Modified:
egregore
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.an idea that takes on a life of its own in the collective consciousness
similar to Harari's concept of a shared myth. but Harari's myths are more like social technologies, including things like "money" that we see as useful fictions but usually don't attribute with agency of their own. and Harari is more focused on large-scale behavior, while egregores exist across all scales including fairly niche settings
strongly connected to identity: many egregores are things like nationalities, sports fandoms, religions, where people identify with the egregore.
but there are also egregores that shape our behavior despite us not identifying with them: fashion trends, mass hysterias (witch trials etc), implicit ideologies (materialism, capitalism, wokism, etc)