Category: Ideas

Let’s begin another post with our table that maps the levels of being against the exoteric-esoteric aspects of existence:- 

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

In past posts, we have focused on how these categories can be used to analyse our identities as individuals. But no individual is an island unto themselves. We are born into a society, and certainly in the first decades of life, we get our identity from that society. That’s why we can use this same set of categories to define the institutions of culture (the ones which bestow our identity on us). For each level of being, we can ask the question: which institution of society represents this?

For the biological domain, the answer is: the family. The family is concerned with the preparation of meals, the provision of shelter, and most of our other basic biological needs. But the family is also an institution predicated on biological relationships of genetic inheritance. While there can be families where the members are not biologically related (e.g., adoption), this is the exception which proves the rule. This doesn’t mean that the family doesn’t have other functions, including economic, political, and even religious, just that the biological ones are fundamental.

Moving to the socio-cultural level, there are three related institutions at play: the political, the economic, and the military. How formal and distinct such institutions are is usually a function of the size and complexity of the society. The bigger and more complex the society, the more we find that the sub-specialities operate relatively independently of each other. This is in contrast with smaller societies where at least the political and military functions are usually combined (think King Arthur and the knights of the round table).

This leaves the higher esoteric. What institution is responsible for the guardianship and propagation of the highest beliefs of a culture? In most societies, this is a straightforward question to answer, but it has become highly problematic for us in the modern West, and this is a big part of the reason why we now hear things like how science or politics has become religion. Religion, of course, would be the simple answer to the question. But at the same time we’re told that science has become religion, we’re also told that religion is on the decline. Thus, in order to answer the question, we need to dig into the history of religion and the twists and turns it has taken in Western culture.

If we think about this issue anthropologically, a question we might ask at a broad level is, how does a culture initiate members into its primary belief structure? There are two main forms of initiation: rites of passage and myths/stories. While there can be all kinds of rites and stories used in everyday life, every culture has its primary rites and stories that communicate its highest beliefs. A tribal initiate goes through a variety of ceremonies and rites whose purpose is not just to test their skills but to teach them the beliefs of the tribe. Such rites are reinforced by the main stories of the culture, which are almost always about past heroes who went through the same thing.

This may sound rather exotic, and yet it is exactly the same thing we see with the Catholic Church. Every Catholic rite of passage, such as Mass, Communion, Confirmation, etc., has its meaning tightly integrated with the story of Jesus and the Bible more broadly. Consider the rite of the Eucharist, where the initiate receives the body of Christ in the form of bread and wine. The meaning of this is directly related to the Bible passage: “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.” (John 6:54). This is in turn related to the idea of salvation and redemption through Christ. The symbolism of the rite of passage and the story that goes along with it are tightly interwoven. That’s the way it is in most cultures.

It follows from this that to find the core beliefs of any culture, you can look for both the main rites of passage and the main myths, especially where these are combined. If we take ancient Rome as an example, we find that one of the main myths was related to the founding brothers, Romulus and Remus, both sons of the god Mars and the virgin Rhea Silvia, and both raised by a she-wolf. The brothers wanted to found a city but couldn’t agree on the location. In the ensuing argument, Romulus killed Remus and chose the site of what is still Rome. That is the mythical aspect.

That myth is then reinforced by the rites of passage, including temples, holidays (holy days), and feasts dedicated to Romulus. In early Rome, religion was quite decentralised and so it wouldn’t have a universal thing to pay homage to Romulus. Later, during the imperial period, things changed. The cult of Caesar had a very similar form to the cult of Romulus, but it was far more widely recognised. Caesar largely wrote his own mythology, claiming descent from Venus. He was deified after his death, and a number of temples were built with various rituals and ceremonies. His birthday was also marked as a holiday.

We can see from this example that the Romans freely mixed religion and politics. However, that is merely our modern Western bias on the matter. The reality is that most cultures make no hard distinction between these domains. This division of ours began in the medieval era when the Catholic Church managed to unite the various barbarian groups of Europe into a unified entity under the Pope in Rome. Right from the beginning, there was a rather weird and also very fuzzy split between the religious and political. The Catholic Church had its origins in Roman culture but with a heavy dose of monastic theology thrown in for good measure. It couldn’t really decide whether it was a political or a religious entity. But that was a question that never would have occurred to the earlier Romans, who recognised no distinction between politics and religion.

