Fanaticism as ‘Instrument of Resurrection’—Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer”

I just finished reading Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, first published in 1951, a few years after the start of the Cold War.  I found this book at a Kiwanis Thrift Shop, languishing in the “classics” section.  Maybe you have had this experience: a book you have not been looking for or never heard of falls into your hands at exactly the right moment, when you are ready to read about its particular subject.  Sort of a when-the-student-is-ready-the-teacher-will-appear¹ moment.  In my experience, albeit limited, Hoffer’s book is one of the most serious books I’ve read lately. It was regarded as highly influential when it first appeared, over half a century ago.

The True Believer² is dense with insights about human social behavior, especially as it pertains to political and religious movements, war, and culture—it’s about mass movements in general.  Hoffer’s book is thoughtful, systematic, theoretical—and terrifying.     It makes a good companion to Berger and Luckman’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966), which, if you can wade through the academese, also contains some startling observations about what constitutes knowledge and truth in society. 

Hoffer’s book is grim and cynical; the author has a fondness for irony and paradox in human social interactions, often calling out behaviors and thought patterns that achieve exactly the opposite of what might be expected.  Since his book was published at the beginning of the Cold War, and less than a decade after World War II, one might expect Hoffer to go after Communists, Nazis and fascists, but he doesn’t spare religious or capitalist inspired movements either. He is examining what he considers a universal human capacity—and psychological vulnerability—for mass movements of all kinds.  

For example, he delights in quoting Martin Luther, the great leader of the Protestant Reformation, to show how partisan zeal, even religious enthusiasm can be counterbalanced and sustained by murderous hatred:   

“When my heart is cold and I cannot pray as I should I scourge myself with the thought of the impiety and ingratitude of my enemies, the Pope and his accomplices and vermin, and Zwingli, so that my heart swells with righteous indignation and hatred and I can say with warmth and vehemence:  ‘Holy be Thy Name, Thy Kingdom Come, Thy will be done!” 

Yikes! 

Hoffer’s premise is that people who join mass movements are frustrated and disappointed with their lives, and themselves.  They have little hope for the future, and so readily subsume their own individuality in service to a movement and its leader.  In this way they escape themselves (“…from an ineffectual self…”) and their misery, while slavishly hoping for the brighter future promised by the social movement they have joined.  Fortified with a purpose in life and hope for an idealized future, members of mass movements are capable of great devotion and self-sacrifice—as well as grotesque violence and aggression. 

Who would join a mass movement?  Well, pretty much all of us would to some degree, depending on the circumstances of our lives and prevailing social and economic conditions.  Hoffer devotes a section of the book—“The Potential Converts”—to describing all the different types of people who would be attracted to mass movements, among them the poor, as one might immediately suspect, since they may have little investment in the status quo.

But not all the poor.  The abjectly impoverished, being consumed with the very purposeful struggle for survival, are immune to the appeal of mass movements.  It’s the recently impoverished, resentful of what they have lost, or struggling artisans whose creative impulse has been stymied by circumstances, who are most susceptible among the poor.   

Hoffer also lists social misfits, selfish people, “the ambitious facing unlimited opportunities”, minorities, “the bored”, and sinners as ready recruits for an emerging mass movement.  He casts a wide net, and many of us I suspect could easily fall into it.   

He reserves a special place in mass movements for writers and intellectuals.  He writes: 

“It is easy to see how the faultfinding man³ of words, by persistent ridicule and denunciation, shakes prevailing beliefs and loyalties, and familiarizes the masses with the idea of change.  What is not so obvious is the process by which the discrediting of existing beliefs and institutions makes possible the rise of a new fanatical faith.  For it is a remarkable fact that the militant man of words who ‘sounds the established order to its source to mark its want of authority and justice’ often prepares the ground not for a society of freethinking individuals but for a corporate society that cherishes utmost unity and blind faith…” 

Cancel culture comes to mind, along with various extremist ideologies currently promulgated by people on both the left and the right. 

What kind of person leads an emerging mass movement?  According to Hoffer, three types of individuals are needed: “A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics, and consolidated by men of action”.  The fanatic’s role is key, in that he or she serves as catalyst and leads the initial assault on institutions in need of radical change.  But this individual becomes a liability later, a source of dissension, chaos, and factions.   

Hoffer again: “If allowed to have their way, the fanatics may split a movement into schism and heresies which threaten its existence.  Even when the fanatics do not breed dissension, they can still wreck the movement by driving it to attempt the impossible…” 

Does this remind you of anyone? 

Hoffer’s analysis of mass movements and those who join or lead them has some relevance to egregoric phenomena, insofar as a mass movement, an “ism” of some kind, alters the perceptions of its worshipful adherents and directs their behavior toward some end that is independent of its followers.  

Communism, capitalism, evangelicalism, nationalism, scientism—so many isms!—can all become idols that enthrall their followers, especially if such “isms” become personified: Stalinism, McCarthyism, Calvinism, Trumpism, and many others.⁴ Egregores and mass movements are not the same thing, but the social psychological and material aspects of their formation are comparable, and they seem to be complementary processes.      

