Tribal Phenomenology and Daimons
Shadowlands #5
In the survival film Cast Away by Robert Zemeckis (2000), systems analyst Chuck is marooned on a small tropical island after his plane crashes down in the Pacific Ocean. There are no other survivors. Chuck struggles with the harsh conditions of his new surroundings, unable to find fresh water or catch any food. But the most difficult aspect of Chuck’s situation is the isolation. He is utterly, painfully alone.
So he creates another human. Partly through accident, partly through unconscious compulsion, he counteracts his isolation by shaping a bloodstain on a volleyball into the shape of a human face. He names this newly created being ‘Wilson,’ and proceeds to develop a complex emotional relationship with him over the course of several years.
They have conversations. Wilson offers Chuck advice and criticism. They discuss survival strategies and go over plans for escaping the island. Wilson’s physicality is subtly expanded throughout the film, with Chuck attaching reeds to the volleyball to mimic hair, and constructing a body of driftwood, complete with arms, upon which he can rest Wilson’s ‘head.’
Wilson’s personality, richness, and realness increasingly develop over time as Chuck engages with, and more complexly objectifies, his own projection of a human-like companion.
Of course, the audience never witnesses Wilson move, speak, or exhibit any forms of agency or animism. This is not a fantasy film. Rather, the entire relationship with Wilson happens inside Chuck’s head, as a coping mechanism for his isolation, and Chuck employs this coping mechanism specifically because he is human. Because humans are—more than anything—social, tribal beings.
But what does that mean exactly?
As explored in the last chapter, humans evolved to inhabit the ancient environment of the Garden—specifically to pass the Torch in a highly chaotic natural wilderness, in tight-knit kin groups of around fifty people. And so the true human entity is not, and never has been, the individual; the true human entity is the self-perpetuating collective of the intergenerational tribe.
What that means is that humans are wired to behave as a network; all of our drives and instincts are calibrated towards cohering with others, working with others, and operating collectively as a single entity. We are extremely social creatures.
But this tribal sociality doesn’t just dictate the way we see things, it dictates the very things we see. In other words: the shape and quality and structure of reality—as we know it—take a distinctly human form. We project the human likeness—face, body, and voice—onto everything around us.
For example, pareidolia is a term describing our tendency to project meaningful objects onto ‘random stimuli.’ Most commonly, these ‘mistakenly’ projected objects take a distinctly human form. Like perceiving a face in the clouds:
Or in a tree:
Or on a rock:
The mind plays these projective ‘tricks’ on us because the human form, especially the face, is deeply ingrained into our psychology. We project it everywhere—we are looking for it everywhere—because the social, tribal object is foundational to our existence.
The human face is the window of culture, the opening through which we share objects with other tribe mates. Expressions, emotions, and language are all borne of the human face; so it makes sense that we would be hyper-vigilant about plugging into facial patterns, that the face would be hyper-salient to our projective faculties, that our consciousness would be constantly scanning its surroundings for any human form—and its associated cultural information—at all times.
In this way, we are always primed for sociality, always looking for hooks on which to hang our social projections.
And so in Cast Away, Chuck’s marooning creates for him a social vacuum. The tribe-shaped-hole in his heart—which his rich community of friends and family and lovers used to occupy—is now empty. And so as he gazes into this bloodstained volleyball, the subtle red resemblance of a face is enough to house a human shaped projection, and Chuck instinctually fills that projective container by creating Wilson. He projects a being into his reality, hanging it on the hook of the volleyball and, in doing so, fills his tribal vacuum.
He does this as a coping mechanism—because he has to—because the tribe is the way in which we are wired, the way in which our psychology is designed to function, the way in which we are programmed to process our experiences and orient our reality. If we don’t—if humans leave that tribal object empty—we begin to short-circuit; we break down.
As I said, if the true human entity is not the individual, but the self-perpetuating collective, it would make sense that it would be adaptive for every member of the tribe to work well with every other member of the tribe; for the individuals to cohere as a whole; for the collective to self-regulate, process information, and adapt as a single unit.
