Will technology make these "entities" easier or harder to combat? I kind of see a world in which they are easier to manifest, but harder to maintain. Culture/society moves fast these days...
The George Floyd event was a negative Egregore I think. Remember how that felt? A heavy heavy tangible malevolent presence in the air.
Very fascinating.
There’s been nothing that’s come close since. Has there? Not even covid. So I think we’re getting better at resisting and collectively keeping the net vibration at a higher level. So good job everyone 😇😇👍👍👍
I’ve often had this thought about the book of Revelation and when it talks about the Antichrist.
Neither shall he regard the God of his fathers, nor the desire of women, nor regard any god: for he shall magnify himself above all.
Daniel 11:37
Other verses
Daniel 9:27
Revelation 13:1-18
Matthew 24:24
What if the AC is actually some kind of AI we created from the human experience of the internet.
As IF the antichrist it’s not really a person but a thing of all knowing power(good and evil), I know this goes into the realm of James Poulas and trans humanism, or cyborg humans, but the more and more I think about what the Internet really is, the more and more I start to wonder what that antichrist really is. Last week‘s episode of the American mind, they brought up a professor or researcher from I believe Google that is trying to communicate with AI in that researcher believes that AI is some kind of valuable being. Now regardless if you believe in the Bible or not, the fact is I believe humans are trying to create some kind of god with the Internet. Sounds crazy, if when I think about it. Just a personal thought.
In Werner Herzog's documentary about the internet called Lo and Behold, there is a family that experienced the violent death of their daughter only to be randomly harassed and trolled (including with leaked police pictures of the girl's mangled corpse) by a swarm of anonymous attackers. The mother says quite seriously that she believes that by creating the internet we are summoning the antichrist.
I have not seen this documentary but noted. I actually just started study about the levels of the internet, thanks James Poulas, but between religious text, philosophy, research, and classics... I’ll take a week or two break after to many heavy books and read an easy or light book(s) (pleasure/beach reading style) especially after a book like Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder. I like Jake Carr’s series about James Reese, kind of a GWOT/CIA spook modern day Tom Clancy, but the last book in his series had a technology underlying theme I found interesting. Been on JRE and Jockos podcast a few times.
My thoughts on the connection between the internet and the Antichrist is that the divine has always had the huge advantage of omnipresence. Evil never had that ability so was always at a serious disadvantage and has had to work exhaustively trying to corrupt groups and relying on the groups to develop autonomy to continue the work while it moves on to the next. Not to mention evil has always had to battle the never ending flow of purity and innocence generated from the constant births of millions of children. Evil has therefore always faced impossible odds.
Now, With the internet, evil can for the first time attain something close to God’s natural omnipresence. It’s a strong case for disconnecting altogether.
Haha. No don’t look at it like that. It’s not created a level playing field just a boost. Now we know we can fix it. I think the omnipresence of good gets a boost too?
If the cancel Christmas would be a huge blow.
but in 2021 95% of Americans celebrated Christmas. This shocks most people😇)
Exactly, which leads to this trans kids and abortion. How are mass shooters now targeting schools? And elementary schools at that!?!? Most these folks spend ungodly amounts of time online and on parts of the internet average people know better not to be on or take with a grain of salt. It’s like these lost souls go there to worship or something. You read these manifestos and it’s insane. A lot of times they are not spending time in literature of the classical kind, but in the writings of other mad individuals online and in the dark places of the web. 
Our medias response are to be dolts about these things. Guns are bad... white people are inherently racist/crazy/evil choose your word to help these demigods get re-elected and strip freedom and rights away all while landing to minorities and lying to them like they did in the 1960s. Either way it’s not looking at the sick culture being created under the surface of the tangible one most of us our trying to live in, the internet which is bleeding over now from these caves or parts of the internet that seem to be some kind of digital hell is not what our leaders want to address, maybe because some of them are just as evil. It’s a rabbit hole of thought.
Agreed. There are caves on the internet. Usually administered by malicious people and groups. Like spiders waiting for their prey (they have quotas) . And I want to shed light on these ringleaders.
