Oops, We've Invented Steroids and Amphetamines for our Spiritual Overlords and They're having Their way with Us
The After-Modern Discovery of the Spiritual Realm
In today's video I do a commentary on the first hour of @peternlimberg 's Stoa's conversation with @Freakoutery @johnrobb @jgreenhall
Here’s the original.
I hadn't heard about "the swarm" or the "autocult" but this comparing notes was super helpful.
From a religious perspective the things that stands out repeatedly is that reductive physicalism always has to look to emergence to account for what @Freakoutery calls Egregores. They arise from below.
Christians like myself and @PageauJonathan see much more perennial patterns and dynamics at play. @vervaeke_john in his updating of neo-platonism will see emanation from above also coming into play.
What we're stumbling towards is that what is running this world is not "people" and by that we main human beings with brains and skin and bodies. That's too simplistic of a conceptualization to account for what we find.
"Spirit" has not fallen out of our language but we've lost much ontological respect for the word in terms of our communal life. My go-to example of this is "school spirit". It's very important but not something we "get our hands on" directly.
We can still talk about the spirit of a meeting, an organization, an institution. Sometimes we talk about "culture" or "energy". What we tend to NOT spend enough time thinking about is the agency of this reality "one level up".
Chris Petkau’s videos are helpful with this.
Recently @PageauJonathan and @vervaeke_john have been working on this together.
I did a commentary on that one too.
This has been a topic of conversation between @PageauJonathan and I for a while now and I'm very indebted to him.
I've been paying some attention even to others who are deeply modernist like @jonstewart but lacking the vocabulary or grammar trying to wrestle with the same thing.
Modernity was supposed to banish this stuff. To flatten the world and subject it to our agency and rationality. It was supposed to exorcise the spirits. To discover we have failed is terrifying to many.
This is just one more sign of the recession of Modernity. the tools we have, as @Freakoutery keeps pointing out are radically accelerating the speed and therefore the power of these spiritual forces.
We've been putting our governing spirits on cyber amphetamines and steroids and they're starting to flex their speed and muscle much to our alarm.
Some of our self-soothing habits are being exposed for what they are here by @fullydavid and @KonstantinKisin
Buckle up buckos, some of our new masters are of our own making and some are much older than we are. But be of good cheer, someone has triumphed over these principalities and powers. We might want to take some lessons from Him.