To best achieve this, each of us is born with a powerful instinct to socialize—to regularly share our experiences, ideas, and feelings with our tribe mates; to mutually regulate each other’s patterns; to mutually orient each other’s perceptions and beliefs; in service of a functional, coherent tribe that successfully passes the Torch. And you can see this behavior—this compulsion for mental-networking with others—at play in our daily lives:
We instinctually form close relationships with others whenever possible (tribal strengthening). We feel driven to repeatedly connect with these people through conversation, projects, and shared experiences (tribal bonding). We’re compelled to ‘catch up’ or ‘stay in the loop’ by regularly meeting or calling each other on the phone (exchange of information, behavioral and ontological alignment). We find ourselves regularly gossiping about others (tribal self-regulation). We find ourselves needing to vent to someone after a stressful experience, or share the details of a novel or humorous event (tribal processing and integration).
If you live in an urban area, and you walk outside, you will see is tons and tons of people socializing, all the time. Constant, spontaneous cultural exchange and tribal networking. No other living thing does this. And we do it so obsessively because it is adaptive for individual tribe mates to mentally network with each other and keep that network updated and healthy. That is the Torch’s brain thinking, problem-solving, and learning through us. And we evolved to readily, joyously participate in that pattern.
A different way in which you can observe this distinctly human-shaped, tribal phenomenology at play is in blame: our tendency to project inanimate causality in the world onto the people around us; usually our spouses or romantic partners. We find ourselves pretending that they are responsible for everything going wrong, everything troubling us—especially our own neuroticisms, bad habits, and fears, because we naturally disown and hide these patterns from ourselves.
Similarly, whenever something goes wrong in the world, people instinctually ask, “Who is to blame for this?” Even when the event is the product of a complex, mysterious collection of circumstances. We don’t like not understanding the cause of something, not having some human-like thing to blame, and so we almost always point fingers.
When the Titanic sank in 1912, and 1500 people died, who was to blame? Was it the White Star Line for hubristically commissioning too large of a ship? Was it J.P. Morgan who financed it? Was it Captain Smith who failed to heed warnings of icy conditions in the area? Or the lookout Mr. Fleet who didn’t warn the bridge fast enough upon spotting the iceberg? Or the crew that failed to properly fill the lifeboats to capacity? Or the nearby SS California that never came to the sinking ship’s rescue?
If we explore the details deeply enough, blame can become quite gray. It can begin to feel as if there actually is no one to blame—as if blame itself is a fallacy. Something happened because of some strange mechanical chain of events, because of some mysterious unfolding of the forces of nature, and your loved ones just happened to be in the crossfire. Most people find this explanation to be deeply dissatisfying and will instead seek revenge or compensation, anywhere they can find it.
Even if we try to trace the causality of something seemingly less complex—like the actions of a friend or partner—we still usually find the ‘source’ to be mysterious.
“Is my sister to blame for the way she treats me? Or is it our mother’s fault who physically abused her? Or is it our mother’s father’s fault who physically abused her? And was that due to a difficult economic situation back in the 50’s? Or a prevalence of macho culture and alcoholism in Ireland at the time? And who’s to blame for that?”
Once again, we find that blame—throwing the root cause or responsibility for something at one person’s feet—is problematic; the world is more gray than that. But in the moment, we are tempted to simply blame our sister for everything she’s done wrong, because we instinctually reduce inanimate, mechanical patterns in the universe down to distinctly human form, and then hang those human-shaped projections onto the humans around us.
Perhaps we are so wired for social interaction, for a tribal reality, that in the Garden it was adaptive to always seek social, tribal solutions for all events; that if something was wrong—even something out of one’s control, like a drought—it was productive to galvanize the tribe towards action, towards movement, towards rearranging the leadership hierarchy and perhaps placing someone else in charge. Distinctly social, tribal solutions for each and every problem.
If you combine the social fallacy of blame—the reduction of complex inanimate reality into human-shaped projections—with the human propensity for tribalism, you can get some powerful, often catastrophic, effects.
