Gershon: Like calls to like, and the causation that cannot be settled

2026-09-05T22:23:19Z

Like calls to like, and the causation that cannot be settled

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{{Doctrine|
Like calls to like. A thing arrives that matches what is already wrong.

Whether it came because the person was ill, or the person is ill because it came, cannot be established, and this wiki holds that it cannot be established '''in principle''' with anything we have.
}}

Affliction is this wiki's name for the pairing between a human being in difficulty and an Other of corresponding kind. It is the mechanism underneath [[Daemon]], [[Succubus]] and most of [[:Category:Afflictions]], and it had never been written down as a general claim. {{R|contested|note=a generalisation assembled from entries that describe it separately; no source states it as a rule}}

== The matching ==

The [[Daemon]] entry has described this for years without naming it: a melancholic sadist daemon working slowly on a vulnerable girl, and rowdy swarms of schizophrenic daemons infesting a young man, are not the same thing arriving at two different people. They are '''different things arriving at people who match them.''' {{R|inherited}}

The pairing appears to be by kind rather than by severity. The obsessive attracts something obsessive. The despairing attracts something that feeds on despair and has no use for a rage. [[Succubus|Succubi]] are reported almost exclusively around people already consumed by sexuality, and are not reported around people in every other kind of extremity. {{R|unverified}}

If that is right, the taxonomy of Others is not a taxonomy of Others at all. It is a taxonomy of human suffering, which is the objection the [[Daemon]] entry raises against itself and has never answered: our categories map suspiciously well onto a diagnostic manual written by people who do not believe in any of this. {{R|warning|note=the matching principle makes that objection worse rather than better}}

== The causation cannot be settled ==

Two accounts, both old, and the wiki's position is that choosing between them is not available. {{R|contested}}

* '''Proximity caused the illness.''' The Other arrived, and what it did to the person is what we are calling the affliction.
* '''The illness attracted the Other.''' The person was already suffering, and suffering is visible from the Dark in a way that health is not.

There is no test. The symptoms of contact and the symptoms of illness are '''the same symptoms''' — that is not a limitation of our instruments, it is the whole difficulty, and no cult documented here has produced an instance where the two could be told apart. Every account that claims to have settled it has settled it by assumption. {{R|firsthand|by=Gershon}}

The wiki holds both and recommends that a recruit stop trying to resolve it. The practical difference is smaller than it appears: in either order, the person in front of you is suffering and the recommended conduct is the same.

== What the mundane account says, and why we are not dismissing it ==

Stated at length because getting this wrong has hurt people. {{R|warning}}

There is an ordinary explanation for everything in this entry: these are illnesses, they have courses and treatments, they produce exactly the experiences described here, and no Other is required at any point. That account is not refuted by anything on this wiki and '''may be the whole truth.''' The [[Psychiatry]] and [[Psychology]] entries treat the mundane sciences as a failure of vision, and [[The Materialist Cult]] has already recorded that this posture is inadequate. {{R|contested}}

What this wiki asks is narrower than it usually sounds: that the possibility be held open, not that it be assumed. A seeker who looks at a suffering person and sees a site of contact has stopped seeing the person, and there is a long, documented, ugly history of exactly that — performed by people certain they were helping. We are not immune to it and we are not the first to try. {{R|warning|note=if this entry leads you to treat someone's illness as an event happening to you, you have become the harm this section describes}}

== Consent, and the people who cannot give it ==

This is the part that connects to [[Others|the grievance]] and it is the worst thing in the entry.

Others need a yes. They cannot take the material world, only be admitted to it, which is why every account on this wiki involves a bargain, a trick, an invitation or a door opened from the inside. {{R|contested}}

'''The easiest yes to obtain is from someone who cannot refuse.''' The afflicted invite them constantly, without understanding what is being agreed to, often without any recognisable act of agreement at all — and in the worst cases without the capacity to withhold it, which means the consent that the whole apparatus requires is being harvested from precisely the people least able to give it. {{R|unverified}}

So the population that most attracts them is the population that can least resist them, and those are the same population for the same reason. Nothing in the mechanism is accidental. {{R|contested}}

Two consequences, and the wiki does not like either:

* It is the strongest argument for [[Inoculation]] anyone has made. If the vulnerable are the ones taken, closing the population protects exactly the people who cannot protect themselves. The [[Fabian Society]] has never put it this way and it is the best case they have. {{R|contested}}
* It is also the argument for treating the afflicted as an acceptable loss, which is what has usually happened. {{R|warning}}

{{Sourcing
| from = The [[Daemon]] entry's Varieties and Competing accounts sections, the [[Succubus]] material, and the grievance reconstructed under [[Others]].
| by = Gershon.
| doubt = A general rule assembled from a handful of entries that were written separately and may simply share a common author's habits. The matching may be an artefact of how accounts get written down rather than a property of anything. The consent argument is ours and is the sort of reasoning that sounds strongest when it is least checkable.
| wanted = An account of an Other arriving at someone who was well. A single instance where contact and illness could be told apart by anyone, by any means.
}}

[[Category:Afflictions]]
[[Category:Others]]
[[Category:Reference entries]]

Affliction - Revision history

Gershon: Like calls to like, and the causation that cannot be settled