The Demons In Democracy

“We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.“
Ephesians 6:12

More than Meets the Eye

Imagine a world in which spiritual identities cover all earthly phenomena. It’s a world full of non-corporeal beings organized into various principalities, thrones, and dominions. What might this look like to mere mortals like ourselves? What would it mean for our human institutions?

I posit that such a world would look precisely like the world we inhabit. And this has profound implications for us. Those who rebelled from these higher principles would cause untold suffering. And those who refused to see beyond the material realm would miss half the picture. They would see what is, but not what ought to be. Many would be prone to nihilism. Most would become slaves to their appetites. And as a result people would grow physically, mentally, and spiritually impoverished even as they became materially richer. Sound familiar?

In a previous post I re-framed the culture war as a spiritual war. This piece expands on that idea as it relates to democratic principles. We tend not to acknowledge any involvement of higher beings in our world. But lately people are beginning to notice a class of non-corporeal entities popularly referred to as egregores.¹ Daniel Townhead and Kenneth Florence explain the term and trace its usage. It’s a concept that could be useful in helping us escape the immanent frame that imprisons the Western mind.

Egregores

An egregore is an occult concept representing some non-physical entity arising from the collective thoughts of a group of people. In other words, when people come together to act as a group it’s said that this can give rise to a type of higher entity. Materialists might call it an emergent property of the group.² Regardless of how we explain it, we’ve all seen this. The group has its own spirit. Teams have a personality. Companies have a vibe. Cities have a soul. Mobs are taken over by a type of ‘darkness’.

Even bureaucracies tend to take on a life of their own. Eisenhower famously warned us about the military-industrial complex.³ A committed materialist might argue that there is no such thing as a military-industrial complex. Recall, Lady Thatcher famously said there is no such thing as a society, only individuals.⁴ In one sense that’s true. But even scientists recognize that collectives sometimes give rise to emergent qualities that are not easily intuited.⁵

Darryl Cooper makes the case that Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex (MIC) has real effectual power:

[W]ithin a few years of Eisenhower’s speech, the military-industrial complex had accrued enough reality, and gained enough power, that it mobilized millions of men and vast social resources to fight a war in Vietnam that three successive US presidents did not want to fight. Who did that? It wasn’t any of the millions of employees, bureaucrats or soldiers, although it couldn’t have been done without them. It wasn’t any individual politicians or agency heads, although they made the decisions that carried us each step further into the war. The thing Eisenhower warned about had, by some strange alchemy, come to life and seized control of the very people who’d summoned it. If today someone tried to turn it off, or even scale back its reach or power, the MIC would fight to defend itself even though we face no actual or potential conflict comparable to the Cold War it was built to fight. This is an emergent entity that is not reducible to its constituent parts, and which, in some ways, ‘has a life of its own.’⁶

Similarly, when people rail against systemic racism aren’t they referring to something like an egregore of the criminal justice system? There is in a real sense this demon of racism. It may fully possess some individuals. And it might even afflict all of us to some degree. The anti-racists are not completely wrong about that. But their sophomoric understanding plays right into it. They fail to see themselves as an extension of it even as they parrot inane statements like, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”⁷

The Tail Wags the Dog

One of the defining qualities of an egregore is that it exerts a level of control over individuals. And their effect can be for good or ill.⁸ People have ideas. But one could argue that ideas also have us. In one sense the Pope controls Catholicism. But in another sense Catholicism controls the Pope.

The agenda of an egregore can look a lot like a coordinated agenda. I suspect this explains a lot of conspiracy theories.⁹ The next time you encounter something that looks like the coordinated agenda of some nameless cabal try substituting the distributed agenda of an egregore and see if that doesn’t provide just as much explanatory power.

In reality, some half-baked conspiracy is unlikely to convince people to adopt any lockstep behavior. Few plots are that compelling. Instead, as BJ Campbell says, “you would need a vast, pseudo-religious indoctrination program wherein their beliefs are code checked daily against their peers.”¹⁰ This is precisely what the egregore does.

In some sense the coordinated agenda of a cabal is a lot less scary than some spiritual being arising organically from some mass formation. One can easily solve the problem of the cabal by identifying and eliminating the cabal. But an egregore appears out of nowhere like a ghost. It doesn’t even need to be conscious to compel our behavior.

BJ Campbell contends that the internet is full of egregores. It just so happens that the way we consume content on the internet naturally sorts us into echo chambers that are ripe for summoning egregores. The whole business model is driven by clicks so the algorithms feed each echo chamber outrage porn tailored to that particular group. The business model incentivizes this. And so the algorithms simply respond to the groupthink of the echo chamber. The groupthink is the egregore. And in a sense that’s really what’s steering the algorithms.