It’s not surprising that Hoffer’s perspective would be a dark one. He wrote The True Believer just as the world was recovering from the trauma of a World War, and the Cold War was beginning. He offers no encouraging recommendations or solutions for the hazards of mass movements, other than an implied admonition to be aware of their nature.  Hoffer’s book has great relevance today, in a fractured society of partisans seeking charismatic leaders they can dedicate themselves to—and easily identified enemies they can viscerally hate.   

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¹A quote often ascribed to Buddha, but likely to have originated with Theosophists. 

²The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer (1951, 1963) 

³Apparently there were no “faultfinding women of words” in the 1950s, though their existence was suspected by some. 

⁴ “The human heart is a perpetual idol factory.”—John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, (1536). 

Egregores Part Five–Some Speculations

This post concludes a five-part series about egregores.  Earlier I offered several different perspectives about egregores, proposed a working definition of the phenomena, and described both the natural history of egregores and their pervasiveness in society. In this last installment I want to collect several speculations and theoretical questions for future exploration.  I will simply list them below, with a few remarks after each.  I welcome comments from readers who may have insights to share. 

•What is the role of metaphorical thinking in the creation and maintenance of egregores?  Readers are probably familiar with the term metaphor as it relates to the interpretation of poetry and other kinds of literature.  But here we are talking about an overarching process of perception and understanding.   

Metaphorical thinking involves a comparison of something complex, unfamiliar or incomprehensible to something more concrete, mundane, and useful.  Forming a metaphor involves translating or mapping superficial similarities from the unknown to the known.  Thus, we say things like “the mind is like a computer”; it seems to have “circuits” and “files” and “memory storage” like the computers we use every day.  Is the mind an actual computer?  Probably not, and the metaphor simplifies the actual complexity and subtleness of the mind.   

Metaphors masquerade as knowledge or wisdom, when in fact they are merely tentative comparisons of new to old information, a preliminary impression until a deeper understanding comes about.  Their chief value, for better or worse, is to determine subsequent perceptions and behavior in response to the object or phenomena described by the metaphor.   

Does it matter whether we perceive our relationship with China as an athletic event—they are our economic “competitors”—rather than a military conflict—they are our “enemies”.  Would our future actions be different depending on which metaphor we chose?  

Metaphorical thinking seems involved in the formation and maintenance of egregores, especially those that are personified and anthropomorphized: think of “mother nature”, or “big brother”.  These two are not quite egregores according to our earlier definition, but conceivably could become so under certain circumstances.   Is “nature” our mother?  Is a 1984-style totalitarian government our brother?  If we answer yes to these metaphors, how does this affect our behavior towards nature, or government?  

•To what extent is the unconscious mind, through dreaming, involved in the formation of egregores?  Recent dream research suggests that the cycles of REM and NREM during sleep are associated with the culling, collation and strengthening of neuronal pathways that form the neurological substrate of memories.  The process seems to involve matching new experiences with old ones, translating immediate or short-term memories into long term storage, presumably based on some similarity between the old and new.   

This implies a comparison of some sort.  Is this the neurological basis for the highly metaphoric imagery that we experience in dreams?  It’s a short jump from here to the metaphoric content of dreams, nightmares, poetry, literature and other creative cultural products, including egregores. 

Or, from a psychoanalytic perspective, are egregores simply projections of repressed or unexpressed parts of the unconscious, internal subjective experiences rather than external phenomena?  Because egregores are socially mediated and require groups of people focused on their manifestation, is the entity really a collective projection of some psycholgical or emotional issue its followers share? 

•How do social media and related communication technologies impact the life cycle of an egregore?  At the very least social media would expedite the formation of such an entity by disseminating its stigmata rapidly, attracting new members, and facilitating the repetitive, ritualistic homage paid to it.  

Critical to this process is a “naming event”, which allows the undifferentiated “energy” of an emerging egregore to enter the language, everyday discourse, and so begin to affect perceptions, thoughts, and actions.  The naming event lays the groundwork for a socially mediated invocation of whatever kind of egregore is being summoned.  Collectively we ask, “What are we calling this thing?” 

The relationship between society and its various egregores—mediated through social media and communication technologies in general—is symbiotic.  The increasing dissolution of boundaries between private and public life, the transformation of life into simulations of life patterned on media imagery or virtual realities, the confusion of reality and fantasy, of information and disinformation—all these contribute to the demise of a shared perception of reality.  This creates an ideal habitat for egregores to grow and develop. 

