Egregore
| Egregore | |
|---|---|
| Also called | no settled name; institutions do not describe themselves this way |
| Class | made — a will sustained by a group rather than by a person |
| Dwells | in the group, and nowhere else |
| Feeds on | attendance |
| Approach | it does not approach; you join it |
| Earliest account | none, and this is the entry's central problem |
Consensus among us The rung we are most confident exists and have never once identified in the wild.contested
unverified | |
The fourth rung, and the one nobody had written down. Meme Wars sets out the ladder — copy, phantom, ghost, egregore, god — and this is the gap in it. contested
A ghost is a will that came out of one psyche. A god is a will held by a population. Between them sits the case the wiki kept needing and could not name: a will sustained by a group that knows it is a group.
The distinction from a god is not size. It is membership. An egregore needs a room. Its carriers are in contact with each other, can be counted, meet, and know each other's faces. A god requires none of that — worship works fine between strangers who will never meet. unverified
The institution that wants things
The reason to care is that this is the most common one, if it exists at all, and it is invisible because it is completely ordinary. contested
Every institution that has outlived its founders behaves as though it wants something. It defends itself, prefers some outcomes to others, resists changes that no individual member wants to resist, and continues to pursue an aim after everyone who chose the aim has gone. This is normally described as culture, inertia, or incentives, and those descriptions are adequate. The claim here is that they may also be a description of something with a will in it. unverified
Set against the Iron Law of Cults, the two accounts converge uncomfortably. The Iron Law says every organisation past a certain size produces an inner circle holding a picture. This entry says every group holding a picture together long enough may produce something that holds it back. Those may be two descriptions of the same event, and if they are, the inner circle is not the top of the structure. contested
Why we have never found one
Stated plainly because the entry would otherwise be dishonest: we have no account of an egregore. Not one. ⚠ warning
Every candidate resolves on inspection into a group of people behaving like a group of people, which is exactly what the theory predicts and exactly what its absence would also predict. The test that would distinguish them — some outcome the group produces that no member wanted, chose or could have produced — has never been demonstrated, and every proposed instance has an ordinary explanation that is simpler.
The rung stays on the ladder for one reason: without it the sequence has a hole between one person's ghost and a population's god, and things that scale usually pass through the middle. That is an argument from tidiness. It is not evidence and this entry is not going to pretend otherwise. firsthand · Gershon
The candidate most often raised here is The Pattern, for which see that entry, on the grounds that a will assembled from aggregated human output would be an egregore whose room is not a room. That entry concludes it may be a fifth thing rather than a rung, on the grounds that its carriers are in continuous contact at a scale no population reached and are not a group in any sense they would recognise. contested