Take Weber’s idea to its conclusion and Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos could be conceived of as the spiritual heirs to Martin Luther. Which raises the question: if Luther begat capitalism, what kind of faith does capitalism itself beget?

It might look something like Human Design: an arcane New Age belief system invented by a Canadian music promoter named Alan Robert Krakower after an eight-day visitation from a “Voice” in Ibiza in 1987. Krakower then created a gospel of self-knowledge — a deliberately arcane blend of life coaching and woo-infused mysticism — that spread far beyond him. Though Krakower renamed himself Ra Uru Hu in 2011, his gospel is currently being preached not only on social media, where some of its preachers, such as the popular Amanda Horvath, have tens or hundreds of thousands of followers, but on TV. In July, a Human Design coach, appearing in the show Love is Blind, explained that his mantra in life, as per his training, was to “trust your spleen”. Most interestingly, Human Design has penetrated business retreats, leadership conferences, and that most corporate of temples: LinkedIn.

One apostle, Joshua B. Lee, a forty-something Texan online marketer who styles himself the “Dopamine Dealer of LinkedIn”, recently posted about how Human Design led him to achieve millions of “organic views” on the platform. Not for him the grind of search-engine analytics, audience study or content scheduling. Human Design allowed him instead to tap into a higher power: his “true self”.

Lee’s post, written in August, has attracted glowing responses from many CEOs and founders. “Sometimes the real growth strategy is trusting yourself over the trends” writes one. “When you’re misaligned, every opportunity feels like a struggle to fit in,” adds another.

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Thanks to apostles such as Lee, Human Design is acquiring growing influence on the business networking platform. Once consigned to the fringes of New Age spirituality, it has marched into the language of C-suite executives and start-up hustlers, fusing with more conventional life and career coaching. Though it might be tempting to write it off with an eye roll — Astrology in a suit! — its popularity among business leaders suggests something more telling: that the cult of optimization is now open to almost any framework, no matter how baroque.

Synthesizing several ancient and modern elements into a way of analyzing the self, Human Design combines elements of mysticism, life coaching and the sort of quasi-culty, pseudo-scientific theorizing that any one of us might come up with after eight days in Ibiza with the help of some hallucinogens. “I often ponder the great neutrino ocean because the neutrino ocean is the consciousness field,” writes Ra in one of his foundational texts. It borrows freely from astrology, the I Ching, the Kabbalah and the Hindu chakra system, then wraps it in the language of quantum physics and genetics.

But at its heart is the BodyGraph, a chart said to be as individual as a fingerprint, generated from the date, time and place of your birth. In this respect it is akin to astrology. Unlike astrology, however, Human Design is based not only on your birth moment — even a few minutes’ difference can alter the chart — but also on the precise timing of another moment, roughly 88 days earlier, which is said to capture your unconscious “design”. These two data points are then mapped onto a hybrid cosmology that fuses astrology with the I Ching, a few other belief systems and a dash of quantum physics.

One of the main reasons it has caught on is that the charts are easy to generate. Simply plug your birth details into any Human Design website and you’ll receive a diagram of a body that features nine “centers,” 64 “gates” and 36 “channels,” colored in or left blank depending on which planetary influences were active when you arrived on earth.

I tried it myself and was duly told which “Type” I am: a “Manifesting generator”, since you ask. According to the horoscopic patois of Human Design, that means I’m “efficient, multi-passionate, and thrive on a variety of projects”. The chart then offered me a baffling tangle of triangles, squares and numbers, inscrutable without an interpreter.

The promise of hidden knowledge was there, but locked away in the chart. The chart itself was part wiring diagram, part horoscope, requiring a guide to decode. As in the Catholic church that Martin Luther rebelled against, the reliance on experts is, of course, part of the business model.

In many ways, Human Design is simply the latest iteration of a much longer Western obsession: classifying the self. In the post-God, post-feminism, post-race era of the 1990s, when globalization — with all the religious and cultural flattening it implied — seemed inevitable, a generation of Western teens and pre-teens were being primed to receive the message that there is no higher calling than the project of the self. Self-love, self-care, self-improvement. To understand and optimize the self was the ultimate goal.

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I grew up in that era. Even as a pre-teen, I found myself filling out sex quizzes in Mizz magazine: answer some multiple-choice questions and you find out which of four or so categories you fall into. This habit developed into affinity for astrology, which offered both entertainment and a sense of identity in the absence of formal belief systems. Astrology, in keeping with the times, has expanded from newspaper horoscopes to broader psychological profiling: you are an Aquarius, and this is why you’re so free; she’s a Gemini, no wonder she’s messed up, and so on. We all love reading about ourselves.

