https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=gwf5T61jn0A
So, what I thought I’d talk about today is this term that’s been flying around this little corner of the internet, Egregore. And so I want to talk about Egregore’s spirits and means and tie them all together for you. We should start with some definitions. It seems to me like the way people are using Egregore is to express something very specific. So first, where do they get the term from? What is this Egregore word all about? Well, Egregore is an occult word. It basically means demon. That’s what you’re playing with Egregore is you’re invoking them. And the reason why this is a popular word for some people is because they’re noticing that things aren’t working out, right? Things are not the way their predictions seem to indicate they should be. And they’re getting confused by, well, if things we’re predicting are going to move society are not working, then what’s moving society? And so, well, it’s got to be something else. It’s going to be an Egregore. And now the thing is, I don’t think an Egregore is anything other than a spirit. The definitions kind of overlap. Spirit’s a little bit larger definition, right? A spirit is roughly, can be a demon, an angel, anything that’s roughly speaking, non material in some fashion. It’s not a physical sort of an item, right? And so spirits move people, right? Spirits can maybe be embodied, right? Angels can come down, things like that. Can they move objects? Depends who you ask, right? And how is this related to memes? So memes are these ideas, right? They’re supposed to be these virus-like ideas. And this was first Dawkins’ thing that he put, I believe, in the Selfish Gene. And he talks about this quite a bit. And it’s sort of the same concept ultimately, right? What’s moving us or not, we’ll say facts or the materiality or the political system or the economic system, these things. They’re reasonable maps, they explain some things in the past, but they’re not really working, so it must be this idea virus that gets in way of the good ideas, the scientific ideas. So that the memes are this nasty, nasty ideas, bad ideas, cuz they’re not scientific or something. And I have a little bit different take on memes, but I think that that gives you a good sort of overview for how I’m gonna talk about egregore spirits and memes. So what is it about this need for these terms? Where did this need come from? Why are we dealing in these non-physical, non-material terms? Well, I think that’s the key, right? The key is that they’re non-physical and non-material. And materialists, right, people who think material is primary in the world, of course, I have a video on that cuz I have videos on things. They’re the ones that are sort of running out of explanations. Well, economics fits a bunch of types of behavior, politics fits a bunch of types of behavior. The idea of science fits a bunch of types of behavior, right? But they don’t seem to overlap and they don’t seem to explain the most important behaviors, right? And they don’t seem to be able to predict any of it. So an explanation is just a description about a past event. It’s not necessarily correct. There are lots of ways you can describe past events. And I think when you’re going with economics or you’re going with politics or you’re going with some other sort of thing like process is another one. Well, people think psychologically this way. It’s like, well, maybe, all right, maybe that’s a good map. Maybe it’s not a useful map though for large groups, for example. So what explains when large groups sort of don’t use science? Or they’re not listening to the facts, or they’re not paying attention to the experts, or they’re ignoring the authorities, or they’re not paying attention to financial incentives, or they’re not afraid. They’re not afraid of force, or they’re not able to be controlled. Like, what’s going on there? I think that’s when you get into, well, there’s something else. Well, what is that other thing? We need a name for it, okay. Well, we’ll say we don’t like religious terms, because we’re a secular society now, so we can’t use a religious term. So the spirit, can’t use spirit. We’ll have to grab another word. And we use egregore, right? And of course, the people who came up with egregore were thinking the same thing. Well, we can’t use one of those religious terms, you know, Christian religious terms like spirit. So instead, we’ll use egregore, right? So this is a different word for the same basic concept. There’s a great deliver a lot between egregore and spirit. Spirit’s a bit bigger, as I said before. And how does this relate to memes? Well, memes, again, are another explanation for why isn’t the material world the thing that’s determining what’s going on? Why can’t we make good predictions using a political frame, or an economic frame, or a combination of the two? Or a frame of power, top-down power from above, that postmodern narrative that I talked about before and hate so much. Well, when your explanations fail, you sort of add more things to your map, right? You add more explanations to your map. And memes are one, right? These viral ideas, they sort of get in the way of science. They’re sort of like, they’re banal in a way, right? They’re vanilla. They’re for those lower class people. I mean, and of course, memes, we’ll say they’re very intelligent, are fun. All right, and as long as they’re not materialists, memes are very fun. If they’re materialists, you won’t understand them. The problem with memes is they’re very temporary, right? Their memes rely heavily on context and shared content. And unfortunately, they’re