So if we look at the egregore as having a flavor of agency and intention… this egregore demands constant extraction of resources from the earth. It demands people want things it doesn’t need (consumer culture). It disempowers or destroys anything that manages to avoid it or escape it (e.g. self-sufficient villages, cultures that don’t participate) - there’s an extinction of hunter-gatherer lifestyles going on; there’s legally mandated taking of children from villages in order to indoctrinate them into civilization (in Malaysia anyway; China is doing a ‘nicer’ version). There’s energy-company goons that go into rainforests and chase out tribes from their homes in order to take their land. This egregore does not care about life or the planet.
You are welcome to disagree of course, this is just one perspective.
I dunno what to call this one, but it’s got Marxist roots
There’s an egregore that feeds off class division. So right now, there’s a bunch of these going on at once. The following are ‘crudely defined’ and I don’t mean them super literally, but just trying to point at some of the dividing lines, as examples: Feminists vs privileged white men. Poor blacks vs white cops. The 99% vs the 1%. Rural vs urban. This egregore wants everyone to feel persecuted. All these different class divisions feed into the same egregore.
Do the rationalists feel persecuted / victimized? Oh yeah. Like, not literally all of them, but I’d say a significant chunk of them. Maybe most of them. So they haven’t successfully seen through this one.
power-granting religion, broadly construed
Christianity is historically the main example of a religious egregore. But a newer contender is ‘scientism’. Scientism is not the true art of science and doesn’t resemble it at all. Scientism has ordained priests that have special access to journals (knowledge) and special privileges that give them the ability to publish in those esoteric texts. Governments, corporations, and the egregores mentioned above want control over these priests. Sometimes buying their own.
Obviously this egregore doesn’t benefit from ordinary people having critical thinking skills and the ability to evaluate the truth for themselves. It dissuades people from trying by creating high barriers to entry and making its texts hard or time-consuming to comprehend. It gets away with a lot of shit by having a strong brand. The integrity behind that brand has significantly degraded, over the decades.
These three egregores benefit from people feeling powerless, worthless, or apathetic (malware). Basically the opposite of heroic, worthy, and compassionate (liberated, loving sovereignty). Helping to start uninstalling the malware is, like, one of the things CFAR has to do in order to even start having conversations about AI with most people.
And, unfortunately… like… often, buying into one of these egregores (usually this would be unconsciously done) actually makes a person more effective. Sometimes quite ‘successful’ according to the egregore’s standards (rich, powerful, well-respected, etc). The egregores know how to churn out ‘effective’ people. But these people are ‘effective’ in service to the egregore. They’re not necessarily effective outside of that context.
So, any sincere and earnest movement has to contend with this eternal temptation:
Do we sell out? By how much?
The egregore tempts you with its multitude of resources. To some extent, I think you have to engage. Since you’re trying to ultimately change the direction of history, right?
This egregore wants everyone to feel persecuted. … Do the rationalists feel persecuted / victimized? Oh yeah. … So they haven’t successfully seen through this one.
Note that this doesn’t follow. It might be, for example, that the egregore causes (some) people to feel persecuted by causing them to be persecuted.
(Admittedly I’m not sure I know what it means to “see through” an egregore. Like, if you “see through” capitalism, you… recognize capitalism as an egregore that demands etc.? You recognize that there may be other ways to organize a society, though you may or may not think any of those other ways are preferable all things considered? You want fewer things that you don’t need?
But presumably, “seeing through” it doesn’t extract you from your capitalist society, if you live in one; you still need a job to get money, and you still need money to purchase goods and services, and so on. And if you don’t live in a capitalist society but a capitalist society is coming to take your land and separate you from your children, “seeing through” capitalism doesn’t protect you from that either.
And so presumably, “seeing through” an egregore that wants you to feel persecuted, doesn’t make you not-persecuted. It might make you not-feel-persecuted if you’re in-fact not persecuted.)
I dunno if I was clear enough here about what it means to feel persecuted.
So the way I’m using that phrase, ‘feeling persecuted’ is not desirable whether you are actually being persecuted or not.