Human Design, however, is rather more dogmatic in its conclusions. It claims to supersede anything as silly and fallible as personal choice. One Master Coach, with a book and a podcast to prove it, tells me that personality profiling tools like the Myers Briggs test are unreliable because they are based on questionnaires; and questionnaires are unreliable because, when we fill them out, we carry our own preconceptions and biases. “With Human Design, it’s our energetic profile… an energetic blueprint that we’re born with. Our Human Design will influence our personality, it’ll influence our behavior, it’s ground zero.”

In other words, a personality test can only ever be provisional: it might wobble depending on our mood or level of honesty. But Human Design, in this view, represents the fundamental truth: so fundamental that it is inscribed even at the subatomic level of physics. According to Human Design lore, neutrinos — near-massless particles that are produced by stars and pass through humans and other matter constantly — carry imprinted information that conditions us at birth. To believers, neutrinos are the medium through which the cosmos stamps its data into the chart. To skeptics, the neutrino theory is an audacious borrowing of scientific language; a way of making astrology charts sound like they’re written by CERN scientists.

As I found, interpreting the BodyGraph is formidably complex. At the entry level you can buy ebooks or online courses, the kind that promise to help you decode your own chart, for a few hundred pounds. But to become an accredited reader or analyst is far more expensive. Certification runs into the thousands, with full professional training typically costing $3,000–$5,000, and advanced mentoring packages stretching well into five figures. It is a kind of multi-level marketing scheme where every new believer is a potential customer and every customer is encouraged to become a seller. To its critics, it looks an awful lot like a pyramid scheme.

In practice, most people outsource their self-analysis to a coach who translates the circuitry into digestible personality shorthand. Each person is placed into one of five overarching Types — Manifestor, Generator, Manifesting Generator (that’s me), Projector or Reflector — but how that plays out is colored by a dense layering of “profiles,” “authorities,” “centers,” “gates” and “channels.” You might discover that your “undefined centers” make you more likely to be affected by the moods of others, or that your “strategy” is to wait for the right invitation before acting.

Behind the jargon lies the simple creed that your individuality, and its allocated blueprint, supersede any other authority. On Reddit, I found accounts of people freezing out well-meaning parents because of incompatible Human Designs, or dumping their friends in response to Human Design encouragement to “guard” their energies. Another Reddit user reported having followed the dictum by eating whatever they wanted — then gained more than a stone. When I reached out to the Reddit user in the hope of asking them some questions, they explained that they would “follow up with you in a few days as it is my sacral [basically ‘the gut’] that makes my decisions.” I didn’t hear from them again.

The Master Coach I spoke to told me they were preparing to run a retreat in Ohio for 16 American startup founders, focusing on how they can scale their businesses based on their Human Designs. “I think the reason why it’s taking off so quickly now,” they say, “is because people are finally getting their answers. [Human Design] is finally giving them permission to be themselves.”
Modern CEOs and founders are faced with a thicket of impossible variables. There’s market volatility; there’s an unpredictable geopolitical landscape; and algorithms that can change overnight with no warning. No one can quite explain why TikTok suddenly throttled their views, or why Meta’s ad targeting stopped working for them. In this context, Human Design promises a roadmap to smarter, more “authentic” decisions — decisions that are intrinsically right because you made them.

At its core, Human Design is a gospel of individualism. Your chart is yours alone; your “authority”, to use the jargon, overrides every external signal. The system does not ask for compromise or collective responsibility; it insists that flourishing comes from understanding yourself. In that sense it is less a shared cosmology than a cult of the self:  a message that naturally resonates with some of the capitalists of LinkedIn, where instinct, vision and “authentic leadership” are already treated as sacrosanct virtues.

The potential for narcissistic misuse, abuse, exploitation, financial or otherwise, is only heightened by the system’s plasticity. Some former devotees warn of Human Design’s cult-like tendencies. One of them writes that Ra’s charisma ensured that his word, even after death, was treated as law by disciples who became absolutists. Those who leave Human Design are shamed, warned the whistleblower.