based on concepts that get understood differently. So for example, if you watch a TV show when it’s on, every week, one day a week, whatever it is, and you get a certain impression of what something means in that TV show, a trope in the TV show, or a common line in the TV show, that has a different effect on you. If you engage with it, we’ll say at the moment, then it does if you binge watch it later. And that’s just a function of the information and how quickly you’re observing it and how well you’re absorbing it. And so the context of the time when it was aired might be completely different from the context of the time when somebody watches it, right? But if two people watch it at different time frames, say five years apart, one year apart, ten years apart, that line may have a different meaning to them, ultimately. Now the meme may still work, right? Because it points two of those sorts of things together usually, or one scene with words, right? Or the scene contrasting two sets of contrasted words. All those are regular meme formats. What’ll happen is, the meme may still work, but it’s actually driving a different meaning for each viewer. And it’s only slightly different, so they can sort of ha ha, right? But just because I find something funny and you found something funny doesn’t mean we found the same thing funny, all right? It may be that we found it funny for different reasons. And that happens all the time actually, if you pay attention. So memes are the same way. They don’t sort of guarantee that you’re going to find it funny in the same way, even though you both laugh. And then of course, again, the information’s temporary. So a meme with a puppet in it, and you don’t know the puppet, but you can derive it from the flavor of the meme, is different from if you know the puppet from where it came from, or the scene in the movie, or the particular character in the TV show, whatever it is, right? These things can be derived after the fact from the context, but they’re not going to be as exact as they would be if you had the fullness of the character in mind, right? And so there’s a lot of drift. So memes don’t transform anything, right? Just look, entertainment is fine, no problem with it. Memes are very entertaining, they can be funny. You need to be funny, jokes are funny, jokes are good, you need laughter, you need amusement, right? But they don’t get you through to the transformation that you need, right? They don’t get you through to a change. They don’t take you out of where you’re at and bring you to a bigger and better place where you can deal with more stuff or deal with your problems better or whatever. They don’t do that, explicitly, I would say, they explicitly don’t do that. And so that can be a problem with memes. It might not be a problem, but I think it is. I think it’s a problem in almost all cases. So that’s worth noting. So how do we resolve this sort of with a more religious frame with spirit? Well, spirit’s been around a long time. Spirit can have a negative or a positive or a neutral affect, right? All three are possible. Spirit implies a realm, and I think this is really the key. When you’re trying to explain things in terms of materiality or physicality, you’re missing the things, right? You’re missing how the world actually works, because the materiality or physicality has to be located somewhere in something. And that has to have space for the materiality or physicality to A, emerge, B, interact with other physicality and materiality to form new things. So it’s like, whoa, where’s that space? And I would say that’s the space of potential or the ethereal realm. So you’ve got sort of material realm and you’ve got the ethereal realm. And you need both. You can’t have one without the other. It doesn’t make any sense. And you can process the world as though it’s all material, but you’re gonna run into problems and then you’re gonna need a new word like egregore or spirit to explain how things are working, right? And that’s gonna lead to these memes. And again, memes are pointing at things. So how do you point at something in the material realm? Because the thing you’re using to point with is probably not material, right? And you can use an arrow, and you may make an arrow out of material, but what’s doing the pointing is the concept of direction, right? And the starting and stopping point of the symbol, right, of the arrow. And so it’s sort of important to know that it’s really just a kind of a symbol, and it’s not an actual material object in the world that you can sort of grab onto. So memes are pointing from somewhere to something somewhere else, maybe multiple places, but basically it’s a linear set of connections. Whereas spirits, there’s an ethereal realm, right? This is where pointers happen. This is where symbolism is. This is how material makes sense to us, right? Because if there’s no realm of thought, there’s no realm of pure ethereality or non-materiality, then we can’t play with ideas. We can’t think. We can’t project. We can’t predict. We can’t let our ideas die so that we don’t have to, as Jordan Peterson has found to say, there’s no way to do that, because there’s no place to do that. That’s why you need an ethereal realm. Now there’s a way in which you can stay too far in the material. Okay, again, you end up in agregores, right, in spirits and memes. Or you can stay too far in the ethereal, where you’re just totally in your head. And you’re, you know, oh, utopia is possible, because I can see it in my mind’s eye, but your mind’s eye is not constrained by the material, right? By whatever created material is out there, right? And there are