Just like we can be quick to reductively place blame for our situation on a spouse or parent—a singular anthropomorphic object—we are similarly quick to blame entire categories of people. It is intuitive to project into our reality the object of Them: a phenomenological tribal container into which we deposit all of our blame. We feel wronged by Them—the vague ‘Other’, the vague ‘judger’; the vague ‘enemy’; the vague ‘oppressor’; the vague source of ‘evil’ in our lives. We readily hang this projection of Them onto the hook of any category of strangers who even remotely fit the bill.
After that, it becomes easy to rationalize a purge of said category. This is the scapegoat mechanism, where we ritualistically eliminate our troubles through the execution of a physical object of blame. The collective agrees upon the source of the troubles—whether that be a person or group—then executes it. This allows them to wipe their hands, say “There, now our troubles are gone,” and move on with their lives pretending they’ve actually solved the problem of evil.
Humans participate in this pattern so readily, so enthusiastically, that it makes them easy to manipulate for political purposes. With the right nudges, they can be galvanized into supporting the persecution, displacement, enslavement, or outright execution of a target group. The most well-known example of this is the Nazis, who rallied the German people, united them into a more coherent, focused, nationalistic force through the scapegoating of Jews.
“Are you mad about your lives? Are you frustrated at the state of your nation? The complexity of these troubled times can be reduced, compartmentalized, and projectively hung onto the hook of the Jewish people. Forget the complicated history of Europe; forget the complexity of World War I; forget the complexity of the Great Depression; and cram all of that gray mess into a nice neat black-and-white package of: ‘It’s their fault. Them. The Jews.’ Since that is the one source of our troubles, we can easily resolve things by removing them from society.”
But in the same way that our human-shaped phenomenology can pump individuals and groups full of demonic negative energy—reducing the complex inanimate reality of our troubled situations to the humans around us—we can also do the opposite: we can raise others up as angelic, god-like heroes, pumping them full of a similarly undeserved positive energy.
The cult leader, the political leader, the celebrity actor, the professional athlete, the rock star, and the spiritual guru are all examples of individuals whom we have inflated with social, tribal projections of positivity. Instead of purging those we blame like demons, we hoist up those we worship like angels.
This is because the tribe survives when we rally behind leaders; not just strong-man warrior types, but spiritual and cultural leaders; those who are wise and creative; those who have discernment and vision. This could be a masculine ‘chief;’ it could be a feminine ‘matriarch;’ it could be a liminal realm-traversing ‘shaman’ or ‘priestess.’ Whatever it is, the leader takes point on important matters, and it is adaptive for a tribe to unite around them in order to produce coherent, focused endeavors as a cohesive unit. Otherwise, the tribe dissipates, it splinters around an infinite amount of ideas or directions, and ultimately fails.
So just like we have a distinctly human, tribe-shaped hole in our hearts—which we readily fill with the people or groups available to us in our immediate physical or virtual vicinity—we have a tribal-leader-shaped hole, into which we readily plug the sexiest, strongest, wisest, funniest, most beautiful, most talented, or most heroic individuals. The instinct is something like: he or she who is best at cultivating the Garden, or he or she who is best at the creative transmutation of chaotic wilderness into harmonious, habitable order, is the one we should rally around; is the one we should support and allow to make decisions for the tribe.
However, in the post-Garden world, this archetypal drive is easily inflated: there’s an entire industrial machine dedicated to transforming people into mega-tribal-leaders, with god-like charisma, presence, and prestige, and then monetizing our evolutionary propensity for rallying around them. We obsess over celebrities, their drama, their opinions on things, their lifestyles. There are celebrity gossip magazines, celebrity endorsements of products, celebrity posters on our walls. Women will sleep with rock stars they have never met and will never see again. Men will sexually engage with a virtual representation of a celebrity at the expense of having a real partner.
