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Avoid Horoscopes, Tarot Cards . . . and Sociometric Seances?
“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”[1]
Christians typically understand that horoscopes and tarot cards stem from occult foundations. These are not harmless parlor games, but rather reflect pagan spirituality at odds with biblical truth. But, what happens when paganism is dressed to serve good old American productivity, whether in business or church? Let’s get to the gist.
What if pagan practices, rather than being a “spiritual recipe” for personal enlightenment, are diluted, masked, and then pitched as a business or ministry “tool” to help you “lead from your strengths,”[2] or “build a team”[3] or “get the right person in the right seat on the bus.”[4] Many pop “business books” sell a form of Gnosticism: “Here’s the REAL secret key to productivity, teamwork, personal growth,” etc. If a true key existed and actually worked, of course, there would be no need for the literally scores of airport-displayed pop business books, not to mention shelf upon shelf cluttered with self-help drivel promoted at local book shops.
Sometimes, undiluted paganism is packaged and sold to the church as a ministry tool: witness the explosion, promotion, and Christian-endorsement of the thoroughly pagan Enneagram.[5] Yet, something is occurring now beyond hyper-marketing and rebranding pagan practices with boastful promises, whether in business, ministry, or “self-care.”
This Dicta centers on how certain technologies are now assuming a fundamental, yet Gnostic and pagan role in society. This occurs via sociometric monitoring. How so?
As Christine Rosen explains referencing MIT sociometric researcher Alex Pendland:
Our devices will soon read our own and others’ signals for us—and they will do it better than we ever did ourselves.[6]
What devices? How are such measurements made? How are such measurements collected? How are such measurements interpreted? And by whom??? And, to what end?
Penland glowingly gushes with rosy optimism:
“The ability to continuously and universally measure human behavior will provide us with the ability to engineer our lives to an extent never before imagined.”[7]
How can this occur? The answer is so obvious we may overlook it. Our lives are now constantly being digitally compiled, categorized, and conveyed from the palms of our hands (smart phones) and from the lanyards hanging from our necks: our “work badges.” These nearly ubiquitous medallions of corporate America constantly and in real time surveil companies’ labor forces. The intent is “reading” the workforce’s emotions. “Emotional recognition technology” already occupies a large place in China – and increasingly in corporate America.
Communist China – implementing its social credit system – deploys technology to target workers’ behaviors that supposedly reveal the workers’ emotions and emotional states. A 2020 interview with a Stanford researcher focusing on China’s technology describes this process:
A colleague and I are doing a big sweep of Chinese language sources on emotion recognition technology, which is detecting and identifying emotion from faces, and of multi-modal emotion recognition, such as identifying emotion from tone of voice, or body movement and gait.[8]
America’s premium engineering universities, like MIT, are likewise developing this same technology, aping the Chinese command and control technical initiative:
To measure our emotions, technologists are devising a host of gadgets and sensors that track our behavior. Pendland’s lab at MIT examines the data from sociometric badges that track individuals’ physical movements using an embedded location sensor, accelerometer, proximity sensor, and microphone to record what the wearer is saying at all times, as well as information on people’s consumer purchases and their posts on social media.[9]
George Orwell would be proud. All these data once collected allow those who have it (Big Brother?) to determine “a user’s personality type and [estimate his] disposable income.”[10] Pendland continues:
“We can also see when someone is coming down with the flu or is depressed.”[11]
When Pendland started his work a decade ago, he called what his project did “reality mining.”[12] Here’s why, as Rosen explains, citing a 2021 study published in Organizational Behavior and Human Processes:
“[O]rganizations are expected to introduce 83 million wearable behavior-tracking devices. A recent survey of 239 large corporationsindicated that, in fact, 50% were [already] tracking non-traditional employee metrics like their emails, social media activity, biometric data, and with whom they met and how they used their workspace.”[13]
This stuff is often peddled under the guise of “wellness.” However, the focus, as the director of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan notes, is this:
“We’ve moved beyond just ‘I want you to get 10,000 steps every day;’ I want you to have an improved mental state.”[14]
First major question: Who decides one’s mental health and whether it’s improved? Some random physician? Psychologist? Psychiatrist? Cleric? Guru? Yoga instructor? Bob, down in supply chain management? Second major question: By what standard? “Mentally healthy” according to whom? How much health is necessary? What constitutes “improved” mental health? Is the measurement quantitative or qualitative or some combination of both? Third major question: Why is this private personal information now part of one’s personnel file to be examined, interpreted, and flagged as if it’s a diseased tissue biopsy placed under HR’s microscope? Who has access to it? For what purposes? Can or will it be sold to third parties? Will your promotion or demotion hinge on it?
