# A Snippet On Egregores, Instincts, And Institutions

I don't even remember the precise context of this, but I found it in my notes, and I'm going to try experimentally posting "things I wrote with myself as an audience and was kind of embarrassed to post anywhere but didn't want to throw away".

On January 7th, 2025 I stored a snippet. That snippet contained allusions to a lot of things that I didn't signpost or cite because I was writing to me, and I know what I know (whereas when I write for others I'm constantly censoring outputs so I don't take something for granted that they would be surprised by).

This snippet did not originally contain any links or any bold (that is to say, the "*" around words was in the original but the meta formatting that would not survive copypasta to ASCII wasn't in the original), but I reserve the right to add links over time (via edits) for at least like maybe a year, as feedback comes in on things people had questions about.

> Saving some text here... 😇
> 
> Here are some of the parts of how **the "emergent 'thousand flowers bloom' egregore"** MIGHT work IN MY OPINION: "silence is violence", "if you see something and don't say something, you're part of the problem", "cancel culture", "call out culture", "wokism", "acab", "anarchism", "in defense of looting", "black lives matter", "anti-capitalism", "accelerating the contradictions", "libertarians are neckbeards", "uncompensated emotional labor", "be true to yourself", "take the path less traveled".
> 
> Almost NO mention of: "immune disorders as a metaphor for civil wars", "Turchin's elite overproduction model", "warnings of the sometimes high and tragic costs of personally helping to cause justice in the world", "procedures for making justice pursuit cheap and efficient and relatively safe for everyone who isn't guilty of the actually worst crimes against Natural Law".
> 
> I think this Egregore \*requires\* [**the basic anthropologically universal instinct to "fix social problems by talking about them** with someone in my sub-Dunbar group of friends" that Patri accurately diagnosed as "what people are doing in Libertarianism INSTEAD of changing the game to one where bad government withers for lack of customers and good government rises as people become customer/citizens of it"](https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/06/patri-friedman/beyond-folk-activism/).
> 
> However, I don't think that instinct is \*sufficient\*. I think humans can have "the instinct to solve social problems by talking with friends about it" and then that instinct can be shaped (with voting, markets, global bimetallism, unlimited minting of precious metal with maybe at-cost seigniorage(?), robert's rules of order, juries, posses, sheriff deputies, churches, potlucks, gossipy grandmas, weddings, funerals, and so on) into relatively non-harmful shapes that can be memetically and ecologically fit (albeit you can have all that stuff and still commit a genocide against the native americans (oops)).

Commentary:

A) "Not doing a genocide" is a key desiderata I have for super minimally adequate performance for any project that plans to engage in a Pivotal Act and also a desiderata I apply as a personal responsibility for any ethically responsible team members that might exist (like if the team has a contracted Kitistugu or Confessor or Keeper or Algorithmic Ethicist for harms reduction and whistle blowing then definitely that person gets a *terrible* grade if a genocide happens... and if the Chief Executive Officer cares about deontics or ethics at all then probably they get a terrible grade too (but like maybe their whole thing is just minimizing "how many" genocides in a non-sacred way, with fewer of them being better))? This is actually tricky. Political purges and coups are "genocide adjacent", and like... [Twitter got blame/credit for some of the Arab Spring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media%27s_role_in_the_Arab_Spring), and Facebook has gotten some blame/credit for [the Rohingya Genocide in Burma]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide). How much Shapley is "too much Shapley" here? Real life is actually complicated.

B) Point "A" is about personal and institutional responsibility embedded in a larger "exogenous" raw milieu of pure nature (where sociology and genocides can happen like poisonous mushrooms just naturally growing sometimes) that is outside of authoritative purview of Executives inside of morally responsible Organizations. However **the snippet** takes the inside view on those dynamics... it treats "culture" and "talking points" and "vibes" as the only thing that actually exists, because almost all activist culture is performative, and works according to a theory where cultural performativity is the only actual way to have agency in a world where institutions are opaque black boxes full of robotic psychopaths whose names are irrelevant (and it would violate performative norms of cultural vibing to "dox" those executives because "doxing is bad" because "if doxing was good then I wouldn't be able to safely vibe like a performative activist who is changing the world with my performative activism" (or something)). Like... if some normy activist is repeating "ACAB" over and over... they probably also have opinions on doxing, and they plausible sometimes wear a black clothe face covering when they throw bricks at protests? And they are culturally co-extensive with "black lives matter" and "colonialism boo" and so on... they could as easily show up at a pro-Palestine protest with US flag burning as show up at a BLM protest where the BLM people are invoking constitutional rights to equal treatment. Its all just culture, right? It doesn't have to be coherent, right?

C) Unifying A+B... There's a deep question here about [Egregore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore) management from inside of the egregore's flock of [boids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids)... but you can't normally actually have conversations about the egregore from inside the egregore. Every move *inside* the egregore is a move **by** the Egregore, and the Egregore's motions will almost never involve the Egregore deciding to kill itself. [It will simply fork instead](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem) if any critical blob of other boids don't like the vibe that claims that an existing egregore is bad... and now you have *TWO* Egregores! And having two Egregores feeling all ["vanity of small differences" about each other](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences) is the beginning of a recipe for Yet Another Genocide... *Sigh*... And actually... if you think about it... 😭

D) There's a cultural package of like... bottom up Old West Style Justice. There used to be an entire media genre that spanned TV and books for this called "The Western" and it includes juries, and hanging bad guys, and taming mobs of angry people, and sheriffs, and it interacts in remarkably lawful ways with the low level tactical possibilities left over by [the Posse Comitatus Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act) for using **locally** *legally* organized "state violence" and is scrupulously mindful of the jurisdictional boundaries of the authority of a given (elected!) sheriff. I think this old Egregore had a huge number of virtues that the modern one is missing and also **I don't think either of them are good enough** to secure a Win Condition as we approach the coming cultural chaos of The Singularity. Its a really hard problem. Its hard. [Coordination Is Hard.](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/coordination-is-hardhtml)

E) A second order issue is that Institutions are generally run by smaller insulated Egregores for priests, oligarchs, managers, or other [nobles of the robe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobles_of_the_Robe), that often [run on ring dynamics and/or are a network of true and real friends](https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/) (arguably it is better to have a clusters of friends, but ultimately "rings" at least can have outsiders break into them, whereas friend systems are often very *very* insular). Ultimately, when the sausage is made, it turns out that The Institution has "the way it says it works on the tin" but then in practice the reality is that this is a bunch of levers and possibilities. It is a machine. An inert machine. There must be humans putting gas into the machine and steering the wheel and shifting the levers. Those humans form into cliques, and now you just have another Egregore *inside* the Institution as well as the ones *outside*. And you're still not really solving The Problem Of Genocide that way.