A tribe of savages got the idea that hare tails make you strong. And everyone started fighting, fighting fiercely over these tails, sparing no one. And those who won the right to wear them really did become very strong — or perhaps only the very strong were able to wear them. It became clear to everyone that the tails truly had magic power. As it turns out, this scheme still works today...

In our time, too, there are countless social institutions whose ideology rests on tails like these, which doesn’t stop them in the slightest from being successful and regularly getting confirmation and proof that their worldview is right. And even if some of them use tails that really do have remarkable properties, the relationships within them are arranged so that the systems would work perfectly well if the healing tails were replaced with dummy ones.

MLM, financial pyramids, esoteric, astrological and religious schools, and fashion often remind me of Doc Brown from “Back to the Future”, who got the design of the time machine by peeking at himself in the past.

Very often the organisers of business trainings build their fortune precisely by teaching others how to make one. Network marketing lures new members with the hope that they, in turn, will be able to recruit others. People put money into the shares of a notorious 1990s pyramid scheme because they were rising fast — and they were rising fast because people were putting money into them. A film’s box office depends above all on its bankable stars, whose bankability depends on their roles in box-office hits. “This season it’s white and figure-hugging,” fashionistas hear — and they wear white and figure-hugging.

You can find the same closed loop in the intellectual layers of society, too. Among astrologers, surely, the influence of the heavenly bodies shows up many times more clearly than among people unfamiliar with astrology. People who hold the view that humans are greedy easily find confirmation of it as soon as they start suppressing that greed in everyone around them. Or take scientific materialism, which proves the strictly material nature of the world by the absence of any reliable observations to the contrary — recorded, of course, by those very same material instruments. What exactly are the instruments supposed to find, if everything they record will be material by definition?

Such social systems organise themselves into a kind of intellectual pyramid, much like financial ones, creating a space around themselves in which all the debits and credits start to balance in a wonderful way. And on the whole everything in them is fine and dandy, except for one small nuance: “the tails everything rests on are completely beside the point; life wouldn’t stop if they were replaced with ears.” There may well be movements that follow the opposite methodology yet achieve the same result. And sometimes they don’t achieve it — or rather, they do solve problems, just not the ones originally declared, but their own. If you read how medieval doctors treated the sick, you wonder how the latter ever managed to survive. Anaesthesia — with a sledgehammer, therapy — with bloodletting and arsenic, prevention — by forbidding washing. But that is more the exception; most beliefs still pay off in their own way. In one film from the hungry 1990s, a young man, at the cost of incredible sacrifices, got hold of money for red caviar, which, according to the plot, was badly needed to help a girl get back on her feet; she was lying in hospital with… a head injury. And she got back on her feet! The red caviar here played the role of a healing tail, in no way connected with the brain’s recovery, yet bearing real fruit. In the same way, colds were always treated with honey and milk (actually a favourable environment for a sore throat to develop), nuts, all sorts of treats, sometimes even red caviar. And it helped, it did — but is it worth searching caviar or nuts for an anti-cold substance? Now that these foods have become a bit more affordable, this folk remedy is less common, but expensive imported aspirins have taken its place. (How care and attention help a sick person recover is a topic for another conversation; with a certain probability, on a psychosomatic level, they can also be the cause or the goal of the illness.)

The urge to put the gathering of healing tails on a production line, to set up their mass production, bears no fruit — it only debunks the myth. Torn out of their environment, they lose their power. Scientists who tried to automate astrological research, to use scientific databases and statistical material, met with failure despite all their efforts, noble ones in my view. At the same time, my own experience has more than once confirmed that astrology works as a system.

The scale of this phenomenon is much broader than it may seem at first glance. Civilisation is so permeated by it that one could say most social processes live an entirely independent life and are not at all what we call them.

Does the number of special effects help get a film’s idea across? And yet in films full of them the acting is often of a higher standard.

How many people remember anything from their university courses? And yet people with a higher education are, as a rule, more erudite.

Do compliments like “You’re holding up remarkably well” make someone celebrating a milestone birthday more confident about their health? And yet their absence upsets him.

How many connoisseurs of very expensive wine could recognise it blindfolded? Or does a wine aged 100 years have properties even slightly more significant for the body than one aged 10? And yet I, like most people, would like to try both.

Are a cold leather sofa and a marble floor any cosier? And yet, I think, they somehow make their owners feel “warmer” inside.

Does a 4:3 film look any better stretched across the full width of an expensive widescreen plasma TV?

Do public campaigns in which rich and successful musicians tell young people it’s better not to start, because it’s too pleasant to stop, really put them off drugs?

Does crime reporting reduce crime? Or reports on where you can get prostitutes, and for how much, reduce prostitution? How to avoid ending up there (how to end up there)?

I could go on for a very long time, so I’ll just make one important remark: none of these phenomena can be torn out of its system; each performs its own useful functions, though often quite the opposite of the declared ones.

Such phenomena are interesting above all because, despite the seemingly obvious — on analytical examination — uselessness of the declared subject lying on their surface, behind each of them hides something unmanifested, a hidden mechanism, something we can’t yet see but can already sense.

Such self-creating and self-sustaining intellectual pyramids are the main functional mechanism of what esoteric literature calls egregores.