This fetish for “secret” self-knowledge is not limited to corporate interests. Commercial interests now tap into this quest for the holy grail of emotional knowledge. Consider the Oura Ring.[15] This product enjoys growing popularity. That device monitors
Body temperature, blood oxygen levels, heart rate, breathing and sleep.[16]
How so? By providing continuous monitoring:
Comfortably wear Oura Ring all day and nightto collect deeply personal health metrics and insights. Your finger provides the most accurate reading of over 20 biometrics that directly impact how you feel.[17]
Seriously? This supposedly allows “emotional analytics.” However, as Rosen cautions
When our feelings become data, and our world is guided by sensors rather than sensitivity, our experience is no longer unique; it is mere information.[18]
These comprehensive monitoring efforts, while disguised as “productivity improvement tools” or “employee wellness initiatives,” have begun to be self-described using the more overt pagan nomenclature of their root assumptions. According Receptiviti’s CEO,[19] these efforts comprise nothing less than “corporate mindfulness” – which he thinks is a good thing.[20]Note the explicit invocation of pagan spirituality: “mindfulness” – a Buddhist concept.[21] Even Christine Rosen understands that these efforts constitute nothing more than dressed-up and camouflaged soothsaying:
But like horoscopes, sociometers and other sensor technologies offer just enough vaguely specific information to seem plausible, and like good astrologers, the technologists who translate that information offer us reassurance about our emotions and their source.[22]
Framing this as pagan spirituality is by no means a stretch nor a slur. Paganism, or as Dr. Jones has put it, Oneism, seeks progress by going “within.”
The Eastern worldview claims that in “going within” we find our inner divinity, and so our problem is not sin but ignorance. We are ignorant of the god within, the god we actually all possess. God is not separate from us, He is within us. We are god. So this Eastern worldview advocates spiritual meditation and altered forms of consciousness to focus on the self, precisely to gain gnosis, knowledge of the god within.[23]
Rosen similarly describes how this technology operates:
In the future, technology is less an extension of man than an invasion of him.[24]
Does this matter beyond the individual or his corporate job? Does it matter for society and society’s ordering? Indeed, it does. Sociometric monitoring erects the precondition for the surveillance State. And the surveillance State is the necessary condition for ushering in a new global utopia according to globalist cheerleaders. As Os Guinness characteristically connects the dots, he notes (by paraphrase) how the Globalists invoke “technology” as a means for establishing their elitist utopian vision:
[H]umanity is on the march and that is what counts. . . . Growth and Advance can lead humanity to utopia. A New Science allied with a New Technology holds out the promise of a New Humanity.[25]
This New Technology rests on and necessitates comprehensive surveillance – which the elites control:
Do the ruling elites of globalism respect any source of authority and power other than their own? . . . What is to stop the trend towards all-coordinating, bureaucratic centralization and surveillance, morphing from soft despotism to hard totalitarianism, even in the West? Why is there already such a growth of centralized surveillance and state control in democratic societies . . .?[26]
The West is declining precisely because it has forgotten or malformed its formative vision of sovereignty. Who is the all-knowing Sovereign: The State, the Self, or the Savior?[27]
Where does ultimate sovereignty lie—in God, in individuals, in the nation, or in some version of the New World Order? Without a comprehensive and constructive vision of life, there can be no unity, only disintegration.[28]
This vision of control (omnipotence), knowledge (omniscience), and constant monitoring (omnipresence) without God and His Son is the idolatrous temptation of all earthy power. As the Psalmist notes, rulers seek – just like in Babel[29] – to consolidate power against the Lord and His ways:
Why do the nations rage
and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers take counsel together,
against the LORD and against his Anointed, saying,
“Let us burst their bonds apart
and cast away their cords from us.”[30]
Yet, the Lord will have none of it:
He who sits in the heavens laughs;
the Lord holds them in derision.[31]
Instead, those who hold earthy power should submit to and kiss the Son – not nature, kinship, nationalism, or Aristotle – a fitting reminder during this Advent Season:
Now therefore, O kings, be wise;
be warned, O rulers of the earth.
Serve the LORD with fear,
and rejoice with trembling.
Kiss the Son,
lest he be angry, and you perish in the way,
for his wrath is quickly kindled.