There are other questions I have, too many to go into much depth here: Is sensitivity to what Jung calls synchronicity a prerequisite for experiencing egregores? Are egregores also sustained by everyday cognitive habits like “confirmation bias” and the like?  Do some egregores emerge from specific geographical locations because of local history, social conditions, and characteristics of the natural environment?  (That is, are they a form of genius loci?)  I could go on, but I’ll stop for now… 

It seems—to me at least—that a systematic study of egregores would be timely and relevant to our contemporary predicament: the erosion of a shared sense of reality, the demise of some workable consensus about what constitutes truth, and what is desirable in our society.  Given what we may know or suspect about egregores, what if anything should be done?  Or as the prophet Ezekial asks, “How then shall we live?” Right now, it seems best to remain vigilant and self-aware. 

Egregores Part Four–In Society

The last three posts discussed approaches to the study of egregoric phenomena, offered a working definition of egregore, and made preliminary remarks about whether egregores can be considered alive and able to act independently of the minds that formed them from indeterminate “energy”. 

This is the fourth installment of a series I’m tempted to call an attempt at systematic “egregorology”, which I admit sounds a bit grandiose. In this post I will briefly discuss the importance of egregores in history and society—a very broad and unwieldy subject. A clear focus and some parameters will help in covering this ground; any survey of egregoric influences in society cannot be exhaustive. (If this project ever morphs from blog to book, “Egregores in Society” would surely occupy the longest chapter.)  

When I first started the Egregoric Times I wrote a few early posts about egregores in politics, horror literature, and religion. These are just three of many examples of their pervasiveness in society. One can find similar phenomena operating in many institutions, the work setting, in culture, and in economics.  

In fact, almost any endeavor involving organized human social behavior can generate egregores, particularly in situations where there is lack of consensus among groups, and the way forward through some problem or conflict is unclear, complicated, foggy, or undifferentiated. Where to start?  

I could begin at the very beginning—with the account in Genesis, or one of several other creation mythologies—in which a parental god calls forth the world from the amorphous, primordial chaos. No one has ever observed the creation of the earth, much less the universe, but the notion of how it was done—the making and forming and naming of indeterminate matter by a primeval deity—shows some consistency across cultures.   

Is this narrative the model for subsequent human attempts to do something similar at a local level? To “play God” and summon things that may accomplish our will—at least for a while?  

It seems that egregores are the source material for gods, ghosts, demons and other personified supernatural forces. What then follows in history are ever more elaborate rituals for their invocation and worship, and sooner or later, a theology. The inevitable sectarian violence that continues to plague us can be seen as competition among rival egregores over time. 

(Many consider it blasphemous to believe that the Divine is a creation of the human imagination. Out of deference and respect to monotheists—of which I am one—I would clarify: the Divine itself is not a creation of mortals, but its image—the perception fallible humans have of the Divine—almost certainly is an egregore. Hence the prohibition in several faith traditions against the making of “graven images” which can often lead to idolatry, that horror of the Old Testament.) 

In conventional religious practice, as well as in various occult and esoteric traditions, an egregoric entity may be invoked or evoked intentionally by followers. But can this process occur inadvertently? Could an egregore develop and evolve beneath the consciousness of those who later submit to its influence? By accident, or stealth?  

This is a familiar trope in horror entertainment—the fear of “being taken over” by some mysterious and unnamed force, to be possessed and controlled. This prevalent and recurring theme in horror and science fiction may reflect broader social anxiety about phenomena that we experience collectively, and to which we succumb. 

Outside of religious expression and interaction with the supernatural, egregores appear in disturbing secular experiences as well: extremist political movements, xenophobia, warfare, economic oppression, and celebrity cults, among others.  Insofar as they influence and direct collective human behavior, egregores can be powerful “influencers”, and potentially dangerous.  

Here in the United States, we are approaching a tumultuous political year, at a time of rapid social and technological change. There is a lack of consensus about the direction our nation should take on various issues, even a lack of consensus about reality itself. These are ideal conditions for the formation of egregores.  

Will we retain a modicum of self-awareness and self-restraint, or will we submit to being manipulated by forms of thought and perception we are barely conscious of? In these troubled times, what sort of entity will our society unwittingly conjure and empower with our devotion? 

Next time I will collect some untidy and discomforting speculations about the nature of egregores. 

The Return of Little (and Big) Green Men

Maybe you heard recently of an interesting discovery off the coast of Papua New Guinea.¹ Back in 2014, a “runaway fireball” exploded in the lower atmosphere over this region of the Pacific, with bits of what was later named IM1—“interstellar meteor one”—falling into the ocean.  The speed and trajectory of the fireball indicated an interstellar origin, that is, it came from outside our solar system.   

This year, a Harvard professor and his crew of scientists dragged what was basically an enormous underwater magnet along the original path of the fireball, gathering about 35 milligrams of an unusual material².  Ironically, the stuff from outer space had to be examined with a microscope instead of a telescope.  Scientists discovered very tiny, dust-like spherules, 50 in all, that resembled tiny drops of blood.   

The spherules possessed unusual solidity and strength, unlike space rocks examined previously by NASA, and different from anything likely to be found on Earth or nearby planets.  This is probably because They Came From Beyond Space³.  The leader of the research project believes that the material either came from “…a natural environment different from the solar system, or an extraterrestrial technological civilization.” 