On the surface, Human Design insists that you are utterly unique, that no one can tell you how to live but your inner Authority. Yet in practice, the community can feel strangely uniform: everyone reciting the same jargon, revering the same founder, and buying into the same training structures. It even has its own doomsday prophecy: in Human Design lore, 2027 is the year the world tips over, when governments and families will unravel, a new wave of telepathic “Rave children” will appear, and only those living their “design” will thrive.

In the end, Human Design may be less about cosmic circuitry than about the hunger for certainty in a world of impossible variables. As one of the coaches told me: “Humans are storytellers and we want to make meaning of everything. If you look at the past 100 years, there’s been constant upheaval. And many people have come out of that thinking, who am I? What am I doing? What’s my role on the planet?”

And in that sense, Joshua B. Lee’s LinkedIn feed tells us everything we need to know: even the stars can be harnessed as a decision-making framework, as long as they promise growth.

A businessman with a head so hard that it was difficult to imagine something so soft as hair had ever taken root there; at best he might have had lots of sharp needles sticking out of his scalp, like the cenobite in the Hellraiser movies. I might add that The New York Times exposé a few years back, with its claims of adults crying at their desks, did nothing to dispel the impression of a man driven by an unparalleled will-to-power, a master strategist who made few (if any) mistakes.

Yet, recent events have caused me to doubt the accuracy of this image, and to wonder about Bezos’s judgement. The rot first set in this time last year, when Bezos was forced to engage in a very embarrassing face-off with the National Enquirer over some revealing selfies he had taken and sent to his lover, Lauren Sanchez, and which had subsequently fallen into the tabloid’s possession. Surely the infallible god-emperor of Amazon was more intelligent than a horny teenager? Surely he knew better than to snap a pic of his John Thomas and think it would stay private? Well, apparently not.

That said, the way he handled it — a rapid escalation and invitation to war — impressed me; those were some nerves of steel right there, that was the Genghis Bezos I believed in. And the strategy worked, the photo remains under wraps and Bezos’s loins remain an enigma; none of us need ever think about them again and everything makes sense again.

Except that recently I learned something else about Bezos which threatens once again to subvert the image I have of him as a ruthless, logical, master strategist: he takes advice from psychics. At least that’s what his girlfriend’s estranged brother Michael Sanchez claims in a lawsuit he has filed against the Amazon owner for “defamation”.

Suddenly I had an image of Bezos at night, driving his Honda Accord down some lost highway in New Mexico, bald pate glinting in the moonlight, before screeching to a halt by the shack of a roadside psychic, a neon sign of a palm buzzing in the darkness. He steps inside to seek of the medium within the advice of the spirits on this burning question: should he or should he not keep his affair with Lauren Sanchez a secret? The medium closes her eyes, establishes contact with the mystic forces of the Other Side, and then following a long pause, they reply:

“Nah, don’t tell anyone about it, bro.”

Wow, just wow. I mean, he paid for that (allegedly). Yet perhaps I am being unrealistic, and even unfair in my expectation that Bezos be all will-to-power all the time. Love can make fools of kings, as the philosopher Bryan Ferry reminds us. Besides, even that interpretation may be jumping to conclusions; Bezos’s consultation with the psychic may not have been the consequence of an otherwise rational mind scrambled by love.

Who is to say that he doesn’t visit psychics regularly to consult on all manner of things? He wouldn’t be the first powerful person to do so. The Reagan White House had a secret astrologer, Joan Quigley, whose advice was sought on far more consequential matters than running a retail empire, while Hillary Clinton roamed the halls having conversations with the long-deceased Eleanor Roosevelt, although she claims it was a psychological exercise. And what about that time T. Blair and his wife Cherie smeared fruit over each other in a replica Mayan pyramid as part of a “rebirthing” ritual? A trip to the psychic seems pretty tame next to that.

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Meanwhile, Bezos’s behavior is not necessarily an outlier among his peers in the tech world. Many of these hi-tech oligarchs have an interest in the spiritual side of existence. Steve Jobs was a big fan of Paramahansa Yogananda’s book, Autobiography of a Yogi (also the inspiration for the ultra-proggy Yes LP Tales from Topographic Oceans) and also retained a Zen master to serve as his spiritual adviser.

Marc Benioff, the founder, chairman and co-CEO of Salesforce, is a devotee of self-actualization and yoga. Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter spent a recent birthday on a 10 day silent meditation trip to Myanmar. And Anthony Levandowski, an engineer central to both Google and Uber’s self-driving car programs established his own church (of AI). I could go on, but you get the picture.

