Egregores
In economics, the term "animal spirits" refers to an emergent vibe—a sort of attitudinal weather condition—throughout the market on a given day or during a particular accounting period, that vibe shaped by the aggregated knowledge, opinions, emotional states, and other such difficult-to-quantify variables of the people participating in it.
So the stock market's animal spirits are the consequence of how stock traders and other relevant entities feel, and those feelings then determine how the market does that day, how it responds to new variables, and so on.
This aggregation of individual vibes into a sort of mega-vibe is an example of what's sometimes called an "egregore," which is a supernatural entity that emerges from collective human thoughts or actions.
Historically, this term has referred to actual spirits, actual beings that existed alongside gods and monsters in colloquial mythologies, but more recent definitions have expanded the concept to encompass everything from market vibes to the seeming character of online social networks.
When we do things together, participating in larger systems that are networked in various ways, the resulting entity—the social network we're all using, the stock market we're participating in, the nation of which we’re a citizen—can be perceived as a sort of Voltron-entity consisting of numerous humans, each of us acting as atomic units of the larger whole.
And that unification of differentiated entities into a mega-entity allows us to treat a group of people as if they're a singular person, assessing and even diagnosing them in potentially useful ways.
Important to note here is that the concept of an egregore is not scientific in any way: this isn't research-based, it hasn't been formally tested or studied.
This is an analytical approach that can be perspective-shifting and at times useful for our heuristics, and it might even point us toward worthwhile targets for future research, but this isn't a fact or tangible reality; it's a label that could help us look at things in different ways (but also maybe not).
It’s interesting to consider how far up and down this concept might scale, though: if we viewed the human story, from pre-agriculture all the way to today, as the evolution of a single entity, what would that tell us about said entity? What metaphors might we use to discuss and diagnose ourselves, and how might we break that story up into various cultures, time periods, etc?
How do we shape the egregores of which we're a part, and how do they shape us in return?
What might we predict using this assessment model, and how might it be refined?
What might we tweak to adjust the character of our egregores (at the individual or Voltron level)?
Paid Brain Lenses subscribers receive twice as many essays and podcast episodes each week. They also fund the existence and availability of all the free stuff.
You can become a paid subscriber for $5/month or $50/year.
You can also support all my work (and receive gobs of bonus content) via Understandary.