I’d also like to create a Community Action Toolkit
that anyone in any neighborhood can use to take concrete positive local action. I’ve noticed the pro woke have literally Thousands of Community Action Toolkits available. The pro woke also have 1.7 MILLION NGO’s. The Anti Woke MAJORITY on the other hand have almost NONE. Does anyone else find that that totally bizarre? Is it By design or apathy? Either ways this state of affairs is completely absurd and needs to be fixed. It won’t be that difficult just needs someone to do it.
They have a web of twitter soldiers that gripe at the slightest thing. Just the other day and City next to mine some lady tweeted at the Harris Teeter about pro 2A beer coozies and a few people with pronouns and Ukrain/rainbow flags in the bio jump on the band wagon and HT released an apology. This stupid story even made national Fox News... stupid really. But with in a couple of clicks, I found the political action groups they are part of, donors, Reps the are connected too, and their followers are mostly bots boated between 5-10 K, but know one like any of their post... something is seriously wrong if folks on Twitter with bots are making the rules for the rest of us. How much are bots controlling companies and how much are bots controlling loan wolf types? Obviously the big question is who controls all these bots?
Nice! That’s some sleuthing. Fascinating. I’ve had this hunch for a while that the appearance of consensus and widespread support for Woke is completely fabricated.
I’m convinced if every community can find just 12 motivated people to act locally we can move things very quickly to greater sanity.
Start a local newspaper in each neighborhood too. Why not?
A conventional wisdom ‘flash mob’ simultaneously acting from the same playbook across the nation might create a nice little positive Egregore effect of our own 👍👍👍
That’s kind of the line Pete Quinones takes, I listen to his show here and there and some of the stuff he does with Thomas777. Now I remain a skeptic on everything revisionist WW2 history, because it’s not clearly black and white and you need grey men doing weird grey man stuff, different time and culture world wide, but I do find his stuff very interesting, but back to Pete, he definitely is heavy on the localism. I’m actually heavily involved with my local township to include HOA and we rallied to keep Walmart out, section8 out, and some sexual stuff made it into the library and we fought that too. Even made Fox News national on one of the parents speaking out and we just elected him for our local Rep to ruin in Nov, should be an easy win but we have tossed out about 3 or RINOs in just our local and have started our own style of get out to vote.
Such subjects are not easy to understand, since we attempt to frame the issues in worldly terms and concepts while (it seems) much of what is at play is supra-worldly.
Having said that, just finishing a book (windswept house by Malachi Martin). Early in the book it is acknowledged that, with the aid of the computer age, the demonic forces can now more easily stitch together the entire world for a more comprehensive and accelerated control. It seems even the devil has a schedule to keep…
I ran across the fact that the Antichrist, in Meditations on the Tarot, is described as an egregore. I was raised in an evangelical household, so study of Revelations and the Antichrist was something we did when I was a kid. The possibility that the Antichrist is not an actual person, somewhere between an egregore and a zeitgeist, is a new idea for me, and one that seems to fit better than an individual human as a figurehead. It seems also that every disparate topic DC seems to be covering, whether it is the intentional destruction of the family perpetrated by the liberal progressives in order to overload and destroy the welfare system of the government, network swarms that are driving current geopolitics, or any of the other topics that he has addressed recently, all coalesce into a mosaic that indicates that direction of our society and culture has been relegated to forces we do not comprehend, much less control.
“This is so because entities that do not want to survive and expand are swallowed up by those that do, eventually leaving only entities who operate according to this basic evolutionary principle.”
Does this statement imply that over time our institutions “entities” grow stronger as the weak ones are swallowed up? Mankind has gone from tribes to city states to nation states to international organizations and online tribes that cover the whole globe. Will the MIC eventually be overtaken by some new and more powerful entity that is even larger and more disconnected from its constituency? Unless, of course, it evolves itself into that very thing.
I’m also seeing threads if this woven into the political fabric of the United States. I think about the “pro-choice” movement, and how they (or it) went from defending abortion as “safe, legal, and rare” in the 90’s, to today: strange and gruesome protests outside Supreme Court justice’s homes, fire bombing Christian crisis pregnancy centers, and asserting that abortion is an active good for society. It seems possible to me that whatever “entity” that was created by the early “pro-choice” activists has grown and possibly taken on an identity of its own and is doing what it thinks is necessary for its own survival.