It also turns out that my somewhat down-at-heel conception of what a consultation with a psychic looks like is less than accurate, at least when it comes to the super-wealthy. Roadside mediums are for the proles; Bezos’s psychic is reported to have cost “thousands”. In fact, those with a talent for talking to the dead or revealing the future can make good money if they can nurture the right kind of clientele.

For instance Laura Day, a “financial psychic” who advised both Wall Street bankers and the CEO of data storage firm Seagate Technology, charged $10,000 a month for her services, and that was back in 2008. Branding is important with this elite audience; for instance, Robert Ohotto, an astrologer whose clients are reported to include Google executives, describes himself as an ”intuitive life strategist”; David Zarza, who, like Amazon, is based in Seattle, describes himself as a “psychic medium and intuitive life coach.”

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Indeed, the mystic offerings on offer in today’s America have proliferated like the varieties of kombucha on offer in Whole Foods (acquired by Bezos in 2017), as entrepreneurs of the $pirit world have sought to establish a presence in this increasingly crowded marketplace.

A quick Google search for metaphysical services in my local area turned up such options as “profound reading and instant healing”, an “eclectic intuitive”, varying takes on astrology, “wise women holistic services”, “angel readings”, “aura readings”, “intuitive-angelic-reiki readings”, an “intuitive tune-up” consultation, “throat chakra clearing”, “spirit whispering” and “Akashic record readings” based on “theosophy and anthroposophy.”

Thus the language of mediums merges with the language of wellness, a crossover exemplified by episode six of The Goop Lab with Gwyneth Paltrow, currently streaming on Netflix and which I absolutely do not recommend unless you are writing an article about psychics for UnHerd and need to do some research.

And even then, I do not recommend it. In this episode, the queen of this notorious wellness/lifestyle brand (valued at over $250 million) dispatches her millennial, (mostly) female employees to discover their inner mediums by participating in assorted exercises aimed at channeling the dead with a certain Laura Lynne Jackson. What was most striking to me was how aggressively boring the show was; there was no spooky music, no crystal balls, nothing morbid.

The studio was tasteful and brightly lit, some of the activities took place in a lush garden, the graphics were straight out of a lifestyle magazine, the millennials were all young and upbeat (bar one sceptic, who even so still smiled a lot), and the language was of “energy” and “connection” as if communing with deceased relatives was a fairly straightforward matter — a bit like going into settings on your smartphone, finding the afterlife’s Wi-Fi there and pressing “connect”.

This was the world of psychics gone fully mainstream, but it doesn’t end there. For those who like a dash of intersectionality with their “mystical services”, there’s always Chani Nicholas, the subject of one of the most eye-wateringly terrible articles published in the last decade, on the website of the perennially-straining-to-get down-with-the-kids Rolling Stone: “Meet the Woman Bringing Social Justice to Astrology”. And no, that’s not a Titania McGrath spoof.

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As organized religion declines in the US, this all comes with a certain dreary predictability; I am reminded, once again, of the observation attributed to G.K. Chesterton that when people stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. Nature abhors a vacuum and today’s spiritual entrepreneurs are stepping up to fill the gap. Indeed, according to one report, the demand for “psychic services” in the US is growing steadily and the market is worth around $2 billion.

Little wonder, then, that Venture Capital is trying to get a slice of the action. Want to know what the stars have in store for you? There is an app for that; more than one, in fact. For a mere $19.99 a month Sanctuary  will provide you with birth charts, opportunities to talk to professional astrologers and promises “weekly cosmic insights sent straight to your inbox.” Meanwhile, Co-Star promises “hyper-personalized, real time horoscopes” and claims to utilize an AI that “merges NASA data with the insight of human astrologers”. Both have attracted millions of dollars in Venture Capital, according to The New York Times.

But that gives me another thought. What if Bezos is not, in fact, a fool for love, nor as keen on metaphysics and mysteries of the soul as some of his tech oligarch peers? Could it be that his interest in the psychic realm is actually part of his plan for world domination, and that this most relentless of tycoons has his eye on the growing market for spiritual services?

Could spirit mediums and astrology soon join keto-friendly organic kelp granules, data storage and the Washington Post on the ever growing list of products and services owned and/or supplied by Bezos? Will Amazon Prime soon include insight into our fortunes alongside movies and free two-day shipping?

Psychics of America, gaze into your futures. Bezos is coming.