it was largely led by, and aimed at, mid-
dle-class white women who saw them-
selves as inaugurating an era of spiritu-
ality, virtue, and selflessness.
By the early twentieth century, New
Thought had shifted its focus from health
and social betterment to the attainment
of wealth. It spawned dozens of best-sell-
ing books, such as Wallace Wattles’s “The
Science of Being Great,” “The Science
of Being Well,” and “The Science of Get-
ting Rich.” Although New Thought lost
momentum in the nineteen-twenties,
the central message of thought-as-power
lived on, according to Satter, in every-
thing from “The Power of Positive Think-
ing” to the teachings of Alcoholics Anon-
ymous and other twelve-step groups.
More recently, Oprah’s enthusiastic em-
brace of the 2006 book “The Secret,”
which was inspired by the writings of
New Thought authors, popularized the
mantra of “Ask, believe, and receive” and
spurred the sale of some thirty million
copies. American business took a turn
toward the mystical at around the same
time, in part because of the rise of Sili-
con Valley, with its deification of the vi-
sionary founder, embodied by Steve Jobs,
Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg. (Tech-
nological innovation, as scholars have
pointed out, often has a messianic tone,
promising a glorious future that will erad-
icate the sins of the present, so long as
we place our faith in the prophetic leader
and his company.)
“The tech industry and Oprah had
a lot to do with the shift toward spiri-
tuality,” Kathryn Lofton, a professor of
religious and American studies at Yale,
who writes about capitalism and celeb-
rity culture, told me. “But the element
I’d really add to that is the housing bub-
ble.” Lofton thinks that stories like
Batiz’s are comforting in the new real-
ity that emerged after the 2008 finan-
cial crisis. Batiz, who lost her house in
an earlier crash, went on to build her
company with no funding, no network,
no formal education, and no structural
help. “Even women who lost their house
in the financial crisis can relate to the
woman who says, ‘I was beaten down,
I had a revelation, and now I continue
to find mystical power,’ ” Lofton said.
As the wealth gap has widened, she said,
“we’ve seen the normalization of spir-
itual talk from the pulpit of commerce.”
Recently, Alan Murray, the president
of Fortune, wrote about a “fundamental
and profound” change in the way that
American C.E.O.s speak about their
roles. He first noticed the shift in 2008,
when Bill Gates introduced the idea of
“creative capitalism” at Davos. During
the next few years, Murray wrote, “Har-
vard Business School professor Michael
Porter began pushing what he called
‘shared value’ capitalism, and Whole
Foods cofounder John Mackey pro-
pounded ‘conscious capitalism.’ Sales-
force CEO Marc Benioff wrote a book
on ‘compassionate capitalism’; Lynn For-
ester de Rothschild, CEO of family in-
vestment company E.L. Rothschild,
started organizing for ‘inclusive capital-
ism’; and the free-enterprise-champi-
oning Conference Board research groupsounded a call for ‘sustaining capital-
ism.’” Lofton told me, “We’ve heard all
sorts of new arguments for ‘compas-
sionate capitalism’ and ‘spiritual capital-
ism,’ because we’re trying to explain how
capitalism can still be a moral good.”
Batiz’s guide to navigating contem-
porary capitalism is her mentor, Gay
Hendricks, who is a psychologist, a writer,
and a personal-growth guru. About two
decades ago, Hendricks and his colleague
Kate Ludeman published a book called
“The Corporate Mystic,” inspired by
Hendricks’s observation that many tech
luminaries draw on mystical principles.
“Basically, the premise of the book is that
you’ll find more actual spiritual prin-
ciples being practiced in a corporation
oftentimes than you will in a monastery,”
Hendricks told me. He pointed to the
rise of once countercultural practices such
as meditation, yoga, and mind-altering
drugs as tools to boost the productivity
of executives. An alternative title for his
book, he said, was “Conscious Business.”
This migration from counterculture
to corporate culture has been particu-
larly prominent in the wellness indus-
try, which now represents a $4.2-trillion
market. Like New Thought, it has given
rise to a new kind of success guru. Gwyn-
eth Paltrow’s empire promises a life of
spiritual perfection and physical purity
through high-end consumption, and
Amanda Chantal Bacon’s Moon Juice,
an emporium of herbal supplements and
skin-care products, promises to bring
cosmic health to well-heeled customers.
The rhetoric of these companies and
their imitators has filtered into nearly
every area of life—including, with Poo-
Pourri, the management of our lowliest
functions. When I asked Lofton about
Batiz, she laughed and replied, “There’s
something so pure capitalist magic about
her! She literally picked one of the three
possible symbols—blood, water, shit—
that root you in so many metaphysical
systems.” Batiz’s company, Lofton said,
is actually about “how to manage the
stuff that makes you dirtier, and the stuff
that can make you healthier, purer, a
better person.”P
oo-Pourri’s headquarters are in a
strip mall in Addison, Texas. In-
side, there are neon poop-emoji signs
and poop-shaped pillows; scatological
inspirational quotations (“Do epic shit”)“I’m tired of playing Studio Apartment. Let’s play
Co-Working Space instead.”