limits. There are limits in that world. There are no limits in your mind. You can, you can come up with whatever you need to or whatever you want to in your mind pretty easily. And I’ve talked about this before, this magical thinking idea, where that’s what happens. People are totally in the ethereal realm. They’re not dealing with materiality. They’re not dealing with restriction. They’re not dealing with constraint. They’re just imagining sort of the laws of nature can work differently. You know, all the animals can get along together and sing kumbaya. That’s not possible, right? Animals have to eat other animals, right? All animals can’t be vegetarians. Like, you know, there are limitations to the world. You know, there are poisonous snakes and spiders in the world, and they bite animals and people, and that’s bad, and there’s not much you can do about it, right? And so there, there may be an imaginary realm in your head where nature is friendly to you all the time, but nature’s not friendly to you all the time. I mean, sure, nature provides you with things that you need to eat, that you’re adapted to, which came first, the adaptation of the nature. I mean, you know, it doesn’t really matter at some point, right? Maybe, maybe the adaptation, maybe we adapted and nature came along for the ride, or maybe a little bit of both, right? So it’s hard to know, but it doesn’t matter. The fact of the matter is there’s a good aspect to nature and a bad aspect to nature. And there’s probably a lot of neutral aspects to nature too, and we just have to be aware of that, right? We have to understand that that’s a thing and that there’s no way around having sort of two realms, the material realm and the ethereal realm, with different restrictions. And I think the restrictions in the ethereal realm are you cannot share exact ideas in your head, right? You lose accuracy and precision. In favor of ideal forms, right? Back to Plato’s forms. And that’s okay, I’m fine with that. I think that’s cool, right? There’s one perfect triangle and only one and you only need one, right? In your head. There’s no perfect triangles and you need lots of triangles in the material world because drawing is hard and people are terrible at it. I know I’m terrible at it. And so they can’t draw perfect triangles or perfect circles or perfect squares or, right, those are all things that only exist in the singularity, right, in the universality of the ethereal realm. And when you don’t have that concept, it sneaks back in, in the form of egregore. Because why are people doing things? What is school spirit, right? School spirit is this way in which we cooperate and commune together. Not exactly, right, our sense of school spirit isn’t the same for all the people in the school, right? But it is a thing. Like you can’t say, oh, there’s no such thing as school spirit. That doesn’t exist. Something is there. We’re pointing at something and we can, we can kind of measure it in some sloppy way, right? And measurement doesn’t work well in the ethereal realm, right? That’s quantity. Quantity only works in the material realm. Quality is the realm of the ethereal, right? What’s a perfect triangle? Well, that’s a good question, but that’s in the ethereal realm, so we can’t really measure it very well, right? We can’t quantify it, right? It’s qualitative. It’s a qualitative feel for what’s beautiful, what’s good, and what’s perfect, for example, through transcendentals. And that’s why you need an ethereal realm. You need to understand what are the principles that people are cohering behind to form an egregore. And look, I mean, maybe those principles are demonic or parasitic or maybe those are the same thing even, who knows? So it’s sort of worth understanding. So when you’re talking about egregores, you’re just talking about spirits, probably bad spirits. When you’re talking about memes, you’re just talking about thoughts that are semi-connected to tropes, right? Whatever tropes, whatever feelings or understandings, but it’s very temporary. It doesn’t have that historical depth, that historical grounding that you really need to form a society. We can both laugh at the meme, but we can’t be transformed by it. We can’t be moved by it in the same way we’re moved by a piece of music. We can’t be set from where we are into a new place with a meme. And maybe not all memes, but maybe, right? Maybe most memes, and maybe that’s good enough, like trying to find it like a universal, all memes do this, or all memes never do that. Maybe that’s impossible, and maybe it’s irrelevant. Maybe what is relevant, though, is knowing what’s important and what’s not in terms of how to express these things. So there’s a way in which something like the zeitgeist is real. There is a zeitgeist, but what is the zeitgeist? I mean, it’s not an accurate, precise thing, right? But it’s definitely present in the world. There’s a way in which ideas spread to groups, and those groups adopt those ideas roughly around the same time, like Egregor. Right, Egregor’s part of the zeitgeist. But it’s also not accurate, precise. You can’t say, well, it takes this long to get from point A to point B, or from person A to person C, or whatever. You can’t do that. But people are very much thinking along the same lines. Why? Because they’re pointed in the same directions, right? Their attention is in the same place. And it’s attention, to some extent, that determines the spirit, although not entirely, because some spirits seem to move people without them really knowing. And that gets down a rabbit hole of what is attention, and maybe I’ll talk about that someday, but not in this video. So I just