“On marrying the egregore” by jimmy

I mentioned in the last post that Kegan's lumping of all "relationships" including identification with one's community into stage 3 has some interesting implications. Basically, people invent an individual named "everyone", use this as a cognitive shortcut, and then become subject to this cognitive shortcut which can take on a life of its own as an egregore: The big divergence between my description and Kegan's starts where I ended describing stage 3 as about being subject to dyadic relationships and stage 4 about making these object in serving larger group coordination. Kegan calls stage 3 about "relationships" without this distinction, and stage 4 is when you transcend external validation and "self author" a "system". I'm not buying it though, because as anyone who has ever met anyone insecure will know, "pre-systematic" people will absolutely create their own internal judgements of themselves. The judgement may be framed as "What other people would/should think", but the little tulpa of society is internally generated nonetheless. Similarly, stage 4 people coincidentally all "self author" into the same kind of systems as their peers. They may frame things as "I make up my own mind", but the way in which they make up their [...] The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: November 5th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AmyoCMhSzNA6svsMp/on-marrying-the-egregore --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.