https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=_AcCxFFOVeU
My point was the agregore is completely bottom up. Right, that’s what I was arguing. And then we’ve got the demonic. And what I heard you saying is the demonic is now a disproportionate relationship between the top down and the bottom up in which the balance that is found within the hyper agent is being lost because, right, the top down is now in a self-destructive process of undermining the individual cognition of the component people. That’s what I heard you saying. Like there’s a top down, right? Instead of a balance between the top down and the bottom up, there’s a misalignment and the top down is now imposing and infecting the lower processes. So the idea would be something like, let’s say the system or the hyper agent is trying to fill up too much space, is not leaving enough, because you need a little messiness on the edge for things to work. And so if they’re not careful, it will create it or give the opportunity for these, give reason for these parasitic processes to kind of appear. And, but I don’t see, I can kind of see it. I can see it mythologically. Sorry, this is my problem. It’s like I think in storage. So I can see it mythologically, which is that a good example is, in the Bible there are these laws about how to till your field. You kill your field, but you have to leave the corner of the field untilled. And you have to leave that for the stranger. So you have to leave it for the processes that aren’t part of your hyper agent, you could say. You kind of have to leave a little bit of room on the edge for a buffer between, but if you’re not careful with those corners, they can start to impose themselves. If you try to till them too much, then they come back like a revenge. They come back like a, and if you leave them too big, then they also kind of, they tend to want to eat your system. I don’t know if that makes sense. Like you have to be careful, because this whole system, no hyper agent can fill up all of its, like the world has all this chaos on the edge. So you can’t fill up the world with the system. It will always leave a remainder. So the way that it’s coming to mind, first of all, what came to mind is Kafka, precisely because what happens in the bureaucracy is it becomes a parasitic process that drains sovereignty and individual cognition away. That’s the horror of the Kafka, of the Kafka’s, right? That there’s been the, so bureaucracies are, this is Max Weber. They’re supposed to be bottom up error signal and then top down prediction, right? Sort of mimicking aspects of it. But what happens, right, is you get the bureaucracy just being the top down discharging of blame and not any upward tick of error correction. And you get the horror, right? Because the line of communication has just become unidirectional. Yeah, and a bureaucracy that’s too strong will produce corruption. It will necessarily produce corruption. That’s what happens in a bureaucracy that is too pervasive. Exactly, and so what it comes to mind is Karst’s idea, where the hyper agent is oriented towards the infinite game, right? Whereas the parasitic process is engaged in a finite kind of game, because what it’s trying to do, right, is get some sort of final closure, right? Because it’s, I’m sorry, I’m stumbling you. Because it’s parasitic, because it’s self-destructive, it can’t be an infinite game player. Do you get what I’m trying to get at? It can’t, whereas leaving the corners of the field is that there’s gonna be stuff beyond the game and we’re gonna have to, one of the things we have to do as we play the game is change the rules by how which we play the game, because it will be the stranger, right? That’s the infinite game, right? But the finite game says, no, no, no, that’s the top-down bureaucracy. We can encompass this completely. And when you look at parasitic processing within individuals, what’s typically happening is reciprocal narrowing, until they get to, it can’t be any other way than this. It can’t be any other way than this. Sorry, I’m just trying to rock what you said, but I got a powerful sense of, right, that there’s an inability of parasitic processing, the demonic, I mean, but this is, you know this, Jonathan, this is like Dionysus, evil is ultimately totally parasitic on the good, right? It pretends to help its self-existence, but it can’t actually play the infinite game. So you, but if you think of it like in a person in terms of, let’s say a fast binge pattern, right? Whereas someone is on a diet, a diet binge pattern, where someone tries to make, create a top-down, a pattern of being in themselves, where they’re like, I’m gonna lose weight, I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna do that. And they make it so strict that the opposite happens, because a parasitic process sets itself up, then you find yourself at two in the morning eating a tub of ice cream, and it’s like, that is, and you know it’s destroying you, but it’s like there’s something else taking over your will. Yeah. Because what happens is instead of a dynamic, right, between bottom-up and top-down, you’re getting a vacillation. Uh, right, the Kafkaesque, and then you get the bottom-up explosion of impulsivity. That’s the binging. I lose all agency, and then I, uh, right? And you’re getting that going back, and that’s typically what’s happening in parasitic processing. So it comes up for me there, and I’m, so I’m noticing two things. One is, how do I say this right? Symbolically, I heard John reference the notion of changing the game. And so that landed for me was perhaps a orientation or an invitation to shift the game that we’re engaging in. Uh, and I noticed that I felt something, how do I say, strong perhaps, or a certain clarity when Jonathan was orienting us in the direction of the mythological. Part of the invitation I would say is to shift more into a mythological, poetic, artistic, religious, mystic, mystic mode. Okay, the other one that came up, as I was myself doing that, was I was, the word golem came in, and it spoke to something like, there’s a kind of part in humans, we might call this the mind or the ego, that has this one of its characteristics, both a capacity and in some sense a propensity to take itself as the whole. So this is that thing where you don’t actually have relationship with, with proper relationship with wholeness. And I’m wondering if this is that delicate balance of the four-cornered field. You know, the, the, the sill and caribdis on either side of that very delicate balance, but actually it takes itself and presents itself as representing the whole, but in fact it certainly can’t. And this is what gets you in real trouble. Like that’s the, that feels like the two sides of the coin. Like one side of the coin is the real actuality of the lived delicate balance of relationship with the actual lived whole. And particular, I’m not sure if this is a commonplace thing. I think it may in fact be a precisely human thing, but we’ll see the challenge or the risk of a particular aspect of human wholes, again, I’ll say things like mind and ego, that will endeavor to present themselves as in fact actually