Flat holism reflects a crucial failure to scale sense-making beyond individual perception, leading to an epistemic drift where systemic issues—such as inequality, climate collapse and economic precarity—are reinterpreted through mystical or esoteric frameworks. Rather than engaging with history, power structures and material conditions, it collapses societal complexity into personal healing, vibrational energy and spiritual evolution. This breakdown in scaling produces an all-encompassing perspective that insists “everything is connected” while erasing structural analysis, critical perspectives and the possibility of systemic change.
- Talk politics? They pivot to spirituality, healing and energy fields beyond material reality.
- Push for societal complexity? They reduce it to individual trauma and personal healing.
- Demand systemic change? They dissolve it into vibrations, levels of consciousness and astral destiny.
What begins as a discussion about power, policy or historical conditions quickly drifts into an abstract metaphysical detour. The conversation shifts from material reality to an internal quest for balance, where oppression is framed as a test of personal evolution rather than a systemic force to be confronted. Within this ideological framing of human existence political discussions are frequently derailed into conversations about energy fields and personal transformation, sidestepping material conditions entirely.
When societal complexity is introduced, it is often reduced to individual terms, centered on personal growth and healing. This collapse in scale fractures the connection between individual experiences and the broader systems that shape them. Calls for systemic change dissolve into vague notions of raising collective consciousness, detaching struggles from their historical and structural foundations.
This holism is flat—everything is connected, yet nothing has structure. There is no society between the individual and the cosmos. Only guides and fellow gifted pilgrims. Attempts to scale understanding from the personal to the systemic, from individual experience to collective reality are met with resistance, as discussions are pulled back into the preferred framework of individual belief and cosmic determinism. Instead of engaging with real-world forces shaping oppression and inequality, they interpret these struggles through an esoteric lens that removes the need for political analysis or action.
Yet socially, those caught in flat holism also often struggle with friction in their environments. They fail to read the room, misjudge social dynamics and struggle to engage with perspectives outside their worldview. When challenged, they retreat—not just as a form of protection, but as an act of condemnation. Their discourse does not adapt or evolve; it doubles down, dismissing critique as low vibrational energy, negativity, or personal blockage. What might otherwise be an opportunity for reflection becomes a self-reinforcing cycle of isolation and ideological entrenchment.
When confronted with social science concepts and critical perspectives, they default to a fixed and flawed human paradigm—the belief that human behavior is unchangeable, predetermined and universally driven by competition and hierarchy. In their view, self-interest and social inequality are not historically shaped but instead innate and eternal. This essentialist view of human nature renders systemic transformation both impossible and unnecessary—futile on one hand and on the other, dependent on an individual’s spiritual awakening to higher consciousness. By framing human nature as static and transformation as exclusively spiritual, they strip away the possibility of structural change, reducing the complexities of power, economy and history to personal spiritual evolution.
Flat holism does not exist in isolation—it is part of a broader epistemic drift that weakens systemic critique by repackaging political, economic and historical realities as personal or spiritual narratives. It overlaps with conspirituality, where wellness culture and alternative spirituality intersect with conspiracy thinking, often leading to a rejection of materialist analysis in favor of mystical fatalism.
The rise of flat holism is not just ideological; it is also highly profitable. Social media platforms, influencers and self-help industries thrive on its diffusion, turning spiritual abstraction into marketable content. From coaching programs and energy healing certifications to algorithm-optimized content loops that push mysticism as a personal solution to systemic crises, flat holism fuels a lucrative economy of spiritual consumerism. These frameworks dovetail seamlessly with neoliberal individualism, reinforcing the idea that personal alignment—not collective struggle—determines success.
This commodification ensures that systemic critique is not only displaced but actively discouraged, as critical perspectives threaten the very marketplace that benefits from endless cycles of self-improvement and esoteric guidance. Understanding flat holism as part of these larger ideological shifts helps reveal its role in neutralizing political critique and reinforcing existing power structures under the guise of universal connection.
Research: navigating the dangers of flat holism
In research, especially within social innovation and design inquiry, there is a necessary space for understanding trauma, emotional responses and belief systems. These factors shape human experience and influence how people navigate the world. However, they must not replace structural and systemic analysis when addressing complex societal issues. The challenge is not whether healing and self-perception matter, but rather how they are framed and whether they obscure the material realities of power, policy and history.
Research on climate resilience can, and should, explore the psychological and emotional dimensions of crisis, such as eco-anxiety, not as isolated personal states but as socially embedded responses to structural failures. Investigating how individuals experience and articulate distress provides critical insight into the lived realities of systemic collapse. However, when such emotional responses are treated as explanatory endpoints rather than situated within broader socio-political and economic contexts, the research risks flattening complexity. If climate collapse is framed primarily as a planetary vibrational shift or a necessary cosmic cleansing, it ceases to be a subject of policy analysis, corporate accountability and environmental justice, instead slipping into mystical fatalism.
Similarly, studies on economic precarity must recognize financial insecurity as both an individual experience and a structural condition shaped by labor policies, financial systems and economic governance. Examining how people narrate their hardship—including through frameworks of scarcity mindset or energy flow—can be valuable, but these interpretations should not displace material analysis. If poverty is reduced to a function of personal vibrational frequency rather than the outcome of financialization, wage suppression and social policy failures, then the research has succumbed to epistemic drift.
