Author: Simon Sheridan

At the end of last week’s post, we combined the esoteric-exoteric distinction and mapped it against the three levels of being to end up with the following table:- 

Exoteric	Esoteric
Higher esoteric	Higher esoteric
Socio-cultural	Socio-cultural
Biological	Biological

What this means is that every level of being has both an inner-facing (esoteric) and an outer-facing (exoteric) aspect. Another way to think about it is that the esoteric aspect is what we know subjectively, and the exoteric aspect is what we know objectively.

For those familiar with Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, our right-hand column maps almost exactly onto the hierarchy. We can represent that as follows:-

Exoteric	Esoteric (Maslow’s needs)
Higher esoteric	Self-Actualisation
Socio-cultural	Intimate relationships, friendships, accomplishment, prestige
Biological	Food, warmth, water, rest

However, the way I prefer to think about these matters is not in terms of needs, but in terms of identity. Our identity consists of both the esoteric and exoteric aspects of our lives. Furthermore, the concept of identity allows for a more positive, creative form of interpretation. We don’t just satisfy our biological need for food by eating anything. We choose to eat certain foods. These are part of our identity, not through capriciousness or vanity (although those can be factors), but because our preferences are expressions of our individuality.

Society offers us a set of default scripts that we follow. Some of these suit us and some don’t. Learning to understand and express our true needs, even basic biological ones, is actually a form of self-actualisation. We want to eat this kind of food and live in this kind of house. We need this kind of rest cycle to be at our peak performance. These are expressions of identity, not just needs.

The same goes for relationships, friendships, jobs, clubs, and other social aspects of our lives. When we are young, we take whatever we can get. It’s better to be friends with anyone than to be alone. It’s better to have some kind of love and affection than none at all. These can fulfil our basic needs, but the expression of identity implies that we have some kind of choice in the matter. We don’t just hang around with anyone; we hang around with our people. We aren’t just in a romantic relationship for the sake of it, but because we actually care for the other person. We don’t just take any job, but one that we have some interest in.

Interestingly, it seems that one of the best ways to transcend the needs-frame and step into the identity-frame is to deliberately go without the fulfilment of needs. The negation of needs seems to facilitate a proper understanding of them. Are you really hungry, or are you just eating because you always eat at this time of day? One way to find out is to fast. Those who have tried fasting know that what happens is that you get beyond the period when you thought you needed food (i.e., you were hungry), and then there’s a long period when you are not hungry at all. In fact, it can happen that you feel much better—lighter, more energetic, tense, and wired in a good way; ready for action. On the other side of what you thought was a need is something very different than you expected.

The same idea can be used in relation to social companionship. Do we really need to be around others all the time? Is it dangerous to be alone? One way to find out is to do the equivalent of a social fast and just be alone for a long period of time and see what happens. Chances are you’ll learn a lot about yourself that you didn’t know. You might learn that many of the thoughts in your head are not your own thoughts at all but just those of the people you hang around with. Maybe those thoughts will start to seem a lot less real once you’ve sat with them alone for a while.

This experimental negation of needs is a core feature of religious practices from a variety of different cultures. We might hypothesise that the way to get to self-actualisation is to negate needs and thereby to turn them into identity. Often this can happen to us by accident as we are forced by circumstances to negate our needs, but the various religious practices are about consciously pursuing the same idea.

That accounts for the esoteric side of the equation. The exoteric side is more commonly associated with the concept of identity because our outward appearance is what really signals our place in the world and hence our identity.

One exoteric aspect of our biological existence is our phenotype. It includes our body type, our eye, hair, and skin colour, the way we walk, the way we talk, and other physical attributes. Meanwhile, an exoteric aspect of our socio-cultural identity includes everything that represents our place in society. Our style of speaking and accent are strong markers that we belong to a particular class or geographical grouping. Our choice of clothing is another big factor here, which signals socio-cultural group membership. Where we live, where we work, and who we hang around with—these are all exoteric socio-cultural markers of identity.

Because humans are social animals, a big part of our identity comes from our membership in social institutions. Almost by definition, institutions belong to the exoteric side of life, but they are also an expression of the esoteric. We can call the institutions whose purpose is to satisfy the biological requirements for food and shelter economic. The economy is how we satisfy our need for food, water, warmth, shelter, etc. It is the work we do to provide those things and the organisations we belong to in order to carry out that work.

For most of history, people satisfied most of their biological needs themselves. The organisation that carried out the work was the family or kinship groups. In fact, the word economy comes from the Greek oikonomia, which meant “household management”. In this case, we might say that the family is the institution for the provision of biological needs. In ancient Rome, the meaning of the word domus (household) included the servants and slaves who did much of the work of production (the word dominate comes from the same meaning).

