Here’s Baylor University humanities professor Alan Jacobs, in a remarkable essay for The New Atlantis, referencing a variety of literary and real-world instances of the “madness of crowds” (as in the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot) to offer a demonic account of what’s happening to us in this age of digitally distributed memes and thought viruses:
Several accounts of the spread of ideas jostle against one another in our moment: Richard Dawkins’s notion of “memes” — ideas spreading by replication — competes with notions of “virality” and of “social contagion.” There is information theory and disease theory. I prefer demon theory. . . .
Social media are the best agents yet developed for the Cosmic Rulers: Social media sleep not, nor do they grow weary. The algorithms grind away like the mill that, according to the old story, sits at the bottom of the ocean and forever grinds out salt; the machine-learning machines keep learning, keep sifting, keep dividing and linking. [In Zadie Smith’s words,] “The unseen actors who harvest this knowledge not only hope to know us perfectly but also to modify us, to their own ends”. . . .
Christians who talk about demonic activity tend to make a distinction between possession and oppression. Those possessed by demons — or, to use the language I here prefer, those who have been absorbed into the demonic realm — lack volition. They feature in a behaviorist puppet show. The more fortunate, though perhaps also the more miserable, are the merely oppressed: The demonic acts on them from without, they feel its force but are capable of resisting it; or perhaps only of desiring to resist it. “For what I am doing, I do not understand,” writes Paul to the church at Rome; “for what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do.” Faced with an intractable dividedness, a spiritual gridlock, he can only cry out — this is one of the screams that a scream can elicit — “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”
Now, as it happens, I am myself a Christian, but I do not write here to issue an altar call, an invitation to be saved by Jesus. Rather, I merely wish you, dear reader, to consider the possibility that when a tweet provokes you to wrath, or an Instagram post makes you envious, or some online article sends you to another and yet another in an endless chain of what St. Augustine called curiositas — his favorite example is the gravitational pull on all passers-by of a dead body on the side of the road — you are dealing with powers greater than yours. Your small self and your puny will are overwhelmed by the Cosmic Rulers, the Principalities and Powers. They oppress or possess you, and they can neither be deflected nor, by the mere exercise of will, overcome. Any freedom from what torments us begins with a proper demonology. Later we may proceed to exorcism.
MORE: “Something Happened By Us: A Demonology“