Superdisorders: part 1
In his post The Psychopolitics of Trauma, Scott Alexander suggests that the psychiatric effects of politics, and the social dynamics of partisanship, seem eerily similar to PTSD.
When Donald Trump was elected, some people described themselves as “traumatized”. Someone asked me for comment on the record, hoping I would say something like “as a real psychiatrist, trauma is a real disorder with strict criteria, and all you people are dumb”.
I did not, in fact, make this comment.
Suppose that outrage addiction is, in fact, trauma addiction. That means the media ecosystem is a giant machine trying to traumatize as many people as possible in order to create repeat customers, ie trauma addicts. Combine that with the explicit, confessed desire on both sides to “trigger” the other as much as possible, and you have a lot of very clever people all trying to maximize one another’s trauma levels. On the external level, that looks like weaving as strong a narrative of threat and persecution as possible and trying to hit people in their psychological weak points.
I tend to agree with this picture. I would be very interested to hear what you have to say, if you do not agree with it.
If true, it’s obviously a huge problem. It’s as though an entire country of hundreds of millions of people is now employed as its own anti-therapist. Woe is the patient. Or should I say, the impatient. Impatient to get home. Impatient to take out their phone, to switch on the TV or TikTok or YouTube or Facebook. Impatient to suffer, and all the while, impatient for the suffering to end.
Millions of them.
No single bird needs to comprehend what the flock is doing. It merely needs to respond to its neighbours and the other parts of its immediate environment (e.g. don’t collide with the ground). The larger patterns of the flock emerge naturally from all of this local, individual behaviour.
Maybe the picture grows clearer if we scale our attention down, from the level of many individuals to just a single one. I’d be very surprised if any one of your cells knowsthat it’s participating in your body, or in particular, if any single neuron knows1 that it’s helping to make up your mind. Inversely, the patterns of your mind can surely influence the situation of an individual cell, and that’s becoming even more true as we get better at coordinating our minds and messing with our biology.
When a person has PTSD, or some other mental disorder, what does that imply about what their cells are doing? Do we go looking for some of their neurons that also “have PTSD”? Not really, even though some of those neurons are probably under extra stress sometimes, due to past trauma. Though we might measure that and say it’s “associated with PTSD” or something. On the other hand, if I happened to measure 1,000 neurons and observed that they were all more excitable than usual, should I expect to see that the person they belong to is more excitable in a psychiatrically relevant way? Maybe. In the extreme, that’s just epilepsy. But it seems weird to say that a neuron has epilepsy, even though there is a clearer correspondence in that case.
When a person has PTSD, does it make sense to say that the society has PTSD? I don’t know, and I’m not claiming that’s what Scott was doing exactly. But it’s interesting to consider whether the superorganism itself can “have” an illness which somehow corresponds (or not) to disorders that its constituent organisms might have.
Does it make sense to model a society itself, and not just its individuals, as having a disorder, or what we could call a superdisorder? Are these superdisorders ever analogues of individual psychiatric disorders, such as the ones described in the DSM? Do the disorders of individuals and the superdisorders of groups need to line up?
According to Wikipedia, an egregore:
is a concept in Western esotericism of a non-physical entity or thoughtform that arises from the collective thoughts and emotions of a distinct group of individuals
Now, I’m not going to say that non-physical entities are involved in anything, or that “thoughts are things” in the occult sense. That seems like a map-territory confusion, which I’d amend like so: when I notice or say that I’m having a thought, I’m effectively pointing to the effects of a subset of the physics of my body, though I may not know it. Likewise, an egregore is not some mystical overarching ghost, born separately from its constituents, but a convenient handle on the emergent effects of a group. In particular, egregores may appear to have their own agency that feeds back on individuals, but this is not mystical. The individuals carry it out themselves, by being sensitive to incentives and punishments generally, and sometimes by subscribing to a model or personification of the force that exerts those pressures, i.e. an egregore.
That seems reasonable enough, and it’s basically how rationalists have treated egregores, even when they give them godlike names. The most prominent examples:
Moloch, evoked by Allen Ginsberg and reified by Scott Alexander in Meditations on Moloch, is the rationalist handle on the behaviour of a group that’s racing to the bottom somehow, where it’s in nobody’s personal interest to be the first to be the better person, and so everything remains shitty.
Elua, introduced by Scott Alexander at the end of Meditations, is the counter-egregore to Moloch. Elua is “the god of flowers and free love and all soft and fragile things. Of art and science and philosophy and love”. The wholesome uprightness of humanity and civilization.
Ra, identified by Sarah Constantin, is a force of corruption that causes people to optimize for the appearance of institutional goodness. A vacant prestige, accompanied by a latent hostility towards any request for receipts. Ra is one of the twisted offspring of Goodhart’s law.
Is it appropriate to see an egregore as structurally similar to a particular mental state, or psychiatric disorder?
Scott’s PTSD framing, taken to its extreme, ends with utter partisanship. Two egregores locked in a terminal struggle, clawing at each other forever. Of course it’s actually the individuals that are causing this to happen, though they don’t need to be aware of the big picture. They’re just responding to their local environment, except that “local” now includes an expertly curated smorgasbord of trauma triggers.
Interestingly, there does seem to be scale similarity in the case of “partisan PTSD”: the contractions of the individual at least somewhat mirror the contractions of their society. The PTSD egregore kind of looks like the PTSD individual, fragmented and clenchy.
In the next post in this series, I’ll explore how the correspondence between levels isn’t clean and can break down, or change over history.
In a way that you would count as knowledge to an intelligent human. Of course a neuron’s activity can be correlated with all sorts of information.