Workplace egregores

I learned about Carolyn Chen’s book about how blurring the line between work and religion in an interview with the CS Monitor. It made me wonder if egregores are more likely to arise in workplaces now that they are becoming more like the home turf of those “autonomous psychic entities that are composed of and influencing the thoughts of a group of people” (Wiktionary, see also Wikipedia).

In Work Pray Code, Chen argues that, in Silicon Valley at least, work is demanding more from high-skilled employees than it did 50 or 60 years ago, but it’s also offering more. In the end, people don’t have time for “other sources of meaning and belonging outside of the workplace, things like faith communities, the Rotary Club, and softball leagues.” Consequently, what’s sacred to them is work, because work is the thing that they are “willing to submit and sacrifice and surrender their lives to.” In an interview with her publisher, Chen notes: “Workplaces have become the new ‘faith communities’ of the highly skilled in knowledge-industry hubs like Silicon Valley.”

While the groups that egregores arise from don’t have to be religious or spiritual, most of the literature about egregores are associated with religious practices, including Western mystery traditions and Tibetan Buddhism. In his book Egregores: The Occult Entities That Watch Over Human Destiny, Mark Stavish notes that “an egregore is augmented by human belief, ritual, and especially by sacrifice. If it is sufficiently nourished by such energies, the egregore can take on a life of its own and appear to be an independent, personal divinity, with a limited power on behalf of its devotees and an unlimited appetite for further devotion.”

I’ve been using the word ogregore to refer to the emergent, collective actions of well-connected groups, tipping my hat to egregores without committing to their occult elements and manifestations. (For example, Stavish notes a second, older definition of egregore than the one given by Wiktionary: “the home or conduit for a specific psychic intelligence of a nonhuman nature connecting the invisible dimensions with the material world in which we live.”)

In “Is crypto an orgregore?”, I ventured that the minimal conditions for an orgregore were that (1) constituent people share a social characteristic, (2) there are 2-way social links that tie all the members together, (3) it demonstrates agency (differentiated, autonomous, interactive, adaptive), and (4) there are discernible actions and outcomes. Some Silicon Valley companies, especially larger, more tight-knit ones that have been around for a while, are probably ogregores.

Since spiritual practices are so strongly associated with egregores, and Silicon Valley companies are increasingly engaged in them according to Carolyn Chen, it’s possible that egregore phenomena are more prevalent in the workplace now than they were 50 years ago.

Coda: Tara Isabella Burton reported on emerging spiritual practices in Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World (2020). In chapter 8, she notes that “two options are currently contending for the role of Remixed culture’s de facto civil religion”: social justice culture and the techno-utopians of Silicon Valley. In chapter 9 she discusses a third emerging civil religion: the “new atavists [who] yearn for traditionalism, authoritarianism, and established gender roles.” Chen’s Silicon Valley workers are not (necessarily) Burton techno-utopians, though they overlap geographically.