For the Greeks and Romans, the public sphere was sharply distinguished from the economic sphere of the household. The public sphere was the domain of politics in the broadest sense. In Greek, polites meant citizen, and polis meant city. Since citizenship was synonymous with military service, the institutions of public life were political and military in nature, including the educational institutions that prepared young men (it was only men) for citizenship. Thus, we would say that the socio-cultural domain was primarily about political and military institutions.

In the modern West, of course, we have removed and continue to remove economic production out of the household and into the social sphere. Thus, our economic identity now revolves around the institutions outside of the home where we work. In doing so, we have very much blurred the line between economy and politics, to the extent that it’s impossible to know where one ends and the other begins. This is true in the very straightforward sense that politicians and public servants freely move between the nominally public and private spheres.

Despite all this, we still have the exoteric side of our identity tied up in the economic, political, military, and all the other associations we may enter into. We may be a professional who works for a corporation, is a Labour Party member, an army reservist, a supporter of such-and-such a football team etc etc.

However, one of the biggest social changes in the post-war years has been the radical reduction in the importance of membership of formal institutions for our identity. Take religion as an example. Once upon a time, it was a big deal whether you were an Irish Catholic, a Roman Catholic, or some denomination of Protestant. Young boys (and sometimes grown men) used to fight each other in the streets over the issue. Your career prospects and choice of marriage partners were not unrelated to your religion. Similarly, you probably worked for the same company for decades, if not your whole life. You were probably a member of the same political party for life.

The big change in the post-war years has been the loss of importance of exoteric membership of institutions as a marker of identity. This has been true across the board. We may work for whichever company we like. We may vote for whichever party we like. We may choose whichever religion we like. If our older choices no longer suits us, we just change institutions. With the declining mportance of exoteric considerations, our identity is now far more determined by the esoteric side of the equation.

These trends didn’t just come out of nowhere, of course. In fact, the shift to the esoteric really began with the Reformation and its rejection of what at the time must have seemed like the exoteric institution par excellence: the Catholic Church. The Protestants rejected not just the corruption of the church but the validity of exoteric membership in general. They claimed that the connection with the divine could only come through a direct, esoteric connection with God.

The shift we have seen in the post-war years has taken a secular form that is very similar to the Protestant theology. It says that we should now be free to create our identity in whichever way we please. We no longer receive our identity from membership in the exoteric institutions of society, we will tell those institutions what our identity is and they must oblige us.

Now that we understand the general cultural backdrop against which these changes have taken place, we are ready to connect the dots and come back to the question of why science and politics have become “religion”, especially in recent decades. That’s the question we’ll turn to next week.

Now that my upcoming introductory book on archetypology is in the last stages of preparation for release (thank god!), I thought it might be worth spending a post or three outlining some of the main elements of the model. To a large extent, the model is the refinement of the ideas I’ve been developing over the past several years. One of the main motivations for that work has been to account for the dominance of psychology in modern politics, especially public political discourse. Another way to look at the same dynamic is the idea that politics and science have become “religions”.

Of course, the question we never ask about statements like “politics has become a religion” is why we think that politics and religion should be independent in the first place. If we look at anthropological and historical studies, we find that very few societies have the idea that politics and religion should be separate. For example, in pre-Reformation Europe, the Catholic Church had its own army, levied taxes, and passed laws. Many of its functions were those we would now associate with the bureaucratic apparatus of the modern state. For centuries, nobody had a problem with that, and nobody had a problem with it in ancient Rome where the Church had its origins.

This raises the question: what is the difference between the medieval Catholic Church and the modern bureaucratic state? We like to say that one of the big differences is that religion plays no role in the modern bureaucratic state. But is that really true? Doesn’t the modern bureaucratic state have its own set of ideals that it works by? And isn’t the modern bureaucratic state fully prepared to coerce those who don’t agree with those ideals (cough, cough, covid, cough, cough) just like the Catholic Church did? At an abstract level, is there any difference between the set of ideals and beliefs of the modern bureaucratic state and those of the Catholic Church or any other religion?

To answer that question, we need a conceptual model that can compare and contrast between these two systems. The discipline of anthropology would be the natural place to start, but we would also need a model that can incorporate the psychological aspects. This is especially relevant to modern Western culture where psychology dominates politics. There is a reason why psychoanalysis and modern psychology had to be invented in the West. Our turn away from the formal aspects of politics and religion, which began with the Reformation, has pushed the underlying issues more and more into the psychological realm.

