Swarms, Egregores, & Autocults – Part II
Let's continue where we left off and discuss morality in the context of: ego functions, evolution, economics.
If you haven’t yet please, read Part I. As a reminder: egregores, by way of autocults, provide swarms with the properties needed to enforce digital morality
Now that we have strong definitions of these three terms, let’s jump into some fields of study that frame how competing digital moralities are enforced.
1. Swarms achieve morality via its inverse, anti-morality
When it comes to swimming in the social media soup, the ability to streamline a barrage of memes into something an individual human can metabolize becomes an imperative. Egregores, as an interface for symbols, acquire this responsibility and co-curate patterns with the monekys-pressing-buttons to direct the latter’s attention toward meaningful images. We therefore see that, due to a paralyzing information flow rate, humans shift from deep and independent thinking to pattern matching.
One direct consequence of this, is that swarm participants tend easily to agree on what to be against, but not what to be for. Pick your favorite online tribe – academic bluechecks, dissident anons, crypto investors, Miami techbros, LawTube podcasters, fitness influencers, postmodern artists, doomer optimists, etc. – and notice that likely anything that unites them into a group is something they are against.
Anti-masks and anti-vax, anti-transwomen competing as men, anti-drag queen teachers, anti-white supremacists, anti-fascism, anti-China, anti-globalization, anti-rural states & counties, anti-Christianity, anti-abortion, anti-puberty blockers, and about 753 others.
While this ‘anti-morality’ is sufficient to provide enough cohesion for network-formation, it is ultimately an inversion of any genuine form of morality, so it can’t give rise to genuine community.
Additionally, what’s interesting is that only one form of ‘anti’-ism usually gets castigated: the networks warning about rapid and untested change are censured, cancelled, deplatformed. Because swarms are maximalist, and aren’t afraid of dying, the dangers of excess are not adjudicated. Suggesting the USA send $3B worth of unaudited weaponry to Ukraine is an anti-Russia stance warmly applauded by the swarm. Articulate a limiting principle, though, from a position of even mediocre clout, and the ban-hammer will come for you and your friends on a long enough timescale.
In contrast to a swarm, a person of sound mind possesses an ego that mediates between his more primitive elements of animal consciousness (i.e., his id), and the idealistic demands of his superego. On the sociopolitical scale, the traditional Western hierarchies of centuries past are in shambles, so most of the Western societal ego function has been outsourced to global corporations & charities – specifically, their HR departments. These institutions, quite the opposite of being well-socialized, are predatory.
The outcome? A swarm morality with the emotional valence of a hormonal teenager combined with the Calvinist rebuke of any public behavior that fails to meet impeccable standards. The fight over this digital ego function is where all the investment occurs, and whence all egregores emerge.
2. Egregoric phylogeny recapitulates within ontogeny
Of course, since you are reading this (I’m assuming you live in the West – but even if not, the swarm is coming for you), you already know that Twitter / Facebook / Instagram hijacks your limbic system by subjecting it to and endless fusillade of viral content. As John Robb describes, the law of conservation of freakout mandates that the all the built up hysterical energy be directed toward ever newer targets (🏳️🌈 → ✊🏿 → 😷 → 🏳️⚧️ → 🇺🇦 ).
Everyone’s question is – how and when does the hysteresis stop? The big-brain title phrase of this section, spoken by Jordan Hall, offers a way out. Let’s break it down.
Phylogeny describes a species’ evolutionary ancestry. Ontogeny refers to the development of an organism from birth to maturity to senescence. The traversal of ecological meta-landscape starting from single-cells → eukaryotes → aquatic lifeforms → reptiles and amphibians → land mammals → primates & marsupials eventually resulted in Homo sapiens. The cool thing is that this entire speciation process is repeated within the progression of an individual instance of the species! A human traverses its biological meta-landscape from fertilized egg → multicellular blastula → amniotic embryo and fetus → nursing newborn → monkey-like child and teenager → fully formed adult human.
In other words, phylogeny recapitulates within ontogeny. The unfolding that led to the emergence new class, X, recapitulates in an essential manner when an instance of X is realized.
Thus, if we are currently caught in a limbically-mediated war of egregores, it would help to look at the Western moral phylogeny, to predict the next metaphysical step in the Western egregore’s ontogeny. That is to say, studying the transition from Greco-Roman polytheistic city-states → the formation of Empire → the collapse into Dark Ages → wide adoption of monotheism → replacement of medieval mysticism with empirical rationalism, and so on; is instructive. Whatever trends & forces infused Western history with this ‘progression’ is prone to recapitulate in the current egregoric battlefield.
3. Autocultic subpopulations answer to a process of price discovery
Having established that egregores are warring on an evolutionary and ecological meme meta-landscape, Patrick Ryan steps forward to characterize their autocultic mechanics in the language of economics.
Recall that human energy-emotion is the underlying protocol of communication, and that symbols are the most energy efficient way of transmitting energy-emotion to be coded and deconstructed by cybernetic agents. Smartphones and users, generating and distributing highly information-dense symbols, create a rapid economy of morality akin to high-frequency trading (HFT). Indeed, in a literal sense, the algorithms that mediate billions of NASDAQ transactions per hour are meaningfully synonymous to the ones that mediate billions of memetic transactions.
If you’ve ever tried your hand at day trading, you are familiar with the brutal process – known as price discovery – of supply and demand curves dancing around each other until an ask/sell equilibrium is achieved. Discussing belief systems via this mechanism sounds heretical because for humans, faith is a primary source of meaning, not a commodity to be exchanged. Nevertheless, your handheld device is commoditizing your beliefs in the same way it commoditizes everything from fertilizer, to oil futures, to lithium ion batteries, to Goldman Sachs’ quarterly performance.
In this ‘marketplace of morality’ an autocult refers precisely to that which seeks to maximize its subpopulation’s moral purchase power and lower its transaction costs on moral propagation: a subpopulation which controls chokepoints such as ‘fund settlement’, ‘underwriting’, and ‘throughput’ controls an entire section of the digital network. What is slacktivism other than a cheap method of lavish virtue signaling? Furthermore, the autocult that ascends to monopoly status, whether through organic virality or centralized imposition, earns the privilege of imposing price controls on its own subpopulation and its moral competitors.
Is it any wonder why Congress and SCOTUS hang the anti-trust hammer over Facebook, threatening Zuckerberg with giant fines over misinformation, so that he racks his robot cranium for ways to comply with their moral imperatives? Moral cartels are going to behave identically to other cartels, even in the liberalized and Enlightened West.
4. And, finally, let’s not forget about China and India.
I’ve focused on the West until now, since that’s the cultural and physical space these four Stoa gentleman – and I – occupy. However, it would be foolish to ignore how the egoism, evolution and economics of (anti-)morality will play out in the East in the 21st century. My next installment will focus on the gentlemen’s dialogue over Chinese & Indian counterparts in the context of swarms, egregores, and autocults.
I hope you enjoyed this one – take some time to digest it and wait with bated breath for the next one!
great reading , yes but the maxim of "faith is a primary source of meaning, not a commodity to be exchanged..." holds true only when there is no trust ..trust is that commodity that really gives faith any meaning& thus makes it "fungible " ...yet faith & trust are not the same .
And a " monkey like child " would have to have a pig,s heart transplanted if They were due for serious heart surgery & it could not be done with a monkey,s heart ...maybe we never came from monkeys but someone tried making pigs out of us with some success ...Galileo ,Copernicus ,Darwin ,Einstein ,Cox ,DeGrasse Tyson!? Gatekeepers or Pig Farmers with a gate ??!..all the best from Cornwall UK .