The issue is not whether emotions, beliefs and subjective interpretations are relevant—these are essential to understanding how people navigate crisis—but how they are framed within research. A critical, multi-scalar approach ensures that individual meaning-making is contextualized within broader historical and systemic structures. Holism, in this sense, must operate horizontally (across disciplines, linking subjective experience with institutional and economic realities) and vertically (scaling from personal narratives to systemic patterns without collapsing one into the other). The risk lies in allowing self-perception or spiritual narratives to overshadow structural analysis, where systemic issues are reframed as matters of consciousness rather than power, history and policy. A research framework that drifts in this direction does not just misrepresent reality—it fragments it, rendering it politically inert.
Trauma and healing matter, but they must be properly situated. Emotional responses to crisis are real, but they should be analyzed as part of broader socio-political dynamics, not detached from them. Design researchers—and often our stakeholders—are not psychological professionals. While we can collect and tell stories or surface patterns, we must be cautious about our involvement and avoid slipping into therapeutic roles we are not equipped to handle. The danger is not only misrepresenting personal experiences but also unintentionally making things worse through wild analysis or armchair diagnosis.
Flat holism and domination: a convenient obfuscation
Flat holism leaves people deeply unequipped to engage with power, domination and structural violence. It struggles to recognize critical contradictions—where oppression is not simply an imbalance of energies but a historically constructed and materially enforced system. Instead of confronting political, economic and social hierarchies, flat holism dissolves domination into mysticism, reframing systemic forces as individualized, essentialized spiritual conditions.
Rather than understanding capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy and racial hierarchies as interlocking structures, flat holism reduces them to matters of consciousness, vibration, personal karmic evolution, or the law of attraction. Exploitation shifts from being a systemic force to a personal trial, oppression becomes a lesson the oppressed “chose” before birth and injustice transforms into a reflection of spiritual misalignment rather than power relations. The law of attraction reframes systemic inequality as a matter of individual frequency and mindset, suggesting that those who suffer do so because they failed to manifest abundance. History disappears, struggle becomes self-work and structural change is replaced with inner transcendence.
New Age spirituality, self-help frameworks and holistic ideologies often align with conservative and religious worldviews, repackaging spiritual determinism through neoliberal self-optimization. Power and violence become mystified—wars turn into energetic shifts, poverty reflects a scarcity mindset and patriarchy manifests as a misalignment of masculine and feminine principles. This framing absolves institutions, histories and material structures of responsibility, replacing systemic critique with personal responsibility.
A failure to recognize systemic structures and social complexity allows New Age ideology to seamlessly align with the logic of domination. Within this worldview, most negative human experiences are explained either as unresolved trauma—whether from the present life, past lives, or ancestral lineage—or as an energetic struggle between high and low vibrational consciousness, good and evil. Class struggle, exploitation and poverty are reframed as personal frequency issues, karmic debts, or spiritual lessons rather than the result of entrenched power relations. Social crises become opportunities for inner growth rather than material conditions to be confronted, while economic justice is reduced to an individual’s ability to align with abundance.
Racial capitalism is reframed as a natural process of evolution, where colonized societies are seen as needing to “catch up” rather than resisting domination. War and militarism are cast as necessary disruptions for planetary progress rather than instruments of state violence. Structural oppression dissolves into narratives of growth, struggle turns into self-improvement, and collective resistance is replaced by a focus on individual adaptation.
If research and design practice are to contribute to meaningful change, they must cut through this mystification, reclaim structural analysis and resist the pull toward cosmic abstraction. The absence of historical, materialist and systemic tools risks turning critical work into yet another product in the marketplace of transformation, endlessly circulating within the very structures it fails to confront.
Note
Flat holism presents a structured, self-reinforcing epistemic framework where external critique is systematically neutralized rather than engaged with. Anthropologically, this reflects a form of epistemic closure, in which belief systems maintain coherence by absorbing dissent into their interpretive logic. Critique is not seen as a challenge to be debated but as a symptom of lower spiritual development, unresolved trauma, or energetic misalignment. This response pattern, observed with thick methodological saturation, is not incidental but structurally embedded, shaping how participants make sense of political and systemic realities.
Within this framework, the rejection of critique is neither arbitrary nor merely defensive; it operates as a boundary-maintenance mechanism that ensures ideological continuity and preserves group cohesion. This dynamic follows a well-documented anthropological pattern in which self-sealing epistemologies prevent engagement with alternative perspectives by repositioning dissent as proof of the outsider’s misalignment rather than as a perspective to consider. Attempts to introduce historical or systemic analysis are frequently reinterpreted as a form of spiritual immaturity—an attachment to left-hemisphere rationality, consumerism or intellectual arrogance.
The epistemic insulation observed here mirrors broader mechanisms found in spiritual movements, alternative healing communities and conspiracy cultures, where intuitive or esoteric knowledge is positioned as superior to empirical or historical analysis. The rejection of intellectualism and scientific reasoning is not necessarily hostile but often framed as a compassionate diagnosis—an attempt to help the critic recognize their own spiritual blockages.
From an ethnographic standpoint, thick methodological saturation confirms that this is not an incidental feature of the group’s discourse but a structural mechanism of belief maintenance. It explains why encounters with systemic critique often trigger epistemic defense mechanisms rather than engagement. These dynamics are not unique to this particular group but are observable in other settings where belief systems prioritize spiritual intuition over historical or materialist explanations.
However, what is specific here is the mystical justification for anti-systemic thinking, where spirituality does not merely coexist with depoliticization but actively produces it. Acknowledging these patterns is not a dismissal of individual sincerity but a necessary step in understanding how epistemic drift occurs, how it is maintained, and how it shapes the way social and political realities are processed within this worldview.