In any case, what we see from the medieval period onwards is a kind of separation of church and state via the truce between the church and the kings of Europe known as the divine right of kings. In theory, the church would concern itself with spiritual affairs, and the kings would take care of politics. Julius Caesar could declare himself a god. But the kings of medieval Europe had to make do with having the Pope give them God’s blessing. In practice, the Pope and the kings were often at loggerheads, but the uneasy partnership held firm all the way until the Reformation when the Protestants realised that the church had strayed from what they believed was its purely spiritual mission and demanded that there really should be a separation of the church and state. The kings of Europe saw their opportunity to ride the wave of popular resentment to get what they had always wanted: more power. Eventually, the separation of church and state became a kind of official doctrine in northern Europe, but not until a great deal of blood had been spilled.

But, to say it again, the separation was already there from the start, as can be seen in the fact that there were separate rites of passage and separate myths for the political and religious domains. A peasant swore allegiance to the local lord, and that was their initiation in an economic, political, and military sense. Meanwhile, the religious rites of passage were run through the church. In theory, these were separate, but then things like the crusades or the church’s function as a propagandist on behalf of the kings muddied the waters. Ultimately, the divine right of kings was the unifying concept that linked the political and religious realms together.

Then we get to the Reformation.

Now, the first thing to note here is that the Protestants wanted to all but get rid of the rites of passage as methods of religious initiation. That was related to the idea of deprecating the role of priest, bishop, and pope. All that was, in turn, predicated on the notion that a believer should aim to have a direct connection with the divine. That direct connection was tied with an increased emphasis on the Bible. Since the Bible contains what we are calling the primary myths of the religion, what the Protestants were doing was tilting the focus of initiation towards the mythology and away from the rites of passage.

Closely tied to this was the desire to get rid of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy and all its pomp and ceremony. That is what led to much of the violence that followed the Reformation, including the English Civil War. In England, Henry VIII had liquidated the monasteries and established the Church of England. But that was really just his own personal version of the Catholic Church, one that would do whatever he wanted. It was a harbinger of the fact that the kings of Europe were slowly getting the upper hand over the church in Rome.

The Puritan reformers later objected to this, not because the church had become a servant of the state, but because it still had the old Catholic hierarchy with too much of a focus on rites of passage, etc. Cromwell and his men gutted the church only for the Restoration to bring the inevitable backlash. A number of thinkers, such as John Locke, started to wonder out loud whether it wouldn’t be better if politics and religion really should just be kept separate. As with so many of Locke’s ideas, this one was eagerly adopted by the American colonists who added it to their constitution. In Britain, there was more of a pragmatic truce which amounted to the Church of England becoming a kind of moral policeman on behalf of the state. In reality, true religious belief was already waning and being replaced by Enlightenment theories of reason.

The upshot of all this was that religion became a mostly private matter in accordance with the Protestant idea of a direct connection with the divine. By allowing direct access to the Bible and therefore opening up its interpretation, the Reformation eventually gave birth to numerous Protestant denominations, each with a slightly different take on the holy book. Religion had ended up transitioning away from the exoteric world of deeds and actions and into the esoteric world of ideology.

Now, if we think back again to Rome, the Romans were almost the inversion of the Protestants in that they emphasised the rites of passage as the markers of religious identity. Literacy rates in Roman times were in single digit percentages, so reading a holy book was not an option for most people anyway. A Roman solidified their religious identity by carrying out the rites of passage required of them. Romans couldn’t care less what you thought about the rites, only that you did them. Thus, the marker of religious identity in Roman times was exoteric, based on external actions. By contrast, the marker of religious identity in the modern West after the Reformation came to be ideologically based. It mattered not that you carried out the rites of the church but that you believed such and such an interpretation of the Bible, or at least professed to believe it.

And this has come to be true of politics too. Modern political parties are made up of factions of people unified not by any rite of passage or formal criteria but by professed allegiance to a set of ideological positions. The same is true for our economic identities too. When we join a new company as employees, there are some things that might loosely be called rites of passage that take place, but largely our membership is based on the fact that we will contribute to the professed mission of the company.

The initial shift towards esoteric forms of religious identity has now given birth to a world where ideology is main marker of identity more generally. That is true of us as individuals and it is true of the institutions of society. Now we’re ready to join the dots and see why politics and science have become religion. We’ll explore that more in next week’s post.

Let’s begin by recalling our table that maps the esoteric-exoteric distinction against the levels of being:

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

Each of these distinctions can be thought of as a component of our identity. That is, our identity has an exoteric, outward-facing aspect and an esoteric, inward-facing aspect. We can think about identity creation as a continuous feedback loop that not only moves back and forth between the rows but can also jump up to other levels of being. Driven by some inner desire, we act in the world, and then the consequences of those actions may trigger new esoteric states.

For example, let’s say there’s a person who is addicted to eating but who knows they have a problem. They feel the need to eat (not because of hunger, but addiction) and then eat to excess. This makes them feel ashamed and having yet again been unable to control themselves. If that loop repeats itself enough, shame may turn into despair, and despair may motivate more extreme actions in the outer world. (This is less likely with food addictions but definitely relevant to more dangerous addictions).

