gender binary, and distinct social roles for men and women. Each movement has been propelled by influencer medicine – the promotion of health products, lifestyle marketing, anti-ageing consumable goods and medical procedures. Crucially, these movements emerged in the context of growing wealth gaps in societies that justified racialised violence to preserve the security of the status quo and gave rise to a public that turned away as some starved to death, while others were hauled to concentration camps. The previous panic led to a holocaust within Europe’s borders. This one has yet to show signs of anything beyond greater technological capacity for the same, this time in the modern US.
Once again, individual bodies are being territorialized for the national body: beauty standards are medicalised, physically embodying the resilience the nation wants to believe it still possesses. The sins of empire and war are displaced through the pursuit of anti-aging, which becomes a terrain to dominate into submission. It’s a productive distraction. It ensures the real crisis arrives unimpeded.