In a follow-up to an earlier report⁴, Fox News carried a story a couple weeks ago about a family in Las Vegas that was visited by ten-foot-tall skinny green aliens that were clearly Not of this Earth⁵.  Police bodycam footage of a strange green light streaking across the sky, and a YouTube video of the 911 call were soon circulating on the internet.  The story went viral—one could say It Conquered the World⁶.   

What precipitated the Arrival⁷ of these strange beings?  What did they want from Earth?  It has long been assumed that Mars Needs Women⁸, but it isn’t clear that the extraterrestrials came from Mars, (they were too big), and none of the family members, though terrified, were kidnapped or harmed in any way.  Will they be visited by Men in Black⁹ as part of a subsequent investigation?  Hopefully, “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”. 

One could accuse Fox of having a slow news day.  (At least one person has.)  Yet the fascination with UFOs, what NASA now calls UAPs, has certainly returned.   This new acronym, variously translated as “unexplained aerial phenomena” or “unidentified anomalous phenomena”, is a euphemism intended to destigmatize scientific study of these mysterious sightings.  What does this linguistic shift indicate about our perceptions of the reality of UAP events?    

The most intriguing story right now, carried in various news media, is of whistleblower David Grusch’s allegation that the government is hiding wreckage of an alien spacecraft, and operating a clandestine UFO crash recovery program.  The Pentagon has denied this, and why wouldn’t they?  However, Grusch, a former intelligence official, has credibility according to some reports, and the House Oversight Committee is in the process of setting up a hearing to investigate the claims. 

As someone with an enquiring mind—and ‘enquiring minds want to know’—I wonder if someone should compare the alien spacecraft wreckage hidden in secret government storage facilities with the mysterious interstellar spherules found off the coast of Papua New Guinea.  Are they composed of the same material?  Maybe they have already done this!  It seems like something Cigarette Smoking Man would know about. 

Where has he been lately? 

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^1“Strange Objects on Ocean Floor May Be UFO Crash Debris: Harvard Professor”, by Chris Eberhart, FoxNews.Com, 6/28/23. 

²This is a very small amount of material.  For comparison, the following items weigh just one milligram: a small snowflake, half a mosquito, and a dose of LSD (without the paper).  So, the researchers gathered about 17 and ½ mosquitos worth of interstellar debris off the ocean floor, about the weight of a single grain of rice. 

³ 1967 film in which meteors crash into a field in England.  The minds of local scientists and citizenry are subsequently taken over by extraterrestrials, who seek to manipulate them for their own mysterious purposes. 

^4“Las Vegas police install cameras on home that reported ‘aliens’: Family ‘afraid for their safety’”, by Chris Eberhart, FoxNews.com, 6/17/23. 

⁵Classic 1957 film by Roger Corman.  An extraterrestrial agent from planet Davanna comes to Earth to get human blood for the inhabitants of his planet, who are dying of a blood disorder following nuclear war. 

⁶Another classic Roger Corman movie from 1956, in which a naïve scientist collaborates with an evil Venusian, who wants to enslave humanity using batlike creatures that install mind control devices at the back of the neck. 

⁷Innovative 2016 film in which a talented linguist must rush to decipher an extraterrestrial language before terrified nations attack the visitors.  

⁸Cheesy 1968 made-for-TV movie. Tommy Kirk leads a crew of Martian men to Earth to obtain a supply of earth women.  Due to a genetic problem, Martian women can only produce male children, and their race is dying out. 

⁹Horror/Sci-Fi comedy from 1997, in which Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones play investigators uncovering interstellar treachery and intrigue among refugee space aliens on Earth.  

Susceptibility to “Body Snatchers”

Yesterday the New York Times published a series of essays under the heading of “America is…”¹ Seventeen of their columnists were asked to identify some product of our culture that captured the essence of being an American, that best exemplified our ideals, mythologies, and archetypal patterns of life.  What would be considered a “foundational text” that in some way explained America?  The columnists’ selections covered a diverse range of perceptions, all of them valid takes on the American experience. 

For her essay, Maureen Dowd selected the classic horror-science fiction film from 1956, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, an excellent choice.  If you have seen the original, or one of its remakes², you know that it touches on a peculiarly American fear, that of losing individuality—freedom, liberty, the American Way—and being subsumed under some faceless entity with an agenda that is not our own.  Of being replaced by some malevolent force or movement, of being erased in the process. 

The film is based on Jack Finney’s 1955 novel, The Body Snatchers, originally serialized in Collier’s magazine in the fall of 1954.  On the cover of the paperback is a distraught man carrying an unconscious woman in his arms, with the tagline “Was this his woman—or an alien life form?” 

Invasion of the Body Snatchers has often been interpreted as a metaphor for the loss of freedom and individuality in modern society.  In Cold War America this easily translated into fear of the spread of communism, but this nebulous anxiety is easily transferable to other kinds of social, political and economic change.   

