The Consensus Trap

When Ancient Instincts Meet Algorithmic Control

Something measurable happened over the last twenty years.

Women started making decisions that contradicted their own safety and interests. Not occasionally. Systematically.

Supporting immigration policies that correlated directly with increased sexual violence against them. Voting for candidates whose platforms undermined protections they relied on. Defending trans athletes in women’s sports while watching female competitors lose scholarships and titles. Abandoning spiritual frameworks that had sustained them for millennia in favor of astrology apps and tarot subscriptions.

Ask why and the answer is always the same.

“Everyone else thinks this is right.”

The consensus became more powerful than observable reality.

It’s an ancient behavior meeting modern scale.

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For hundreds of thousands of years, female survival depended on reading and following group consensus.

A woman in a village of 150 people needed to know where she stood. What the tribe valued. What behavior would maintain her position. Being cast out meant death for her and her children. Men could survive alone, hunt, defend themselves, move between tribes. Women couldn’t.

When your husband got killed by an invading tribe, you didn’t have the luxury of loyalty. You switched sides immediately. Integrated with the victors. Adapted to the new consensus. The women who clung to the dead husband’s tribe got killed. The women who read the new power structure and adjusted survived. Had children. Passed on those genes.

This wasn’t moral failure. This was survival intelligence.

The consensus you were tracking was local. Built on observable reality. Generational wisdom. Actual survival data from people who’d been there. If the tribe said don’t go near that cave, you listened. That consensus emerged from real experience in a real environment where wrong information got you killed.

The mechanism worked because the scale was manageable.

Then the scale changed.

2003: Facebook launches. Social consensus at global scale becomes possible for the first time in human history.

2010: Instagram launches. Not just connection. Competition. Status signaling through curated photos. Every image a performance. Every like a vote on your worth.

2018: TikTok hits mainstream. Algorithmic amplification of consensus at unprecedented speed. Ideas that would have taken years to spread now go viral in hours.

Twenty years. That’s how long it took to rewire the mechanism.

Instagram didn’t just give women a platform. It gave them a consensus-reading machine that plugged directly into evolutionary hardware optimized for tribal survival. Every scroll delivers social hierarchy data. Every notification triggers status anxiety. Every algorithm-curated feed tells you what everyone else thinks is valuable, attractive, true.

The woman tracking consensus on Instagram is doing exactly what her great-grandmother did in the village. Reading social signals. Monitoring group values. Adjusting behavior to maintain standing.

But the village had 150 people. Instagram has 2 billion.

The village consensus emerged from observable shared reality. Instagram consensus emerges from algorithmic optimization designed to maximize engagement, not truth.

The ancient mechanism that kept women alive now keeps them scrolling. And believing whatever the algorithm amplifies.

Watch what happens when you scale tribal consensus-seeking to global algorithmic manipulation.

Women in the UK support mass immigration despite direct correlation with massive increases in sexual assault and violence against women. The data is clear. The pattern is observable. But the consensus signal says “supporting immigration makes you compassionate,” so they follow the signal over the reality.

Women vote for policies that demonstrably harm their economic interests, their safety, their children’s futures. When you show them the data, they don’t deny it. They just care more about what the consensus says than what the numbers show.

Trans athletes compete in women’s sports with obvious physiological advantages. Women lose scholarships, titles, opportunities they trained their entire lives for. Today, it’s being made illegal in multiple countries. The Olympics is prepared to ban trans athletes from all women’s events. The evidence was overwhelming. But for years, women supported it anyway because the consensus said “opposing this makes you bigoted.”

Suicidal empathy driven by manufactured consensus.

This is why men have historically held certain decision-making roles. Not because women are less intelligent. Because women are wired to prioritize consensus over individual assessment when the two conflict. In a village, that worked. The consensus was usually right.

At global algorithmic scale, it becomes a weapon.

The spiritual marketplace reveals the mechanism with perfect clarity.

Twenty-five years ago, women sought cosmic connection through church. Prayer groups. Bible studies. A framework that had sustained Western civilization for two millennia.

Then the cultural consensus shifted. Entertainment, media, influencers all pushing the same message: church is lame, astrology is cool. Sacred becomes oppressive. Profane becomes liberating. The movie “Wicked” turns the villain into the hero. The very word “wicked” flips from evil to empowering.

Women didn’t independently decide to abandon church. They followed the consensus signal.

Instagram amplified it. Influencers with millions of followers posting about their tarot readings. Celebrities discussing their birth charts. The algorithm learning that spiritual content drives engagement and serving more of it. One-to-many communication shaping consensus overnight.

Co-Star raised $15 million. The Pattern raised $11 million. The spiritual wellness market exploded from $12.8 billion to $22.8 billion in a decade. Because the consensus said astrology was cool.