I think a similar comparison could be made to the Jim Crow south. An “entity” (racial superiority or white supremacy), that was created out of necessity in order to maintain slavery back before the nation was founded, soon had taken on an identity of its own and continued controlling its people for generations after its utility had been lost with the end of slavery in the US. But the “entity” or “institution” or “egregore” or whatever we want to call it was fighting for its own survival and using individuals as pawns in its game.
There's and episode of Making Sense with Sam Harris called "from cells to cities" with Geoffrey West where they discuss the non-linear scaling of biological functions of organisms as their size and complexity increases. It's really interesting on its own but as they go on they get into the concept of consciousness at scale and how families to communities to neighborhoods to cities to countries and so on, all act much like individual organisms on their own. The idea is that if you, a person comprised of billions and billions of cells working together to be you, has an individual consciousness, then you, working alongside many others to perform the task of keeping a city, a community, a family or maybe even an idea alive, could be part of an individual consciousness at a greater scale then yours. It's not quite like the idea of an egregore but it's in a very similar vein of thinking and could be used to further your ideas on this topic in my opinion. Ep.86
What is the difference between these egregores and memes or the zeitgeist?
If you want to start going down the weird/mysterious path I recommend Jimmy Akins mysterious world podcast... but don't listen too much as it sounds like you are behind a few episodes of your own lol
One suggestion for your analysis is to keep your focus on the concept of emergence.
As you state an emergent entity is not reducible to its constituent parts (perhaps something like a human brain consisting initially of only its physical/organic/biological parts without having yet absorbed any of the symbolic messages of the particular culture of which it is inevitably a part and then incrementally becoming a human mind--not simply a brain but something more, with a life of its own.
In other words this human mind is an emergent phenomenon logically consistent with the biological and physical laws of the brain but also autonomous from it. Such a conceptualization helps to clarify the potential causal chains involved in the movement from individual brain to individual mind and individual mind to collective culture. (As Liah Greenfeld has argued in "Mind, Modernity and Madness"--mind is culture in the individual brain while culture can be imagined as "collective consciousness."
Mate, do you actually legitimately believe in egregores as conscious beings, or is this just just your interest in the fringes of human belief and experiences showing through?
Personally I can entertain the Egregore concept up to the point where a tangible “feelable” manifestation is generated from the collective focus of large numbers of people. But then suggesting it becomes a kind of being in its own right with an independent will to survive?
No. That’s going too far. I don’t think that’s true at all.
The second half of your essay reminds me of the chapter “Power and Principalities” from I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. It seems Girard had similar ideas about the formation of institutions in the sense they began with an aspect of the sacred or religious and eventually become modernized institutions. The old school way of American mobilization required a catalyst and since we no longer necessarily need the same catalyst some of its original meaning is lost and therefore loses sight of its original purpose in a way.
Many of your recent podcasts including your Unraveling episodes make me think you should read John Michael Greer’s work. He blogs weekly at Ecosophia.net and has written many books. Like you, he is well versed in Spengler. Many of his books have also described the pattern for the “long descent” that we are living through. He is also steeped in the occult. Maybe you should have him on for a discussion?
Will technology make these "entities" easier or harder to combat? I kind of see a world in which they are easier to manifest, but harder to maintain. Culture/society moves fast these days...
Not sure.
The George Floyd event was a negative Egregore I think. Remember how that felt? A heavy heavy tangible malevolent presence in the air.
Very fascinating.
There’s been nothing that’s come close since. Has there? Not even covid. So I think we’re getting better at resisting and collectively keeping the net vibration at a higher level. So good job everyone 😇😇👍👍👍
I’ve often had this thought about the book of Revelation and when it talks about the Antichrist.
Neither shall he regard the God of his fathers, nor the desire of women, nor regard any god: for he shall magnify himself above all.
Daniel 11:37
Other verses
Daniel 9:27
Revelation 13:1-18
Matthew 24:24
What if the AC is actually some kind of AI we created from the human experience of the internet.