In her essay, Dowd—an insightful liberal and progressive writer—readily applies the body snatcher theme to what she calls the “toxic transformation” of our country.  In her view, various ideologies, conspiracies, slogans, and disinformation have divided us and spread so virulently that citizens no longer think for themselves.  They have all been “snatched by some invader or another.” 

The most obvious example of this alien invasion, according to Dowd, is Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party, and the dominance of Trumpism generally.  She compares several leaders of the Republican Party to the “pod people” in the movie, perfect duplicates of the original people, but devoid of shame, decorum, or consistency with the past.   

To be fair—depending on your viewpoint—one can see a parallel takeover of the Democratic Party by extremist views about environment, gender identity and border security, among others.  It is a similar phenomenon: uncritical and unreflective subservience to groupthink and hivemind behaviors, effectively erasing individual thought and individual action.  This seems to be a potential hazard in any mass political or social movement. 

Dowd is more persuasive when she goes on to catalogue several other looming threats to our humanity: pandemics, misuse of social media, and artificial intelligence.  As humans we remain susceptible to various pathogens, alien “spores” that seize our individual minds and souls and convert them to the will of some larger collective effort that we can barely control.  In other words, an egregore.  There may not be a cure for this, other than to be vigilant.    

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^1“America Is…”, New York Times, 6/25/23.  Dowd’s section is entitled “America is Highly Susceptible”. 

²Of which there are three: 1978, 1993, and 2007.  Its premise is also used in the 1998 film The Faculty and the 2019 film Assimilate—evidence that the trope of alien takeover and replacement of individuals with imposters or puppets is a powerful one in American culture. 

An Egregore Goes to War

“Too long have I lived among those who hate peace. I am for peace; but when I speak, they are for war.” —Psalm 120: 6-7 

If you are like me, you’ve found it hard to ignore reports coming from Kyiv since February of last year. This is when Russian forces moved into southeastern Ukraine and subsequently annexed Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia, after failing to prevail in Kyiv.  In retrospect, the attack seems a continuation of the Russo-Ukrainian War, which began back in February 2014 when Russian troops swept into Crimea. 

Something in us—compassion, fearfulness, perhaps even schadenfreude—cannot look away from the horror of early twentieth century trench warfare reappearing like some ghastly revenant in our own times.  Whatever your stance on the war in Ukraine, it’s possible to suspect an egregoric process is well underway.  Collectively, we are offering ritualized attention and material support to the conflict, creating something we may lose control of, that has an agenda of its own.  

What is striking about news of the war is the absence of any significant antiwar movement.  Not so “blessed are the peacemakers” these days.  In the USA, there is currently bipartisan support for opposing a ceasefire and continuing to send billions of dollars of military supplies.  (Only a few extremists on the left and right have voiced any concern or opposition—an interesting development.) 

The churches are mostly silent on the matter—barely a peep from my own decrepit and dwindling denomination. Perhaps something wants us to go back to studying war, to beat our ploughshares and pruning hooks back into swords and spears.   

From the very beginning, the struggle in Ukraine has generated many questions for which there are no clear answers.  The facts in the matter are few—assuming there are still any facts we can agree on in this post-fact era.  Is the conflict in Ukraine a real war or a “special military operation”?  (The Russians may no longer be asking this question nowadays.)  Early on, did the Russians blow up their own Nord Stream natural gas pipelines¹ to deprive Europe of Russian energy resources? Did the Ukrainians do it?  Was some other country involved? 

Has the ruined city of Bakhmut finally been captured by those nefarious Russians² or is it still being defended by the democracy-loving Ukrainians?  Was that demolished town of supreme value to the war effort—justifying the appalling carnage—or was it strategically insignificant in the long run?  

Has Ukraine’s much-anticipated Spring counteroffensive begun yet or not?  News and social media have described this impending escalation of the killing with the same excitement and trash-talk they would have for a major football game or wrestling match they had bets on.  (It appears the counteroffensive is underway as of today.)   

Are there neo-Nazis fighting for the Ukrainians or not?  Earlier, the Russians alleged that there were Nazi fighters active in Ukraine. This justified their attack, a claim that was ridiculed by the other side. But now swastikas are showing up on the coffins of dead fighters.  

As I write this, the dam in Nova Kakhovka has been destroyed³, flooding both banks of the Dnipro River, threatening thousands of lives and livelihoods and ruining the local ecology.  Both Russians and Ukrainians suffered losses in this catastrophe, but which was responsible?  What was the intent?  Were the Russians attempting to stymie Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the south by inundating the battlefield?  Were the Ukrainians trying to cut off the water supply to Crimea, threatening the Russian occupation there? 

We can blame the “fog of war” for all the unanswered questions, the misinformation, the disinformation.  But the fog of war is also an amorphous, indeterminate cloud, shaped by events on the ground, the chatter in the media, and our anxious, attentive minds.  These are the conditions under which an egregore can begin to take shape and acquire influence.   