being a whole and therefore get in the way. Right. And this is that sort of mob problem like the demonic capacity, something like that. So there’s a bunch of things there that maybe can, we can play with. Well, there’s definitely, let’s say in the image of the demonic hierarchy, you have the devil as being, as pride being the sin of the devil. That is definitely, that is there. The idea is that what the devil says is I am, I am God, right, I am God. And so it comes into conflict with the whole because he wants to be the totality of all things in himself, let’s say, and not participate in something bigger than him. And that is what leads to the two. So in terms of what we’re talking about, in terms of the flip between one side and the other, St. Maximus, the confessor talks about sins of the right hand and sins of the left hand. And he says, the first sin is always the sin of the right hand, that is its pride, self-sufficiency, all of these types of sins. And then those secretly lead to sins of the left hand, which are passions, falling apart, all these thoughts that you can’t control. And so you have this movement from one to the other, but it is rooted in the idea of not, let’s say a being not participating in a greater whole, but wanting to just exist as itself, like as this kind of self perpetuating thing. So that, I think this is a good move, because participating, like what’s the participatory relationship? And so, Levinas makes the famous distinction between totality, which is what the bureaucracy is trying to do, or what the passion is trying to do also, and infinity. And so the totality is the idea that this can be grasped, this be closed upon. Whereas the living thing has the proper relationship to infinity in the sense that the living thing has a capacity for evolution, that the parasitic processing thing doesn’t have. This is the sense I’m getting, in fact, from Maximus, I’m reading him right now. I’ll use mythological language as Jordan invited us. If God was to completely remove, he can’t, I get it. But if he were, and the demons were allowed to run completely free, they would disappear in an instant, because they would reciprocally narrow to nothing. They don’t actually, they do not have a capacity, in fact, the defining feature of them, I would put it to you, is they’re incapable of evolution. They’re incapable of that movement that is constitutive of life, which is the participation in infinity without ever claiming to have a totality. And so the thing I see in the mob is exactly that feature. It may be self-perpetuating, and so therefore it’s different than the pure agregore, but it can’t evolve. Or I would put it this way, if it starts to evolve, it precisely ceases being a mob and becomes a proper hyperagent. So, right, and just to hold that little piece right there, is that there’s a, just that thing I brought in earlier about the fact that we don’t wanna be confused. So the mob, we have a very nice term, actually, it’s the distinction between evolution and development. Yes, yes. And development is the exploration of a potential that is already present in a closed domain. Yes, yes. So the mob, in fact, can develop, meaning it has a period of time whereby it can in fact expose a novelty that was already imparted into the reality that it was at the moment of its being without actually being connected to a wholeness and therefore is incapable of evolution, right? Yes, yes. It’s a novel thing, yeah, okay. And Jonathan, doesn’t this resonate? I mean, at least in some deep ways, I mean, like I said, I’m doing Lexio-Divine on both Dionysus and Maximus right now. And that’s right, and I’m both, I’m in sections both where they’re wrestling with, right, the existence of evil, and they’re both making the argument that evil is kind of pure self-destructiveness. And like Jordan says, it has a capacity for development because it’s not completely self-existent, although it pretends to be, right? But if it was completely unconstrained by the love of God, it would actually like completely self-destruct. Like, I don’t think I’m imposing that on them when I’m saying that. No, no, no, I think you’re right. So a good, I think, so the way that I like to think about it, at least, so would be something like the constitutive elements of an egregore, let’s say. They’re these parasitic patterns, parasitic structures, but they have, they could have the possibility of being more than what they are. It’s just that they aren’t. They’re self, they’re looking at themselves, and it’s called a devolving because of that. So an addiction is a good example. So every addiction is based on a true desire, which could lead you into something more, but because it closes itself off and then acts as this weird self-existent being, then it becomes parasitical and tends to destroy the higher agent. So now we have to bring in the notion of selling your soul. Right? Right? The addiction captures the actual vitality of a living being. Yes. And it enslaves, it whips, right? It drives that living being. It actually will extinguish it, but in the meantime, it will actually tap into whatever degree of evolution that living being actually still has left in it. So if you imagine sort of your classic, let’s go with Jim Morrison, somebody who I have a sort of a connection with, you have a vital genius connected to wholeness in a particular way and ridden by a demon that pushed the being into a self-destructive, like a local optima extraction of what was available in terms of a short-term burning brightness that generated an energetic flow of capacity that was extracted by the demon until of course the underlying host died and at which point the demon also evaporates, or in this case has to find a new host. Has to find a new host. Yeah. And many of us may in fact be associated with that. So there’s a very interesting, now we’re getting to a very interesting place to begin exploring what that looks like. But I think you’re right. The idea of selling your soul, that’s exactly what it is. It’s like, I mean, you could say that every time that you see a good in itself, or that you try to attach yourself to a good in itself that isn’t leading you to better, higher goods, that isn’t placing you in a system of higher goods, let’s say, then you are somewhat selling your soul or you’re letting your soul be captured by something which will feed off of it. Anything, anytime you profane the sacred, you’re selling your soul. Yeah, and so you can understand like it’s a country, for example, could have that problem where they get caught up in one specific aspect of what it is to be a country. And then they kind of revolve around that and then it captures the soul of the country. So, and then it ends up, it can end up just devouring it. I think you saw that in communist countries. And I think you probably see it now. Let’s say, in America, you can see how entertainment has become, let’s say, this massive, weird parasitic thing that is devouring everybody’s attention and is in some way blinding them to higher goods in which they can participate. It’s kind of capturing the soul of even a country. And there are different forms of that, I think.