When we model identity creation in this fashion as a set of relationships between different aspects of our character, some important insights become apparent. For example, consider each row in the table and then ask the question, Which scholarly discipline is dedicated to it? For the biological row, this is straightforward. Biology is the discipline in question. But note that biology is only concerned with the exoteric side of the equation. It studies what can be known from outward appearance. It is not concerned with the subjective experience of biological processes like hunger, thirst, cold, etc. The inner aspects our biological identity have been left out of scope of the discipline of biology.

The same is true of our socio-cultural identity, which includes the disciplines of economics, political science, anthropology, and sociology. But all of these are concerned with outward behaviours and not with inward states. An economist wants to know how resources are allocated and tries to measure economic variables such as production, inflation, and unemployment. The other disciplines in question are also concerned with what can be measured and, therefore, with the exoteric column and not the esoteric.

Modern economics is particularly interesting in this respect since it not only ignores the esoteric aspect; it builds a theoretical framework based on an assumption about the esoteric that makes no sense. Economics recognises that economic activity is driven by human needs and wants (esoteric), and yet it assumes those needs and wants are infinite. But human life is finite. How can we have infinite wants in a finite life? The economic doctrine of scarcity is born out of this assumption, since if wants are infinite, there can never be enough time or money to satisfy them. Modern economics also fails to recognise the hierarchy of wants implied by the levels of being and therefore does not account for the fact that the desire for self-actualisation may require no resources at all and therefore be infinitely attainable. It requires no resources to fall in love, for example.

But economics is not alone in this ignorance of the esoteric dimension of existence. We see the exact same problem in political science, anthropology, and sociology. All of these pay no attention to the esoteric side of the equation since that would make their discipline subjective, and science is supposed to be objective. As a result, there is no science of the esoteric aspects of our biological, economic, political, or even military identities. These are ruled out a priori by the assumptions of modern science.

As a result, in modern Western culture, the esoteric parts of existence have been left to the artists, writers, and philosophers to deal with. Since biology has not been a traditional subject matter of the arts, we have almost no representation of inner biological states in either science or art. This includes things like hunger and thirst but, more interestingly, feelings of ill health.

There are all kinds of interesting questions to ask here. What does it feel like to be sick? What symptoms are common across illnesses? Is there any difference in the severity or quality of those symptoms? Another relatively unexplored area is the nature of sensation. How do the tastes of things differ, or the smells of them? What are the qualities of vision or hearing? What differences exist in the sensory experience of touch? Within our schema, all of these belong to the esoteric aspect of the biological level of being.

Although the biological has been ignored, the esoteric aspects of the socio-cultural level of being have been a primary subject matter for art, literature, and philosophy since these equate to important matters of politics, economics, and war. But even then, there is a huge split between the exoteric and esoteric investigations. Historians, economists, and political scientists focus on objective representations of external events. Such-and-such a war happened. Such-and-such a battle swung the war this way or that. Such-and-such a ruler was defeated and removed from power. These all belong to the exoteric side of the equation.

The esoteric side of the equation is left to the artists and writers, who explore the motivations behind war and other political disputes. Why did the war start in the first place? What were the motivations of the rulers? Why were the public so enthusiastic about it, or why did they not want to fight? These are questions that could be asked and yet never really get answered. Political disputes are treated much like illness in that their subjective aspects are presumed to be not amenable to explanation. Is that actually true, or has nobody ever tried?

We might expect more attention to be paid to the esoteric motivations of the ruling class, since they play a disproportionate role in political matters and are easier to study. Shakespeare explores such themes numerous times in his plays, especially in Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and Richard III. Richard III is the true psychopath that will do whatever it takes to gain power and feels not the slightest remorse. Hamlet is almost his opposite. He is a young man who should take power but lacks the decisiveness to do so. Othello applies the logic of power to his marriage, and it ends up destroying both himself and Desdemona. Macbeth is perhaps the most interesting because he has honourably served his king Duncan, but cannot resist the temptation to take power when the opportunity presents itself. Nevertheless, Shakespeare shows us that Macbeth is hesitant before the act and then suffers afterwards.

As magnificent as Shakespeare’s plays are as an exploration of the attainment of power, they don’t really explore the interaction between the esoteric and exoteric aspects of politics or war. The plots of his stories don’t revolve around any specific political issues. Thus, there is no real connection between the exoteric and the esoteric in his stories. They are first and foremost psychological investigations.

Thus, we have ended up in a situation where science explores the exoteric side of life, while art and literature explores the esoteric side, and never the twain shall meet. We don’t have a model of the feedback loop that occurs between the exoteric and esoteric aspects of human existence.

