omniharmonicEgregore
An egregore is a concept from esoteric philosophy describing a non-physical entity or thought-form that arises from the collective thoughts, emotions, and behaviors of a group of individuals. Once generated, an egregore takes on a kind of autonomous agency, shaping the perceptions, incentives, and choices available to the people who participate in it. The concept bridges the gap between systems thinking and the phenomenology of culture: it names the way that systems of belief and behavior, once they achieve sufficient complexity and momentum, seem to operate with a will of their own, beyond the intentions of any individual participant.
Benjamin Life uses the concept of the egregore to describe capitalism as a force that is not reducible to human nature but operates as a system that metabolizes metals and minerals, plants and bodies into a strange kind of order. In “A Regenerative Accelerationist Manifesto,” he describes the “egregore of capital” as an insatiable drive to transform atoms into consumer goods, a virus that possesses the mind and urges the body to consume. This framing is crucial because it shifts the diagnosis from individual moral failure to systemic dynamics: no one person, film, or even mass social movement can change the function of the system through shifts in perspective alone. It is the incentives and behaviors that co-arise with the egregore that determine the choices available to us. In “I Did It All For Love,” the moment of recognizing this — when the Brazilian Minister of Forestry shrugged off an immersive VR documentary about illegal logging in the Amazon — shattered Benjamin Life’s earlier theory of change and redirected his work toward understanding how systems and cultures, not just individual consciousness, must be transformed.
The egregore concept connects to the meta-crisis as a way of naming how systemic dynamics become self-perpetuating. It relates to the story-of-separation as the ontological substrate that feeds the egregore of capital. It also connects to living-systems thinking by illuminating how non-biological systems can exhibit emergent, organism-like properties, and to dominator-culture as the cultural expression of an egregore optimized for extraction and control.