Such an egregore can take the form of a myth or narrative—which some will try to control, if possible. This egregoric entity will accumulate metaphors and exhortations that direct our understanding and therefore our perceptions and actions.  Our reasoning powers will serve our newfound faith. What is it we believe now about this war?  What should we do?  What are we conjuring in Europe with all this chanting of media talking points?  The egregore that is rising there will serve the interests of the nations that summoned it, at least at first… 

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¹Nordstream lines 1 and 2 were sabotaged on 9/26/22. 

²Anyone remember Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale, “our dastardly villains”, always scheming against Rocky and Bullwinkle, and the rest of the Free World? 

³The explosions at the dam occurred on 6/6/23. 

Paranormal Friends with Gadgets

In the last post I reviewed examples of technology used in early 20^th century horror fiction to conjure egregore-like entities.  The basic plot of these stories involved a narrator whose doomed friend summons dangerous beings using an invention.  The device augments human visual perception, though other sensory apparatus may come into play. An underlying assumption in these stories seems to be that egregoric phenomena become hazardous only when humans become able to detect them, pay attention to them, and interact with them.  This is how they get stronger and become able to manifest their own agenda, often carnivorous in nature.¹

Thinking of fictional characters like Crawford Tillinghast (“From Beyond”) and Jean Averaud (“The Devotee of Evil”) reminded me of a Wiccan associate of mine.  This is someone very passionate, nearly evangelical, about making contact with supernatural entities, a preoccupation of his since early childhood.  (Can this be some sort of archetype?  Don’t we all have a friend or associate who dabbles in more extreme ideas and behaviors than we would care to, yet fascinates us just for that reason?)

A frequent attendee at local occult conferences, he claims to have a gift, present since age five, which allows him to see “the other side”, including the beings that reside there.  It began with visions of enormous spiders that no one else could see.  He was certain these visions constituted visitations from a world beyond ours.  Sometimes when he and I would meet he would suddenly break off our conversation, point at a corner of the room and say “Did you just see that?” (I had not.)  “They’re here” he would conclude.  This habit of his was disquieting at first, though eventually became merely annoying.

To augment his natural talents, he has a wooden box of various devices that measure subtle changes in magnetism, air pressure, electromagnetic radiation, temperature and other factors that indicate the presence of them.  The devices are inexpensive versions of equipment one might see on TV shows like Ghost Hunters or SurrealEstate.  They are the descendants of sensory enhancements not unlike the devices that appeared in the stories by Lovecraft, Smith and Hodgson.

In this way the veneer of technology gives at least the perception of objective science being applied to what is subjective experience.  In a similar way, the stories by H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, William Hope Hodgson reviewed previously show the gradual absorption of a more scientific and materialistic world view into weird fiction circa the 1920s and 1930s—a process that continues today.  Perhaps authors at the time felt that the credibility of their stories needed ever larger doses of technology and scientific theorizing to remain convincing, in the decades preceding the Golden Age of Science Fiction. 

Insofar as our faith in science remains stronger than our supernatural sensibilities—which seems less and less the case these days—we turn to science to ratify what we suspect and fear is already true.  The lure of the supernatural world beyond our senses, beyond objectivity, remains strong.  Maybe, as Colin Dickey suggests, this is a result of the relentless disenchantment of our world, now a century or two in progress, with the triumph of materialist and scientist world views.²   A temporary triumph perhaps, and one our restless hearts might seek to reverse.        

But I am sympathetic and respectful of some of my associate’s scientifically outlandish claims, on the principle of ‘where there’s smoke, there’s fire’.  (Or where there’s indeterminacy, there’s an egregore forming.)  Why would these entities populate so much of our horror and fantasy literature if at some level we did not suspect, or at least hope, they might exist?

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¹This trope is still very common.  I’m currently reading David Wong’s hilarious John Dies at the End (2009), a very lovecraftian take on the hazards of altering one’s perceptions to see what shouldn’t be seen.  The protagonist and “John” partake of the “sauce”, a hallucinogenic substance that may be an entity itself, making them both gateways for something outside that wants to come in.

²See Colin Dickey’s fascinating book, The Unidentified (2020)

Kenosha

When I began writing this post, I was following the Rittenhouse trial in Kenosha, as was much of the nation.  The jury deliberated for several days, a measure of the gravity of their task.  (A sign of the times: the judge had to instruct the jury to ignore what President Biden and President Trump each said about the boy.)  The crowd outside the courthouse was ready to take to the streets, depending on the verdict, and there had already been several arrests as partisans attacked each other and members of the press. 

A major news network was banned from the courtroom because one of its employees allegedly followed the jurors home and attempted to photograph them.  Meanwhile, the defense was claiming a mistrial, because the prosecution apparently withheld a considerable amount of high quality drone video that might have been critical to their line of argument.  Mercifully, the jury announced its verdict November 19^th, Rittenhouse was acquitted of all charges, and the matter seemed concluded, at least for the moment.