By 2020, dating apps added zodiac signs to profiles. Not creating demand. Responding to what women were already doing. Filtering matches by birth charts. Checking cosmic compatibility before agreeing to meet.

Even men in the pickup artist community figured it out. Learn some astrology. Talk about her chart. Read her palm. She lights up every time. Because it plugs into her need for consensus validation.

Walk into any coffee shop.

The women who would have been in church small groups now compare planetary transits over lattes. Same hunger for cosmic connection. Different framework. The consensus shifted. They followed.

Here’s what makes this more insidious than church ever was.

Church positioned itself explicitly as intermediary. Pastor between you and God. Priest interpreting Scripture. The mediation was visible. You knew you were being told to submit to human authority.

You could reject it. Millions of women did.

The spiritual marketplace is different. It positions itself as your own intuition. Your inner wisdom. Your divine feminine. It makes you think you’re trusting yourself while actually trusting an external framework.

Astrology isn’t the problem. Astrology is the symptom. The problem is outsourcing your internal authority to whatever consensus the algorithm amplifies.

Church said “trust the pastor.” Spiritual marketplace says “trust your intuition” but then defines your intuition as whatever the cards say, whatever your chart says, whatever the moon phase calendar says.

Same cage. Prettier branding.

This is counterfeit spiritual seeking. It mimics connection to Source while actually leading away from it.

A woman checking her horoscope before making a decision is doing the same thing her great-grandmother did when asking the tribal elder for guidance. Outsourcing authority. Following consensus. The mechanism is identical.

But her great-grandmother’s tribal elder had real wisdom built from generations of observable reality. Her horoscope is generated by an algorithm optimized for engagement.

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The Gen Z paradox makes sense through this lens.

Social media pushed consensus at unprecedented scale. But it also enabled counter-narratives. Algorithms amplified fringe ideas to mainstream visibility. Total addressable market: the entire world.

Some Gen Z women got the “church is lame” signal. Some got the “actually Jesus is cool” counter-signal. The internet is a double-edged sword. Same mechanism that pushed women away from the Father through consensus amplification also enables pathways back.

But most won’t take those pathways. Because taking them requires something harder than following consensus.

Sovereignty.

The solution isn’t new church programs or better marketing or female pastors.

The solution is the same one that got a man killed two thousand years ago.

The kingdom of God is within you.

Not in temples.

Not in algorithms.

Not in cards or charts or cosmic timing.

Within.

That was the revolution. If people grasped they had direct, unmediated access to the Father—that the capacity for knowing truth was already present and functioning—what would they need any mediating system for?

Religious authorities killed him for this. It threatened everything. Their power came from being necessary intermediaries. Direct access destroyed the business model.

Every system since has run the same model with different branding. Priests. Gurus. Coaches. Now we have algorithm-optimized apps with venture funding and behavioral psychology built into notification timing.

All selling the same thing: outsourced authority. Pre-fabricated narratives for your life, your choices, your suffering.

The cage isn’t gender-specific. Men outsource authority too. To career metrics. To status hierarchies. To whatever their tribe says makes them valuable.

But women’s consensus-seeking makes them particularly vulnerable to algorithmic manipulation at scale. The same instinct that kept their ancestors alive now keeps them trapped in manufactured consensus that contradicts observable reality.

When you sit quietly and pay attention to what you know before thinking about what you know—that’s not cosmic energy or algorithmic wisdom.

That’s the part of your consciousness that recognizes patterns before language names them. That operates faster than thought. That knows things you haven’t consciously processed yet.

The divine spark. The inner compass. The kingdom within.

Direct access to the Father. Not through priests. Not through algorithms. Not through consensus. Through the presence that’s been in your chest since before you learned to doubt it.

Sovereignty means placing the full weight of authorship on your shoulders. No consensus to follow. No system to credit or blame. Just you, making decisions in uncertainty, owning the consequences completely.

That’s lonely. That requires developing discernment through practice and failure. Learning to distinguish the Father’s voice from fear’s voice in your own chest.

Most people won’t choose this. Not because they can’t. Because following consensus is more comfortable than bearing the weight of your own authority.

The woman who left church for astrology didn’t choose freedom. She chose a different cage. One that felt less restrictive because it validated her instead of condemning her. But external validation isn’t sovereignty.

It’s just more comfortable dependency with better marketing.

The door has been open since before anyone learned they needed permission to walk through.

Most won’t walk through. Sovereignty is lonely. Uncomfortable. It requires distinguishing the Father’s voice from fear’s voice in your own chest.

But for those who will—the freedom is absolute.

And the Father is waiting.

<3 EKO

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Thank you for reading. Do you like when I cover culture + tech? Let me know, and revisit this piece I wrote last month on the guy in charge of X’s algorithm.

Next week on Thanksgiving I’m releasing my new book, Parables Unsealed, with three all-new additional chapters. If you’d like a preview, just shoot me a note.

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