‘Feeling persecuted’ means feeling helpless, powerless, or otherwise victimized. Feeling like the universe is against you or your tribe, and that things are (in some sense) inherently bad and may forever be bad, and that nothing can be done.
If, indeed, you are part of a group that has fewer rights and privileges than the dominant groups, you can acknowledge to yourself “my people don’t have the same rights as other people” but you don’t have to feel any sense of persecution around that. You can just see that it is true and happening, without feeling helpless and like something is inherently broken or that you are inherently broken.
Seeing through the egregore would help a person realize that ‘oh there is an egregore feeding on my beliefs about being persecuted but it’s not actually a fundamental truth about the world; things can actually be different; and I’m not defined by my victimhood. maybe i should stop feeding this egregore with these thoughts and feelings that don’t actually help anything or anyone and isn’t really an accurate representation of reality anyway.’
So I don’t really want to get into this, my note was about the structure of the argument rather than factual claims about the world. But...
I think I feel motte-and-baileyed? When I read your original comment with the term “feel persecuted” I’m like “eh, dunno, sounds plausible I guess?”. When I read it trying to substitute in the definition you give I’m like ”...mm, skeptical”.
Like I get that jargon sometimes just has that effect, I’m not currently saying you shouldn’t use that term with that meaning. But that’s my reaction.
(If you do want a different hook to use, it sounds like “feel persecuted, and also be clinically depressed” is tongue-in-cheek kinda close to what you describe? Though bringing in the concept of “depression”, and especially “clinical” depression, may not help see things clearly either.)
No, it’s definitely not about being depressed. That’s very far from it. But I also don’t want to argue about the claims here. Seems maybe beside the point.
I think I could reword my original argument in a way that wouldn’t be a problem. I just wasn’t careful in my languaging, but I personally think it’s fine? I think you might be reading a lot into my usage of the word “So”.
Scientism has ordained priests that have special access to journals (knowledge) and special privileges that give them the ability to publish in those esoteric texts.
The Ivermectin case seemed that journals are not important to Scientism. Nobody cared about peer-reviewed meta-analysis when those went counter to institutional positions.
Could you clarify what egregores you meant when you said:
The main ones are:
modern capitalism / the global economy
So if we look at the egregore as having a flavor of agency and intention… this egregore demands constant extraction of resources from the earth. It demands people want things it doesn’t need (consumer culture). It disempowers or destroys anything that manages to avoid it or escape it (e.g. self-sufficient villages, cultures that don’t participate) - there’s an extinction of hunter-gatherer lifestyles going on; there’s legally mandated taking of children from villages in order to indoctrinate them into civilization (in Malaysia anyway; China is doing a ‘nicer’ version). There’s energy-company goons that go into rainforests and chase out tribes from their homes in order to take their land. This egregore does not care about life or the planet.
You are welcome to disagree of course, this is just one perspective.
I dunno what to call this one, but it’s got Marxist roots
There’s an egregore that feeds off class division. So right now, there’s a bunch of these going on at once. The following are ‘crudely defined’ and I don’t mean them super literally, but just trying to point at some of the dividing lines, as examples: Feminists vs privileged white men. Poor blacks vs white cops. The 99% vs the 1%. Rural vs urban. This egregore wants everyone to feel persecuted. All these different class divisions feed into the same egregore.
Do the rationalists feel persecuted / victimized? Oh yeah. Like, not literally all of them, but I’d say a significant chunk of them. Maybe most of them. So they haven’t successfully seen through this one.
power-granting religion, broadly construed
Christianity is historically the main example of a religious egregore. But a newer contender is ‘scientism’. Scientism is not the true art of science and doesn’t resemble it at all. Scientism has ordained priests that have special access to journals (knowledge) and special privileges that give them the ability to publish in those esoteric texts. Governments, corporations, and the egregores mentioned above want control over these priests. Sometimes buying their own.
Obviously this egregore doesn’t benefit from ordinary people having critical thinking skills and the ability to evaluate the truth for themselves. It dissuades people from trying by creating high barriers to entry and making its texts hard or time-consuming to comprehend. It gets away with a lot of shit by having a strong brand. The integrity behind that brand has significantly degraded, over the decades.