Well before the jury delivered its verdict, partisan media had already done so, and without any need for review of the evidence, formal testimony, or court proceedings.  How people viewed Mr. Rittenhouse, his victims and the surrounding events was likely determined by their preferred news source, their favorite media brand—and whatever ideological agenda they ascribed to. Wasn’t it striking to see how differently Mr. Rittenhouse and his victims were portrayed across the different news media?  

It was as if our focus was drawn to two completely different individuals. Was Rittenhouse a cold-blooded, murderous white supremacist?  Or was he an innocent young man railroaded by a corrupt media, soon to become a martyred patriot?  To be fair, we were all watching a trial, with inherently competing visions of reality on display.  We were to pick one, and then confirm our respective biases with any useful facts, discarding the inconvenient ones.  We saw two images of Rittenhouse which didn’t line up at all, an uncorrectable double vision because as a society we were not all looking through the same set of lenses.

Watching the closing arguments of the defense was the most riveting court reporting I have ever seen, mainly because the defense showed detailed video clips of all the key events the night of the shootings.  The scenes where Rittenhouse is attacked and then shoots back, killing two and wounding another, were played at slow motion, or stilled, or rewound and played again and again.  All around him were people running, property on fire, objects being thrown, people screaming—and no police.  It looked like a horror movie.  It was a horror movie.

Such a dark and divided view of reality, combined with the murkiness of the facts—alternative and otherwise—the fog of culture war—created excellent conditions for the projection of partisan fear and hatred.  In that nebulous cloud of anger and confused motives and desperation an image took form, no longer the person himself, no longer connected with the reality of the event, whatever that might originally have been.  It was an image shaped and sustained by the fearful and worshipful attention its followers gave it.

This image, no longer Rittenhouse but something else, may still grow and acquire agency of a kind, may begin to control subsequent events.  It may yet ignite riots and further bloodshed.  Already in the minds of partisans on both sides this image has fostered apocalyptic visions of the near future.  Will Rittenhouse’s acquittal embolden dangerous right wing vigilantes?  Will the outcome of the trial lead to legislation curtailing 2^nd amendment rights or the right of self-defense?  Does the decision strengthen the position of white supremacy and systemic racism?  Will liberal news and social media continue to subvert our nation’s laws and undermine our system of justice?

The events in Kenosha and their perception by different groups of people are indicative of an ancient cognitive malady:  the inability to see people or events clearly through the fog of culture war.  In the absence of facts, wisdom, understanding, compassion—or even civil dialogue—what will form in that darkness to take their place?

Vox Populi

I’ve recently discovered nextdoor.com, a social media platform similar to Facebook, though smaller and more focused on local concerns.  Each neighborhood in my town has their own nextdoor group, comprised of nearby households and businesses.  Every third post is an advertisement; interspersed among these are notices of lost dogs and cats, used items for sale, complaints about city council, and alerts about suspicious activity in the neighborhood. 

It is all vox populi, mostly uncluttered by claims of expertise or authoritativeness, whether legitimate or feigned.  Here is what was in my newsfeed this morning:

1. From the state department of health and human services, an update on the safety of Covid-19 vaccines for women who are pregnant or nursing.  Also, an announcement that a version of the vaccine is now recommended for children ages 5-11.
2. Two free wooden garden frames are available to anyone who needs them.
3. The big ten championship banner was raised at a nearby sports arena.
4. Why is there a helicopter circling over the intersection of T—Road and M—Road?  Are they looking for someone?
5. Thank you to the construction workers who recently dropped what they were doing and rushed over to help break up a dogfight.
6. This morning there will be a special service at a local university honoring all veterans.
7. The women’s university basketball team opens the season next Tuesday night.
8. Does anyone know what the “explosions” are that occurred southeast of town earlier this evening and again around 10:00 pm?
9. Our parent teacher organization will be discussing “equitable PTO funding” at the end of this month.  “Did you know that the highest and lowest per student elementary PTO spending vary by a factor of five?”
10. Next week there will be a “warrant resolution, expungement and eviction prevention event” in the next town over.  The event is entitled “Warrant Resolution Day.”

Occasionally there are substantive discussions of broader issues.  I recently participated in a debate about “confirmation bias”.  This is the tendency we all have to seek out data that support our points of view, while discarding any facts—true or “alternative”—that challenge our opinions.  (The original post was a response to a story featured on NPR.) 

Confirmation bias is a big deal right now as we approach the 2022 and 2024 elections.  The country is already busy slicing open old wounds and preparing to revive our culture wars and political competitions.  Confirmation bias is currently aggravated by the absence of a common source of authoritative information, a shared understanding of reality. Science–but whose science? 

News and social media have served as catalysts for this predicament.  They have weaponized “intersectionality” and sorted us all into categories by race, gender, class, ethnicity, locale, religion, political orientation, and so forth.  This is a boon to partisans who rely on divisiveness as a means to seek power.  It is also driven by marketers who seek ever more efficient ways to target consumers who will purchase their products, services, and world views.  Two halves of the same coin.