Campbell illustrates how even obvious conspiracies like Qanon aren’t really piloting the ship:

Qanon is, very specifically, a few bearded nerds in a basement writing up conspiracy stuff and sticking it on 8chan. The stuff they write is intentionally written to be the most viral thing they can think of within the Qanon echo chamber, and they keep it this way by including real and true things with the fiction. We may think that because it’s a couple of guys in a basement, it qualifies as a conspiracy, but it’s not, because they can’t actually control what they’re writing. If they wrote something that the echo chamber didn’t like, then it wouldn’t go viral.¹¹

The egregore is the power behind this whole dynamic. It’s the tail wagging the dog, so to speak. No one dares anger the egregore least they face the ire of the mob and risk cancellation. This is how the egregore controls individual behavior. It leads to enforced conformity through self-censorship.

Democracy Uncensored

This doesn’t only apply to internet memes. It has implications for all our institutions. If you grew up in the West then you were probably conditioned, as I was, to view democracy as an unqualified good. We’re suspicious of politics for good reason, and yet we revere democracy. Consider that the spirit that controls Qanon content also animates successful politicians. Rather than competing within an echo chamber for clicks, politicians compete for votes. They cannot speak freely. Instead, like the bearded Qanon guys, politicians repeat the most viral soundbites their handlers can think of while avoiding anything that might upset their base. In other words, they tell us what we want to hear. They are the mouthpiece of an egregore.

The politician, however, is not influenced by just one group of constituents. It costs money to campaign. Those running for office at the national level spend millions of dollars campaigning for jobs that pay just a few hundred thousand. So while their words pander to voters, their actions primarily serve moneyed interests like the military-industrial complex, the education-industrial complex, the medical-industrial complex, and all the other special interests tugging on them. Elected officials are controlled by these headless entities. The fact that some states have fraud-friendly election laws is a feature, not a bug.

We look at our elected officials and assume they are just really bad at their jobs. But if we consider that their job is not actually to represent us, but rather to protect entrenched interests and to transfer as much wealth as possible from the public to the powerful, then we see they are actually quite good at what they do. Let’s be honest, they don’t work for us.

We miss the bulk of what’s going on because we view it all through an immanent frame. It’s as if we are looking at things through a keyhole. Nearly everyone sees the corrupt politicians. Most can see that the system itself is corrupt. But few see the demons in the democracy. Every few years we throw the bums out and pass new rules hoping to fix things. But nothing really changes. That’s because the egregores set the agenda. Unseating a politician doesn’t actually disempower them. They just find new mouthpieces to do their bidding.

If we could see what’s really going on we would quickly realize that reform doesn’t begin in Washington. It has to start in our own hearts. These egregores are collective structures that we humans co-create. They reflect our own spiritual state. In essence, we reap what we sow. We cannot expect these ‘garments of skin’ to display virtues that we do not possess. John Adams understood this when he famously wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.”¹²

Sacrificing Virtue

You will not have a functioning democracy without a virtuous people. Politicians are inevitably going to tell us what we want to hear. We must demand the truth even when it’s uncomfortable. And our very notion of goodness has to be grounded in truth. Because what’s good for Big Tech and Big Pharma should always be subordinate to the common good. The same goes for the Military-Industrial complex. These things only have value to the extent that they recognize something of more worth than themselves.

It doesn’t help that our schooling aspires to be value-neutral. Of course this is not really possible. A value-free education imparts a hidden curriculum. This teaches me that I am the autonomous ruler of myself, able to determine right and wrong according to whatever I choose. Education without values, if it were possible, only makes man a more clever devil.¹³

As Paul Kingsnorth points out, we now live in a culture that finds nothing particularly troubling about the Seven Deadly Sins. Ours is a culture that not only tolerates, but celebrates gluttony, greed, lust, pride, sloth, envy and wrath. Kingsnorth notes that pursuing these is “no longer something to be confessed or repented: it is the very thing which drives our notion of Progress forward.”¹⁴

Transcendent ideals like Goodness, Truth, and Beauty depend on our corporeal existence to bear witness to them. And when man fails in his role as mediator, ceasing to inform matter with meaning and to express meaning through matter, the natural order becomes confused. Man continues to channel the spiritual realm, but with no heavenly ideal informing things, he finds himself offering material support to these headless egregores.

Repentance Precedes Reform

I see no way to save our democracy that doesn’t involve repentance and right worship. Campaign finance reform and voter ID laws won’t change anything as long as we are controlled by egregores vying for power at the voting booth. We bring them into existence and then they start to animate us. It’s time we stop blaming the politicians and look at the horror and a corruption inside of ourselves.

We must learn to love mercy, to do justice, and to walk humbly with God. I’m not optimistic that we can pull this off without first going through great hardship. I am not overly optimistic, but I am hopeful. Because where there is memory and desire, there is Hope.

Note: This post was originally published August 11, 2022.

^{Photo Credit: “At the Polling Booths 1940 – Can you help us identify who they are?” by statelibrarywa is licensed under CC BY 2.0.}