Blessed are all who take refuge in him.[32]
Advent rejects Gnosticism by reminding us to kiss the Incarnate Son. As TxC Scholar, P. Andrew Sandlin put it, Advent:
is a protest against all Gnosticism. Advent shouts that the material world is so good that God himself lives in it.[33]
Time to unplug, shed the badge, and “touch the grass.”[34]
[1] T.S. Eliot, The Rock (1934)
[2] Rodney Cox, Leading From Your Strengths: Building Close-Knit Ministry Team (2004). While Mr. Cox is a Christian, the “tool” embedded in “assessing strengths” stems from variations on Myers-Briggs personality typing. For further information about the rise and permeation of the pseudo-science of this see, Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing (2019)
[3] Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable (2002). Mr. Lencioni is likewise a Christian; however, his recent work heavily relies on Myers-Briggs typing: The 6 Types of Working Genius: A Better Way to Understand Your Gifts, Your Frustrations, and Your Team (2022)
[4] This phrase was popularized by Jim Collins in his best-selling Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . And Others Don’t (2001)
[5] Elisabeth Bennett, Enneagram Life: Personal, Relational, and Biblical Insights for All Seasons (2022); Elisabeth Bennett, The Guardian: Growing as an Enneagram 6 (60 Day Devotional); Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert, The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective (2001); Kim Eddy, The Enneagram for Beginners: A Christian Guide to Understanding Your Type for a God-Centered Life (2020); Bill Gaultiere and Kristi Gaultiere, Healthy Feelings, Thriving Faith: Growing Emotionally and Spiritually though the Enneagram (2023). TxC Researcher Pamela Frost has conducted extensive research on the Enneagram and its pagan working assumptions.
[6][6] Christine Rosen, The Extinction of Experience – Being Human in an Disembodied World, (2024), 128
[7][7] Id., citing Alex Pendland, Honest Signals – How They Shape Our World (2008).
[8] HAI Fellow Shazeda Ahemd: Understanding China’s Social Credit System, https://hai.stanford.edu/news/hai-fellow-shazeda-ahmed-understanding-chinas-social-credit-system
[9] Id. at 128, 129
[10] Id., citing Pendland
[11] Id.
[12] Rosen at 130, citing Kate Greene, “What Your Phone Knows About You,” Technology Review, December 20, 2007
[13] Id. at 130
[14] Rosen at 131, citing Chip Cutter and Rachel Feintzeig, “Smile! Your Boss is Tracking Your Happiness,” Wall Street Journal, March 7-8, 2020, B1
[15] https://ouraring.com/, and The Oura Ring is a $300 Sleep Tracker that Provides Tons of Data. But Is It Worth It? https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/oura-ring-sleep-tracker/
[16] Rosen at 132
[18] Rosen at 138. This seems to echo T.S. Eliot’s point from his poem, The Rock (1934): “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
[19] Rosen, citing the quote contained in the Wall Street Journal.
[20] Consider this “explanation” regarding “corporate mindfulness” – it drips with pagan mysticism: What to Expect from a Corporate Mindfulness Program, https://www.eastwesticism.org/corporate-meditation-vs-mindfulness/ The high-powered and highly regarded Boston Consulting Group pitches mindfulness to corporate America with boastful promises: Christian Geiser, Jan-Philipp Martini, and Nicole Meissner, Unleashing the Power of Mindfulness in Corporations, https://web-assets.bcg.com/cc/db/b39118d84b34be612fe22194f646/unleashing-the-power-of-mindfulness-in-corporations-rev.pdf. BCG’s 2023 revenue topped $12B. Implementing such programs potentially raises numerous religious liberty issues by imposing pagan religion on others as a condition for their continued employment.
[21] Peter Jones, Is Mindfulness Christian? https://www.ezrainstitute.com/is-mindfulness-christian/
[22] Rosen, at 131
[23] Id. at note 21
[24] Roaen at 128
[25] Os Guinness, Our Civilizational Moment – The Waning of the West and the War of the Worlds (2024), 17
[26] Id. at 19
[27] For a theological and political development of this point, see Jeffery J. Ventrella, Idols in Our Midst – Christ, Caesar, or Self: Recognizing Political Idolatry, https://theaquilareport.com/idols-in-our-midst/
[28] Os Guinness, Our Civilizational Moment – The Waning of the West and the War of Worlds (2024), 22, 23
[29] Gen. 11:3, 4
[30] Ps. 2:1-3
[31]Ps. 2:4
[32] Ps. 2:10-12
[33] Facebook post, December 11, 2024.
[34] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/touch%20grass#:~:text=%3A%20to%20participate%20in%20normal%20activities,reality%20outside%20their%20pixelated%20screens.