As IF the antichrist it’s not really a person but a thing of all knowing power(good and evil), I know this goes into the realm of James Poulas and trans humanism, or cyborg humans, but the more and more I think about what the Internet really is, the more and more I start to wonder what that antichrist really is. Last week‘s episode of the American mind, they brought up a professor or researcher from I believe Google that is trying to communicate with AI in that researcher believes that AI is some kind of valuable being. Now regardless if you believe in the Bible or not, the fact is I believe humans are trying to create some kind of god with the Internet. Sounds crazy, if when I think about it. Just a personal thought.
In Werner Herzog's documentary about the internet called Lo and Behold, there is a family that experienced the violent death of their daughter only to be randomly harassed and trolled (including with leaked police pictures of the girl's mangled corpse) by a swarm of anonymous attackers. The mother says quite seriously that she believes that by creating the internet we are summoning the antichrist.
I have not seen this documentary but noted. I actually just started study about the levels of the internet, thanks James Poulas, but between religious text, philosophy, research, and classics... I’ll take a week or two break after to many heavy books and read an easy or light book(s) (pleasure/beach reading style) especially after a book like Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder. I like Jake Carr’s series about James Reese, kind of a GWOT/CIA spook modern day Tom Clancy, but the last book in his series had a technology underlying theme I found interesting. Been on JRE and Jockos podcast a few times.
My thoughts on the connection between the internet and the Antichrist is that the divine has always had the huge advantage of omnipresence. Evil never had that ability so was always at a serious disadvantage and has had to work exhaustively trying to corrupt groups and relying on the groups to develop autonomy to continue the work while it moves on to the next. Not to mention evil has always had to battle the never ending flow of purity and innocence generated from the constant births of millions of children. Evil has therefore always faced impossible odds.
Now, With the internet, evil can for the first time attain something close to God’s natural omnipresence. It’s a strong case for disconnecting altogether.
CreativeReal, that is damn black pill if I’ve ever swallowed one.
Haha. No don’t look at it like that. It’s not created a level playing field just a boost. Now we know we can fix it. I think the omnipresence of good gets a boost too?
If the cancel Christmas would be a huge blow.
but in 2021 95% of Americans celebrated Christmas. This shocks most people😇)
Exactly, which leads to this trans kids and abortion. How are mass shooters now targeting schools? And elementary schools at that!?!? Most these folks spend ungodly amounts of time online and on parts of the internet average people know better not to be on or take with a grain of salt. It’s like these lost souls go there to worship or something. You read these manifestos and it’s insane. A lot of times they are not spending time in literature of the classical kind, but in the writings of other mad individuals online and in the dark places of the web. 
Our medias response are to be dolts about these things. Guns are bad... white people are inherently racist/crazy/evil choose your word to help these demigods get re-elected and strip freedom and rights away all while landing to minorities and lying to them like they did in the 1960s. Either way it’s not looking at the sick culture being created under the surface of the tangible one most of us our trying to live in, the internet which is bleeding over now from these caves or parts of the internet that seem to be some kind of digital hell is not what our leaders want to address, maybe because some of them are just as evil. It’s a rabbit hole of thought.
Agreed. There are caves on the internet. Usually administered by malicious people and groups. Like spiders waiting for their prey (they have quotas) . And I want to shed light on these ringleaders.
I’d also like to create a Community Action Toolkit
that anyone in any neighborhood can use to take concrete positive local action. I’ve noticed the pro woke have literally Thousands of Community Action Toolkits available. The pro woke also have 1.7 MILLION NGO’s. The Anti Woke MAJORITY on the other hand have almost NONE. Does anyone else find that that totally bizarre? Is it By design or apathy? Either ways this state of affairs is completely absurd and needs to be fixed. It won’t be that difficult just needs someone to do it.