want you to be aware, the zeitgeist is something that exists in the ethereal realm. It’s something like what Carl Jung talks about with the collective unconscious, right? It’s definitely something to that concept. Can’t quite put my finger on it, but it’s correct in some important fashion. And that’s good to know. And so we’ve got that issue of that zeitgeist, of that way in which we’re moved by the same concepts around the same time and in very similar fashions. And Egregor is one of those things that injured the zeitgeist. And maybe not everybody’s in the zeitgeist, right? But maybe everybody’s affected by the zeitgeist to a greater or lesser degree. In order to get any of this to work, you have to acquiesce, you have to sort of submit the idea of a non-material realm, of an ethereal realm, where these ideas can happen. Where ideas can cohere, where there’s a level of perfection. There’s a level of similar quality, right? That can’t be the material realm, because things in the zeitgeist seem to spread almost without communication at all. And I don’t know what that is, I’m not gonna make any claims about that, but that seems to be what’s going on. And it’s good to know that that seems to be what’s going on, cuz that’s important. It’s important to realize that that might be something to pay attention to. So that’s the way in which I’m tying Egregor’s spirits and means together in the ethereal realm, right? That’s where the zeitgeist is, right? These concepts are all very similar, if not exactly the same. And they’re super important. It’s important to understand why people come up with new terms for things that we have existing terms for. Like if you’re allergic to Christianity, maybe you don’t wanna use the word spirit ever, right? Or if you’re allergic to woo, you don’t wanna use the word spirit, like you’re avoiding these non-material things. Woo is just the statement that there are non-material things in the world. Or maybe of a certain type. Maybe of a non-scientific type, a type we can’t get intersubjective agreement on. And that will lead me into a video I’m gonna do soon on what is it that people are talking about when they’re talking about science, cuz I think that’s important. Science is very much stuck in the realm of materiality, and a subset of it, not all materiality is subject to science. And that’s okay, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not to denigrate science or anything, it’s just to say that things have limits, and science is one of those things that has limits. And it’s limited within the material realm, right, to a subset of it. And so things that aren’t in the material realm, like ethereal things like the zeitgeist, well maybe you can’t science that. Maybe you can’t science spirits. Maybe you can’t science memes very easily, right? Maybe you can science some concepts, some ideas like equals MC squared. Maybe we can science that, but maybe we can’t science things that don’t have a material impact that is, we’ll say, universal. So how people react to the zeitgeist, how people react to memes, how people react to egregores, how people react to spirits, all seems to vary with the person. It doesn’t vary a huge amount, but it varies enough that it’s not measurable anymore, not with any accuracy or precision. And I think that’s okay, if it’s a little scary, but we live in an uncertain world. And that’s good, because uncertainty is the representation of potential. And potential’s wonderful. And so long as you believe that being is good, which I think it is, then potential is a wonderful thing. It can engender awe in you, right? It can engender that sense of excitement and that sense of happiness. And that sense that everything’s gonna be great, right? Even though things are uncertain, they could turn out way better than you expect. And that’s why you shouldn’t be worrying necessarily about egregores and spirits or even memes, except to know that they’re out there and that you have to watch out for them. But as long as you are paying careful attention to them and spending your attention wisely, they won’t have a negative effect on you, right? Or maybe they won’t have as negative an effect on you, and maybe that’s the best you can do, and maybe that’s good enough. So that’s all I wanted to say, to tie in egregore, spirits, and memes with the ethereal realm and the zeitgeist. I think these things are important to break down and understand. And so when you hear people say, egregore, just think spirit, just think demon spirit, right, what’s moving people. And egregore is moving them, right? And then realize, maybe when people are talking about egregores and they’re just actually talking about spirit, which is a much older word, with a much better history, more historical grounding, right? More historical depth, more depth of understanding, right? Maybe it’s important to realize that those people are ignoring a tradition and a way of handling what it is they’re trying to handle out of sheer spite, right? There’s no reason for it, they just don’t like it. They don’t want to be religious, they don’t want to woo or whatever, and it’s kind of silly. But that’s okay, people do things. We can help them maybe if we’re positive enough about it and sort of quietly self-correcting, but not ignoring, right? Not hiding. But we’re out there saying, I don’t know about that. Maybe there’s a better way to think about this. Maybe there are answers to these questions. And I think that’s important because the thing that you have that you can use with other people and with yourself is the thing that I also value the most when you watch my videos, which is your time and attention.