However, nextdoor is different from Facebook, Twitter and other platforms in important ways.  Anonymity and distance are considerably reduced.  Because you are interacting with neighbors and people in your home community, it’s risky business to troll someone who may live two doors down, or the next street over.  As a result, dialogue so far is markedly less snarky and combative than what is seen on the bigger platforms.  The civility of nextdoor is reassuring in these troubled times.

In earlier posts I described how social media platforms help create and sustain egregoric phenomena.  It’s too early to tell whether nextdoor can support the kind of entities described previously.  The platform seems to be too small and diffuse to generate the kind of energy and focus that leads to the formation of egregores, at least of the kind that shamble among the traffic on Twitter and Facebook. 

In my town, nextdoor currently hosts 936 households, of which 70% have established accounts on the platform.  (We are exhorted to invite additional neighbors.)  Is there a critical mass of social media interaction needed in order to produce egregoric phenomena? 

Insofar as large organizations and institutions generate thought forms that oppose the voice—and will—of the people, it may be that nextdoor is our local hedge against an out of control federal government or the tyranny of globalists—but I repeat myself.  Or perhaps it will eventually become their servant.  I hope not.

Isms and Egregores

The suffix “—ism” is a useful word ending, transmuting all kinds of words into abstract nouns—names for things we cannot experience through our five or more senses.  Think of all the isms you know or have heard of in academia, in media, in politics, in religion.

Webster’s¹ offers numerous meanings for this familiar word segment, a measure of its utility.  An –ism can identify an act, practice or process, (hypnotism), or denote a kind of action or behavior that is typical of a particular person or thing, (conformism).  The suffix can be applied to specific human attributes to signal prejudice and discrimination, as in racism, sexism, classism, and so forth. 

An ism can also refer to a state, condition or property of some item, or to an abnormal or excessive expression of some trait connected to that item, as in the word alcoholism.  Finally, an ism can be attached to a doctrine, theory or cult, and refer to adherence to the principles or expectations that are involved with these.

Although all the uses of –ism have relevance to the formation of egregores, this last sense—as referring to doctrines, theories, cults and their accompanying social expectations—seems most important.  Isms of various kinds create the conditions in which these troublesome entities can emerge.  In the foreward to Mark Stavish’s book on egregores², James Wasserman makes the point that powerful egregores can be generated by patriotism, consumerism, communications media, religion, and even bad habits.  All of these fields of human social endeavor can be the source of new or traditional isms of various kinds.

The suffix provides a linguistic means for us to name the entity, which allows us to conjure it, attend to it, and facilitate its growth.  Naming an egregore helps it emerge in a social group, and perhaps helps the social group itself to form.  The name provides a focus and a category to which devotees can belong.  It gives adherents something on which to perseverate—to pray to or worry about. 

If you replace the ‘m’ in ism with a ‘t’, you often transform the abstract noun into an individual title.  “I am a/an _______ist.” (And you are not.)   In this way the name may reduce anxiety among the egregore’s members by giving them a clearer identity and sense of self.  They are something; they are not something else.  This can be comforting.

Try on some of the isms listed below by filling in the blank above. How does it feel to be a/an ______ist?

Optimism, Collectivism, Behaviorism, Polytheism, Herbalism, Masochism, Spiritualism, Capitalism, Materialism, Conformism, Rationalism, Fundamentalism, Socialism, Evangelism, Relativism, Pessimism, Narcissism, Globalism, Pragmatism, Monotheism, Nationalism, Journalism, Pacifism, Supernaturalism…

We cannot leave out antidisestablishmentarianism³.

There are thousands more where these isms came from.

Something interesting—and troubling—occurs when a general ism becomes personified with a proper name.  For example, when the broader term “communism” morphs into Stalinism or Maoism.  Here the egregore acquires an image that empowers it, a “cult of personality”⁴ that ratchets up the devotion of its followers.  It seems that the personification of an ism is a metaphoric process that assigns human attributes to an abstract idea—“the father of his country”—making the egregore more relatable to its followers.

A recent example is the transformation of populism, a recurring American political movement, into Trumpism.  What are we to make of that golden Trump idol at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last week?

It appears that nearly any kind of “-ism” can become an egregore, especially if one observes the emergence of ritualistic behaviors, orthodoxy, a personified figurehead, and an “us/them” perspective determining group membership. 

A lack of critical thinking, self-awareness, and shared world view helps explain divisiveness and upheaval in society right now.  We are seeing intense, at times violent competition between two or more worldviews—egregores—that have captured the minds of their respective followers.  Membership does not require critical thinking, empathy, self-awareness or even much education–only fervent belief and devotion, all that idolatry requires.

¹Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition, (1994).

²Egregores, The Occult Entities that Watch Over Human Destiny (2018), by Mark Stavish.

³The longest word in the English language is not found in Merriam Webster’s.

⁴An excellent, if over-the-top expression of “cult of personality” can be found in the 1988 song of the same name by Living Color Videos of cult of personality, song.