These three egregores benefit from people feeling powerless, worthless, or apathetic (malware). Basically the opposite of heroic, worthy, and compassionate (liberated, loving sovereignty). Helping to start uninstalling the malware is, like, one of the things CFAR has to do in order to even start having conversations about AI with most people.
And, unfortunately… like… often, buying into one of these egregores (usually this would be unconsciously done) actually makes a person more effective. Sometimes quite ‘successful’ according to the egregore’s standards (rich, powerful, well-respected, etc). The egregores know how to churn out ‘effective’ people. But these people are ‘effective’ in service to the egregore. They’re not necessarily effective outside of that context.
So, any sincere and earnest movement has to contend with this eternal temptation:
Do we sell out? By how much?
The egregore tempts you with its multitude of resources. To some extent, I think you have to engage. Since you’re trying to ultimately change the direction of history, right?
Still, ahhh, tough. Tough call. Tricky.
Note that this doesn’t follow. It might be, for example, that the egregore causes (some) people to feel persecuted by causing them to be persecuted.
(Admittedly I’m not sure I know what it means to “see through” an egregore. Like, if you “see through” capitalism, you… recognize capitalism as an egregore that demands etc.? You recognize that there may be other ways to organize a society, though you may or may not think any of those other ways are preferable all things considered? You want fewer things that you don’t need?
But presumably, “seeing through” it doesn’t extract you from your capitalist society, if you live in one; you still need a job to get money, and you still need money to purchase goods and services, and so on. And if you don’t live in a capitalist society but a capitalist society is coming to take your land and separate you from your children, “seeing through” capitalism doesn’t protect you from that either.
And so presumably, “seeing through” an egregore that wants you to feel persecuted, doesn’t make you not-persecuted. It might make you not-feel-persecuted if you’re in-fact not persecuted.)
I dunno if I was clear enough here about what it means to feel persecuted.
So the way I’m using that phrase, ‘feeling persecuted’ is not desirable whether you are actually being persecuted or not.
‘Feeling persecuted’ means feeling helpless, powerless, or otherwise victimized. Feeling like the universe is against you or your tribe, and that things are (in some sense) inherently bad and may forever be bad, and that nothing can be done.
If, indeed, you are part of a group that has fewer rights and privileges than the dominant groups, you can acknowledge to yourself “my people don’t have the same rights as other people” but you don’t have to feel any sense of persecution around that. You can just see that it is true and happening, without feeling helpless and like something is inherently broken or that you are inherently broken.
Seeing through the egregore would help a person realize that ‘oh there is an egregore feeding on my beliefs about being persecuted but it’s not actually a fundamental truth about the world; things can actually be different; and I’m not defined by my victimhood. maybe i should stop feeding this egregore with these thoughts and feelings that don’t actually help anything or anyone and isn’t really an accurate representation of reality anyway.’
So I don’t really want to get into this, my note was about the structure of the argument rather than factual claims about the world. But...
I think I feel motte-and-baileyed? When I read your original comment with the term “feel persecuted” I’m like “eh, dunno, sounds plausible I guess?”. When I read it trying to substitute in the definition you give I’m like ”...mm, skeptical”.
Like I get that jargon sometimes just has that effect, I’m not currently saying you shouldn’t use that term with that meaning. But that’s my reaction.
(If you do want a different hook to use, it sounds like “feel persecuted, and also be clinically depressed” is tongue-in-cheek kinda close to what you describe? Though bringing in the concept of “depression”, and especially “clinical” depression, may not help see things clearly either.)
No, it’s definitely not about being depressed. That’s very far from it. But I also don’t want to argue about the claims here. Seems maybe beside the point.
I think I could reword my original argument in a way that wouldn’t be a problem. I just wasn’t careful in my languaging, but I personally think it’s fine? I think you might be reading a lot into my usage of the word “So”.
The Ivermectin case seemed that journals are not important to Scientism. Nobody cared about peer-reviewed meta-analysis when those went counter to institutional positions.