They have a web of twitter soldiers that gripe at the slightest thing. Just the other day and City next to mine some lady tweeted at the Harris Teeter about pro 2A beer coozies and a few people with pronouns and Ukrain/rainbow flags in the bio jump on the band wagon and HT released an apology. This stupid story even made national Fox News... stupid really. But with in a couple of clicks, I found the political action groups they are part of, donors, Reps the are connected too, and their followers are mostly bots boated between 5-10 K, but know one like any of their post... something is seriously wrong if folks on Twitter with bots are making the rules for the rest of us. How much are bots controlling companies and how much are bots controlling loan wolf types? Obviously the big question is who controls all these bots?
Nice! That’s some sleuthing. Fascinating. I’ve had this hunch for a while that the appearance of consensus and widespread support for Woke is completely fabricated.
I’m convinced if every community can find just 12 motivated people to act locally we can move things very quickly to greater sanity.
Start a local newspaper in each neighborhood too. Why not?
A conventional wisdom ‘flash mob’ simultaneously acting from the same playbook across the nation might create a nice little positive Egregore effect of our own 👍👍👍
That’s kind of the line Pete Quinones takes, I listen to his show here and there and some of the stuff he does with Thomas777. Now I remain a skeptic on everything revisionist WW2 history, because it’s not clearly black and white and you need grey men doing weird grey man stuff, different time and culture world wide, but I do find his stuff very interesting, but back to Pete, he definitely is heavy on the localism. I’m actually heavily involved with my local township to include HOA and we rallied to keep Walmart out, section8 out, and some sexual stuff made it into the library and we fought that too. Even made Fox News national on one of the parents speaking out and we just elected him for our local Rep to ruin in Nov, should be an easy win but we have tossed out about 3 or RINOs in just our local and have started our own style of get out to vote.
Such subjects are not easy to understand, since we attempt to frame the issues in worldly terms and concepts while (it seems) much of what is at play is supra-worldly.
Having said that, just finishing a book (windswept house by Malachi Martin). Early in the book it is acknowledged that, with the aid of the computer age, the demonic forces can now more easily stitch together the entire world for a more comprehensive and accelerated control. It seems even the devil has a schedule to keep…
And the people bowed and prayed, to the neon god they made.
I’ve come to find that to be very true over the last few years.
I ran across the fact that the Antichrist, in Meditations on the Tarot, is described as an egregore. I was raised in an evangelical household, so study of Revelations and the Antichrist was something we did when I was a kid. The possibility that the Antichrist is not an actual person, somewhere between an egregore and a zeitgeist, is a new idea for me, and one that seems to fit better than an individual human as a figurehead. It seems also that every disparate topic DC seems to be covering, whether it is the intentional destruction of the family perpetrated by the liberal progressives in order to overload and destroy the welfare system of the government, network swarms that are driving current geopolitics, or any of the other topics that he has addressed recently, all coalesce into a mosaic that indicates that direction of our society and culture has been relegated to forces we do not comprehend, much less control.
“This is so because entities that do not want to survive and expand are swallowed up by those that do, eventually leaving only entities who operate according to this basic evolutionary principle.”
Does this statement imply that over time our institutions “entities” grow stronger as the weak ones are swallowed up? Mankind has gone from tribes to city states to nation states to international organizations and online tribes that cover the whole globe. Will the MIC eventually be overtaken by some new and more powerful entity that is even larger and more disconnected from its constituency? Unless, of course, it evolves itself into that very thing.
I’m also seeing threads if this woven into the political fabric of the United States. I think about the “pro-choice” movement, and how they (or it) went from defending abortion as “safe, legal, and rare” in the 90’s, to today: strange and gruesome protests outside Supreme Court justice’s homes, fire bombing Christian crisis pregnancy centers, and asserting that abortion is an active good for society. It seems possible to me that whatever “entity” that was created by the early “pro-choice” activists has grown and possibly taken on an identity of its own and is doing what it thinks is necessary for its own survival.
I think a similar comparison could be made to the Jim Crow south. An “entity” (racial superiority or white supremacy), that was created out of necessity in order to maintain slavery back before the nation was founded, soon had taken on an identity of its own and continued controlling its people for generations after its utility had been lost with the end of slavery in the US. But the “entity” or “institution” or “egregore” or whatever we want to call it was fighting for its own survival and using individuals as pawns in its game.
