This is slightly tangential to your main point but seems important to interject:
I think you’re disoriented about what kind of thing an egregore is.
Like, near the end you say:
I bet that a core tenet of the Neo-Enlightenment project we’re trying to carry out will be building a culture inimical to egregores.
That doesn’t actually make sense. What’s a non-egregoric culture?
The whole point of the “egregore” term is to notice how biological metaphors apply to patterns of human behavior. So to the extent that we can talk about (say) cats “wanting” things or “trying to” make certain things happen, we can say the same thing about social movements and cultures and other groups.
You can’t get away from this. If there’s a big, powerful movement that starts to tear down all things identifiable as egregores… well, guess what kind of thing that movement is!
(Appropriately enough, it’d be a postmodern egregore, completely with postmodernism’s paradoxes and probably with postmodern strategies for avoiding facing those paradoxes. “Oh, nothing is absolutely true, huh? Is that claim absolutely true?” This glitch prevents postmodern egregores from becoming fully self-aware. Wokism being the loudest current example I know of.)
I don’t think this takes away from your main point. Some egregores really are about sweeping people up and blinding them, and I read you as pointing at something that opposes that kind of egregore.
I just want to note that even if you’re exactly right about your main point, it’d be because you’re describing something about the hyperobject ecosystem, not because you’ve identified something that prevents such an ecosystem from influencing you.
This is slightly tangential to your main point but seems important to interject:
I think you’re disoriented about what kind of thing an egregore is.
Like, near the end you say:
That doesn’t actually make sense. What’s a non-egregoric culture?
The whole point of the “egregore” term is to notice how biological metaphors apply to patterns of human behavior. So to the extent that we can talk about (say) cats “wanting” things or “trying to” make certain things happen, we can say the same thing about social movements and cultures and other groups.
You can’t get away from this. If there’s a big, powerful movement that starts to tear down all things identifiable as egregores… well, guess what kind of thing that movement is!
(Appropriately enough, it’d be a postmodern egregore, completely with postmodernism’s paradoxes and probably with postmodern strategies for avoiding facing those paradoxes. “Oh, nothing is absolutely true, huh? Is that claim absolutely true?” This glitch prevents postmodern egregores from becoming fully self-aware. Wokism being the loudest current example I know of.)
I don’t think this takes away from your main point. Some egregores really are about sweeping people up and blinding them, and I read you as pointing at something that opposes that kind of egregore.
I just want to note that even if you’re exactly right about your main point, it’d be because you’re describing something about the hyperobject ecosystem, not because you’ve identified something that prevents such an ecosystem from influencing you.