But, more broadly, there is still a big imbalance between the exoteric and esoteric. Science is still the dominant source of “truth” and science is focused on the exoteric. There were signs in the 19th and 20th centuries that this imbalance might begin to be corrected. The arrival of psychoanalysis was one. In my opinion, Freud and Jung’s more speculative work in anthropology (Freud) and even theology (Jung) was their most interesting. Although he drank way too much of the Wagnerian kool-aid, Spengler’s work provided an example of esoteric historical scholarship. There was Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, which was interested in some of the issues we discussed earlier, such as the subjective feelings of illness. Meanwhile, anthropology and sociology toyed with what was called “qualitative analysis,” which, in our terms, meant esoteric investigation.

All of these were positive developments that occurred prior to WW2 and then were snuffed out afterwards. Even psychoanalysis, which started off so positively, has turned into modern psychology, which now models every mental issue as a bio-chemical problem to be addressed by the administration of medication. All that esoteric stuff took too long, so now we just jab people with needles to get the result we want more quickly.

We see much the same pattern in the recent developments around the trans debate, especially as it relates to the surgical and pharmaceutical interventions required for people to change gender. Using our exoteric-esoteric distinction, we can see that the gender change concept is all about the exoteric side of the equation. This includes innocuous things like the application of make-up and hairstyling, but has more recently incorporated interventions such as implants, injections, and other surgical procedures. Together with the correct application of socio-cultural identity markers like clothing, these enable a change of gender in the exoteric sense.

But much like modern economists write off the esoteric side of their discipline by simply assuming that humans have infinite wants, so too is the esoteric side of the trans issue almost completely ignored. The assertion is that an individual simply feels like a man or a woman, and that is enough justification to have medical professionals running for the scalpel and the syringe. The question that never gets addressed is, “What does it actually feel like to be a man/woman?”

There’s a song whose title indicates it might provide an answer to exactly this question. It’s called “Man, I feel like a woman,” and was a big hit for Shania Twain about twenty years ago. Could we find an answer here to the question of what it feels like to be a woman? Well, not really.

The best thing about bein’ a woman
Is the prerogative to have a little fun and
Oh, oh, oh, go totally crazy, forget I’m a lady
Men’s shirts, short skirts
Oh, oh, oh, really go wild, yeah, doin’ it in style
Oh, oh, oh, get in the action, feel the attraction
Color my hair, do what I dare
Oh, oh, oh, I wanna be free, yeah, to feel the way I feel
Man, I feel like a woman (hey!)

Now, we shouldn’t expect much from a pop song, but the absence of even a single definitive esoteric quality of womanhood in the lyrics is indicative of a larger problem. How could we know what it feels like to be a woman, or a man for that matter? If we can’t answer that question, how could we ever verify when somebody says that they feel like one or the other? How could anybody know for themselves what they feel like?

The reality is, we are living in a culture which simply doesn’t care about the esoteric side of life. The economist states that gender surgery is just another of the infinite number of humans needs that contributes to the GDP. The medical professional is more concerned with performing the operation correctly than whether its esoteric motivation is justified. There’s a giant black hole where the esoteric aspects of existence should be. To make things even worse, the existential consequences of this absence of esoteric understanding are then weaponised by politicians who pretend to care. That’s why we end up with identity politics and all the variations on wokeness, which has increasingly amounted to nothing more than the insistence that anybody should get whatever they want just because they want it.

This is the unholy alliance between capitalism and liberalism that has dominated our culture in the post-war years, and which has reached new heights of absurdity in the last few decades. Both have ended up in a position of assuming infinite wants which are qualitatively indistinguishable. Economics assumes it because it enables things to be measured monetarily. A dollar spent on one thing is the same as a dollar spent on any other thing. Liberalism assumes infinite wants because for somebody to assert that there really are qualitative differences would be “authoritarianism”. Both of these are predicated on a wilful ignorance of the esoteric side of life.

Now, still we haven’t really addressed the topic which motivated this series of posts in the first place, which is why economics and politics have become a religion. But this post has started to hint at the answer. It lies in the disconnection between the esoteric and exoteric aspects of existence. Whatever one wants to say about Christianity, it had an explicit model that accounted for both body and soul. Thomas Aquinas, for example, emphasised the harmonious relation between the esoteric and exoteric. The decline in Christianity as an active force in the culture has left science in charge. But science has no integral or holistic approach to the esoteric-exoteric distinction. In fact, as we have seen, science all but ignores the esoteric. Without any notion of esoteric truth, the esoteric side of our culture has become increasingly hysterical.

We’ll explore these themes more in next week’s post.

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!