And just like the scapegoat mechanism, our angelic human-shaped projections of goodness and heroism can also be inflated and manipulated for political purposes. The cult of personality is an effective political trick to raise an individual up onto the level of a god. This was utilized in ancient times, for instance, to sanctify the rule of a King, to inflate him up into something divine and untouchable. It is still used today in places like North Korea, where the previous ‘Dear Leader’ Kim Jong Il was supposedly born atop the sacred Mount Paektu, wrote 900 books, scored eleven hole-in-one’s on his first attempt at golf, and was capable of teleportation.
Good and evil, angel and demon, our reality is distinctly moral and distinctly humanoid, with inflations of tribal psychological projections rippling upward and downward, across multiple perceived planes of existence, and churning out a living, breathing world of personified shadows and anthropomorphic light. And if we take that concept of tribal phenomenology even deeper, we will see that our propensity for a social reality results in the strange phenomenon of daimons: autonomous human-shaped projections that are seemingly independent of any ‘physical’ human. We project these autonomous humanoid daimons onto the forces of nature, onto our explanatory narratives, onto our moral and cultural structures, and—most importantly—onto our own unconscious inner world.
Firstly, there are personal daimons, personifications of our inner world that are unique to us, such as: the inner child, the inner demon, the higher self, the anima figure, and so on. These are not mapped onto any physical humans around us, and they aren’t simply metaphors for emotions, or elements of fantasy. They are autonomous beings within us; human-shaped objects dwelling within our unconscious world.
Sometimes they take over in moments of stress or weakness. Panic attacks can find us regressing into a child-like state, even speaking from that child’s point of view, as if there is an autonomous infant-like being living inside us. Some forms of psychosis can resemble a demonic force taking over our body and making decisions for us; making us do things we would never do; making us say things we would never say. It’s not as uncommon as you might think, even in people of seemingly good mental health.
Hallucinations of human-like entities—both visual and auditory—are very common with schizophrenia. They are also frequent in other neurocognitive disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. Psychoactive drugs like DMT seem to routinely produce an experience of being visited by human-like entities, often resembling extra-terrestrials. And, of course, we regularly project human-like entities into our dreams, which serve as a kind of phenomenological playground for our inner beings, swept clean of the external stimuli of the waking world upon which we normally hang them.
Internal Family Systems is a psychotherapeutic modality that deals with personal daimons explicitly, developing a system for communicating with them, developing greater awareness around them, and bringing their often exiled or fallen nature back into place of harmony. Many people find this approach very powerful because a human-shaped inner world is far easier to access, far easier to engage with than a cold, inanimate collection of abstractions.
The personal daimons I’ve highlighted thus far are almost always unconscious, but—strangely—you can intentionally create your own, just like Chuck created Wilson in Cast Away. Projecting human qualities onto inanimate things makes them more ‘real’, and can make engaging with them more powerful, dynamic, and effective.
For instance, when we name our pets we are creating a daimon. We may not realize we are doing this, but we are giving them human-like qualities, pumping them full of projective material to give us a more powerful, more meaningful relationship with them. Most of us can probably rationalize slaughtering a cow for food. But if, instead, we have projected a daimon onto a cow by naming it Bessie, and refined that daimonic object over the course of five years through daily companionship on the farm, we might feel less comfortable pulling the trigger. Surely the death of our beloved bovine friend would be devastating, possibly on par with losing a human friend. But why? Because we’ve projected a being onto the cow; it is no longer an animal, but a tribe mate, housing our projections of complex human-like subjectivity.
Even more strangely, you can project daimons onto inanimate objects. Children do this all the time with stuffed animals and dolls. You can actually play with this by doing something like naming the oven; maybe unpacking its latent personality based off of arbitrary aesthetics, like “Omar the Oven is clearly jolly and stout with a deep, friendly voice” and then repeatedly opening and closing his oven door like he’s talking to you. You can actually go around personifying all kinds of things around your living space and, before you know it, you’re living in a world like Pee-wee’s Playhouse—something alive and vibrant and mystical—rather than a cold, mechanical warehouse of expedient tools.