To begin building our model, we take two concepts that relate directly to this distinction between the psychological and anthropological ways of looking at the world. The first concept is called the esoteric. Esoteric comes from the ancient Greek, where it simply means “within” or “inner”. By esoteric, we denote all the properties of human existence that are concerned with inner states. This includes things like emotions, feelings, and thoughts, since these are inner phenomena that are not directly visible to the outside world. The esoteric also includes beliefs and mental models about the world, including political and religious beliefs. Thus, the broad category of esoteric incorporates the disciplines of psychology alongside philosophy and theology.

The second concept we need is another Greek word that means the opposite of esoteric. Exoteric means “outer” or “external”. The exoteric aspects of human life are all those things that can be seen by a third-party observer. This includes our physical appearance, such as hair, eye and skin colour, body type, height, and weight. It also includes the markers of our social status, such as the clothes we wear, our accent and vocabulary, where we live, etc. In relation to our beliefs about the world, the exoteric markers of those beliefs include the rites and ceremonies that we partake in and any symbolic markers on our body or our possessions.

By itself, the esoteric-exoteric distinction is a useful analytical tool when applied to both individuals and cultures. A person who keeps to themselves and has a rich inner life can be described as esoteric (introverted) as opposed to those social butterflies who live exoterically (extroverts). We can characterise cultures in the same way. Ancient Greece and Rome were exoteric in nature. The Romans in particular were very tolerant of the religions of other cultures, but only if those religions was practiced exoterically, as Roman religion was. The one thing the Romans did not like was secretive (esoteric) religious practices, and they tended to clamp down on those. Similarly, Roman and Greek politics was exoteric in nature. Democratic voting in ancient Greece, for example, was conducted by a public show of hands rather than a secret ballot in most cases.

By contrast, modern Western culture has become progressively more esoteric. In the religious sphere, this originally manifested in the Protestant rejection of the exoteric rites and ceremonies of the Catholic Church in favour of a direct esoteric connection with the divine. Meanwhile, pre-democratic European politics was mostly conducted behind closed doors, and even in the democratic era we find the need for concepts like the “deep state” or the “shadow government” to explain how politics actually works.

Although the esoteric-exoteric distinction is useful in and of itself, it does tend to coagulate a great many other concepts that we would normally want to keep separate. For example, we would normally want to analyse a philosophy or underlying belief structure separately from emotions such as sadness, joy, or anxiety, even though all these technically belong to the esoteric realm of human existence. If we want to answer the question that we began this post with (“Why has politics and science become religion?”), we need to be able to distinguish different aspects of our exoteric and esoteric existence so that we can identify the relationships that exist within and across these broad categories. To do that, we will need a second set of concepts.

Now, I’ve been trying to find good names for these categories for the best part of two years. What I’ve been hoping to do is to create labels that don’t have a lot of ideological baggage around them. That is possible, but it’s easy to swing to the other extreme of having labels that are either overly vague or trivial. Anyway, what I’ve ended up with is a three-part distinction based on the levels of being (or great chain of being) concept that goes back to antiquity. This gives us the three categories of biological, socio-cultural, and higher esoteric. Importantly, each of these has an exoteric and an esoteric aspect. This gives us six combinations as follows:-

Exoteric	Esoteric
Higher esoteric	Higher esoteric
Socio-cultural	Socio-cultural
Biological	Biological

The astute reader may have noted that the top-right term is a pleonasm—the higher esoteric is already esoteric. That is true, but I’ve come to think of this as a feature, not a bug, of the classification system. What is the higher esoteric? It is both “above” and “inner”. It is the most important domain of our esoteric existence. Therein lies a value judgement, of course, which says that the higher esoteric (whatever that is) is superior to the biological and socio-cultural esoteric.

We won’t attempt to justify that position in this post. We simply note that what the levels of the being concept adds to our classification system is that there are differences between the esoteric states that are related to the biological sphere (hunger, thirst, cold), those related to the socio-cultural sphere (shame, guilt, happiness), and those related to the higher-esoteric (spiritual ecstasy and terror). The same goes for the exoteric domain too. In next week’s post, we’ll flesh out these distinctions in more detail, and then we’ll be ready to apply them to the problem of why modern Western culture has taken a big jump into the esoteric.

I haven’t had time to write a post this week as I’ve been focusing on the final edit of my upcoming book Archetypology, Volume 1: The Archetypal Study of Human Nature (note: it better be the “final” edit or I’m going to cry!) For those who are interested, this is the front cover:-

Also, I’ve decided to try X (formerly twitter) again. I haven’t had the time to post or do much of anything yet, but will be rectifying that when the book is done. For any X users, this is my account – https://x.com/SimonJSheridan

See youse next week!

Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction, or should I say, better than fiction, more entertaining, and more full of meaningful symbolism and crazy coincidences. What are the odds that the main mechanism for laundering money from the US government would be called USAID? It’s just asking to have an “s” added to the end, which is exactly what some wags on the internet did as the story blew up in the last couple of weeks thanks to Elon Musk and his team of computer nerds cutting off the money supply. I doubt that the jokesters know just how accurate the USAIDS moniker is. So, let’s tell a story. It’s a true one, too.

So, there’s this scientist called Kary Mullis who, I must admit, is exactly my kind of guy: an iconoclastic, fun-loving truth seeker. If I was going to write a science fiction novel with a comedic twist, I’d make somebody like Kary Mullis the hero. In between surfing, experimenting with drugs, and picking up chicks, he’d uncover the secrets of the universe.

Eventually, Mullis wound up in the biomedical industry and saw a lot of the shenanigans (read “fraud”) with his own eyes. While working at one of those companies, he invented the Polymerase Chain Procedure (PCR). He later won the Nobel Prize for his troubles. The PCR was never designed as a diagnostic tool for viral disease, but since Mullis invented the thing, he was hired in the 80s to use the PCR to research how HIV caused AIDS. At the time, Mullis was not an “AIDS denier” (or a climate denier, anti-vaxxer, transphobe, conspiracy theorist, anti-whatever-phobe-denier-theorist). No doubt he took the gig because it paid well, and who wouldn’t want to work on what was then one of the biggest issues of the day?

So, Mullis gets to work, but his employment is covered by grant money from the US government which requires some kind of regular progress reports. At the beginning of a report, Mullis writes the statement “HIV causes AIDS” but, as a good professional scientist, he knows that he needs to cite a reference for such a statement. He goes looking for the scientific paper that is the gold standard which definitely proves that HIV causes AIDS. He can’t find it. This is all happening in the days before the internet, and so Mullis takes the old-fashioned route of calling up people he knows in the virology field and asking them where to find the paper. None of them know. Eventually, Mullis personally meets with the virologists who have publicly claimed that HIV causes AIDS and asks them for the reference to the paper. Not only do they not know, but they are also clearly uncomfortable with the question. Mullis never finds the paper that proves that HIV causes AIDS, because it doesn’t exist. Apparently, he was the only “scientist” who had a problem with that.

Well, that’s not entirely true. There was at least one other scientist who also had a problem with it, and if this whole story really was a fictional comedy, he and Mullis would be a perfect odd-couple pairing. Mullis is the quintessential American scientist in the mould of Richard Feynman: iconoclastic, fun-loving, sociable, good with the ladies.

Duesberg starts to realise that the whole HIV causes AIDS theory doesn’t make sense, and the more he digs into it, the less sense it makes. At the beginning, Duesberg’s contribution is limited to just asking some simple, straightforward questions of the theory. He gets brushed off in the same manner that Mullis did. But Duesberg is a virologist himself, and so he has many more opportunities to ask questions of the right people, including at scholarly conferences. The gentle brushing-off response starts to be replaced by something more aggressive. Duesberg doesn’t like that. He’s also noticed that a lot of these American scientists seem to be very wealthy. The ones who are speaking loudly on the subject just happen to have various copyrights and patents on the technology that is now being purchased with the government money that is being thrown at the “AIDS problem”. A lot of people and corporations are making out like bandits. What’s more, the whole thing is a boon for virology in general, which is now swimming in government grants. Even the virologists who are not actively involved don’t appreciate Duesberg threatening to kill the golden goose.

Most people at this point would have gotten the message and just dropped the whole thing. But Duesberg’s got that really annoying habit of preferring truth over money. This is back in the 80s, when the US mainstream media was not as in the pocket of monied interests as it is now. Duesberg gets himself interviewed on some pretty well-known media outlets. At that point he has crossed the line and openly challenged the virological powers-that-be. To cut a long story short, they proceed to destroy his career and reputation. Bear in mind, the very same people who were controlling the government purse strings were the ones who were pocketing a lot of the money, either directly or indirectly.

Sound familiar? It should. AIDS was very much the template for USAIDS, a heady mix of corrupt science and greedy capitalism. But most importantly, the whole thing was government-funded, squillions of dollars just waiting to be released like water out of a dam spillway. All you needed to do was convince the politicians and bureaucrats to open the gate. How do you do that? By creating public hysteria. Convince the public that they’re literally going to die and allow the politicians and scientists to become the heroes who are going to save the day.

In one respect, Mullis and Duesberg were wrong. (US)AIDS is a disease. It’s also not inaccurate to call it a viral disease. It’s not a disease of the body, however, but of the body politic. One of its main symptoms is when real scientists get their careers and reputations destroyed for speaking the truth.