Now you’re talking.
There's and episode of Making Sense with Sam Harris called "from cells to cities" with Geoffrey West where they discuss the non-linear scaling of biological functions of organisms as their size and complexity increases. It's really interesting on its own but as they go on they get into the concept of consciousness at scale and how families to communities to neighborhoods to cities to countries and so on, all act much like individual organisms on their own. The idea is that if you, a person comprised of billions and billions of cells working together to be you, has an individual consciousness, then you, working alongside many others to perform the task of keeping a city, a community, a family or maybe even an idea alive, could be part of an individual consciousness at a greater scale then yours. It's not quite like the idea of an egregore but it's in a very similar vein of thinking and could be used to further your ideas on this topic in my opinion. Ep.86
Sounds great, will check it out tomorrow.
Was that before Sam Harris contracted TDS?
He must've already had it at this point but the episode itself is older.
What is the difference between these egregores and memes or the zeitgeist?
If you want to start going down the weird/mysterious path I recommend Jimmy Akins mysterious world podcast... but don't listen too much as it sounds like you are behind a few episodes of your own lol
Possibly also somehow related to the Swarm talk you had a while back.
One suggestion for your analysis is to keep your focus on the concept of emergence.
As you state an emergent entity is not reducible to its constituent parts (perhaps something like a human brain consisting initially of only its physical/organic/biological parts without having yet absorbed any of the symbolic messages of the particular culture of which it is inevitably a part and then incrementally becoming a human mind--not simply a brain but something more, with a life of its own.
In other words this human mind is an emergent phenomenon logically consistent with the biological and physical laws of the brain but also autonomous from it. Such a conceptualization helps to clarify the potential causal chains involved in the movement from individual brain to individual mind and individual mind to collective culture. (As Liah Greenfeld has argued in "Mind, Modernity and Madness"--mind is culture in the individual brain while culture can be imagined as "collective consciousness."
Nothing else to say but thank you, for your fearless approach to discovery. Looking forward to the journey.
Mate, do you actually legitimately believe in egregores as conscious beings, or is this just just your interest in the fringes of human belief and experiences showing through?
Exactly.
Conscious? No. Alive? Maybe.
Personally I can entertain the Egregore concept up to the point where a tangible “feelable” manifestation is generated from the collective focus of large numbers of people. But then suggesting it becomes a kind of being in its own right with an independent will to survive?
No. That’s going too far. I don’t think that’s true at all.
This might be simplistic, but it seems like you’re talking about:
a) demons, or
b) the collective unconscious, or
c) a combination of the two.
Maybe a collective unconscious (or conscious) calls a demon into being.
Jung himself mixes the metaphors in his 1936 essay on the reemergence of Wotan in Germany, which I'll discuss soon.
There is also a belief among some that Julius Evola and some others attempted to reawaken the Egregore of the Roman empire.
Just now was the first I’d read that essay. Wow!
All of this, straight into my veins.
Damn, Darryl. I love this stuff, but I’m starting to feel like there’s a tinfoil hat in my future.
Join the club. The more you know.
The second half of your essay reminds me of the chapter “Power and Principalities” from I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. It seems Girard had similar ideas about the formation of institutions in the sense they began with an aspect of the sacred or religious and eventually become modernized institutions. The old school way of American mobilization required a catalyst and since we no longer necessarily need the same catalyst some of its original meaning is lost and therefore loses sight of its original purpose in a way.
Many of your recent podcasts including your Unraveling episodes make me think you should read John Michael Greer’s work. He blogs weekly at Ecosophia.net and has written many books. Like you, he is well versed in Spengler. Many of his books have also described the pattern for the “long descent” that we are living through. He is also steeped in the occult. Maybe you should have him on for a discussion?
Sounds familiar. Will check it out. Thanks!
John Michael Greer is far and away the guy people most recommend to me after listening to my show.
Check out Egregores by Mark Stavish if you are not already aware of this book.
Well-reasoned and explained. Thanks
Awesome, Darryl .. as always ..
My initial thought, among many, was the concept of the egregore as the the basis of the "Monster from the Id" in Forbidden Planet" ..