As counterintuitive as it may seem, this is the default world for human beings: an anthropomorphic one, where all perceivable aspects of reality are keenly human-like. And in the past, our emergent abilities of techne and language—which allowed us to share objects between minds—allowed us to also share daimons, and therefore create interpersonal collections of them we could pass from generation to generation. These would evolve to become a kind of pantheon: an exhaustive mapping of both the inner and external phenomenological worlds in the form of a human-like collective.
This daimonic mapping of reality allowed us to develop a more complex, nuanced relationship with the world. It specifically allowed us to bargain with the world, allowed us to transcend our animal instincts and need for immediate gratification in favor of patience, sacrifice, and work. It allowed us to innovate with our reality the same way we might innovate with other members of our tribe.
For instance, I might say to a personification of the sun, “If I refrain from gluttony, laziness, and lust; if I stay disciplined and focused and work hard every day for the next several years, will you reward me with good health, long life, and a strong Torch?”
Or “Oh great river, if I respect your domain, if I refrain from dumping my trash in you, refrain from absent-mindedly playing on your slippery rocks, refrain from getting greedy, and only take the water and fish that I absolutely need, will I stay in your good graces? Will you reward me with the resources I need, season after season?”
From a modern perspective, this may seem silly. We may think it obvious that hard work and sacrifice results in good outcomes for one’s life; we may think it obvious that if you trash your natural environment, it will eventually stop providing for you. But it wasn’t to first wielders of consciousness. They came from a purely social, relational phenomenology of the Garden, and had to innovate all the strategies and wisdoms and systems of today over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. Even now, the scientific worldview continues to perplex us; it fails to land with us. We find the daimonic, personified world much easier to digest, much easier to have a meaningful, interactive relationship with. Scientific materialism, on the other hand, is a newcomer and must worm its way into each individual’s psyche by force.
Additionally, by integrating powerful and watchful shared daimons into the social fabric of the tribe, humans were able to outsource their need for selflessness, hard work, and sacrifice into a transcendent realm with much stronger cosmic implications for one’s actions, than simply that of one’s peers. Shared, transcendent daimons helped scaffold a more and more powerful culture, that could be passed down intergenerationally, by saying, “It’s not only the tribe matriarch that wants you to stay focused and responsible, it’s the immortal goddess of the moon who wants it as well.”
The obvious eventual product of shared transcendent daimons, who personify all aspects of reality in a kind of living, evolving pantheon, passed down from generation to generation, is polytheism.
It started off as an instinctual, unconscious mapping of one’s phenomenological reality into easily digestible, human-like objects—a description of the world—and progressed into intergenerational pantheons through which we built powerful, digestible, sustainable sets of customs, ethics, rules, and guides to outsource the tribal wisdom of effective torchbearing into a transcendent, untouchable realm—a prescription of the world.
Eventually, some of these cultural threads would evolve into a kind of ultimate, singular, meta daimon—the One Daimon. Something like: a prescriptive human-shaped encapsulation of the entirety of our existence as torchbearing agents. But that is for another chapter.
Reality, as we know it, is a landscape of social, tribal objects. We have a distinctly human-shaped phenomenology. We personify our world; we anthropomorphize it. We are wired this way—it is built-in—because our existence is fundamentally predicated on a social, tribal network constructed around passing the Torch. This daimonic place of human-like entities was our home: the pantheonic wilderness of the Garden. Through the advances of techne, and the development of the scientific method, we began to increasingly dispel this anthropomorphic perspective in favor of an inanimate, mechanical worldview. Whatever kind of progress that yielded for humankind, this dehumanization of the world has left us spiritually de-homed.
When the fairies of the forest are just wood to be cut, the voices in the wind are just variations in air pressure, the spirits of our ancestors are just hallucinations, and Mother Earth is just a rock with a virus clinging to it floating through nothingness, existence can be a lonely place, betraying us of the beauty and vibrance of the rippling, breathing, animated world we so readily bring to life around us.
