Social hierarchies change rapidly. As a competitive cross-country runner in high school, I remember being in utter awe of Dan Hoy – the fifteen year old prodigy breaking national records in age divisions two years above his own. He was an internationally competitive triathlete, in addition to being an unbelievably fast track runner.
One cannot forget the fabled showdown between Conal Wilson, the third and final in the dynasty of Wilsons (his two brothers having been prodigies, and national champions of their own), head-to-head with Dan Hoy in the 2015 New Zealand cross-country championships. There was no way to comprehend the magnitude of their intensity but by running in a race with them — the few times I did bore into me a distinct impression of the nearly inhuman stamina they possessed.
The starting gun explodes and within two minutes Conal and Dan pull far in front of the pack. Three laps they must run, atop mud-grass raked by thousands of spiked shoes. After the first lap it is just Conal and Dan running head to head, neither quite beast nor angel, floating over the clods of wet mud, absurdly ahead of the rest.
Over a corner Conal suddenly slips and rolls and Dan, barely looking back, burns ahead. The collective shock barely registers before Conal leaps up and chases Dan down. They disappear out of view and minutes later, a single figure appears in the distance, followed distantly by a second. It is Conal, driving forward, gliding over grass, pulling far, far away from Dan Hoy. The victory is immortal.
No one talks about Dan Hoy or Conal Wilson today. In the Olympics, these demigods appear and disappear in a flash.
At MIT, it became rapidly apparent that athletic ability was utterly uninteresting1. Far more interesting were data structures: "Sure, your vanilla binary search trees work for your problem set, but if you want predictable performance under real-world load, you'll want red-black trees", or "Check out this really neat visual explanation of the kernel trick", or "How many Arduinos do you need to capture the MAC addresses of each iPhone pinging open Wi-Fi across campus?" or, "I heard he passed the first round at Jane Street so easily, they offered him a $30K signing bonus on the spot."
This shear between social realities I think is so important to pay attention to. It's one of the few signals that can guide you out of the egregore's grip2.
Even though one in four students was a serious athlete, outside of intramural sports, my friends went to a median of zero football games
“Egregores are quite independent entities in the Book of Enoch, and there was then no notion that they arose from a collective. In literature, especially older literature, "egregores" have often been straightforward references to these Enochian entities… Some authors seem to have merged the esoteric concept with the Enochian concept to arrive at an idea of "spiritual entities" that "feed off the thoughts and energy of a unified multitude.”
Egregore intended like social/organizational memes ?