Over the past decade, the nature of public events has shifted to a different dynamic. Once spontaneous, hyped with natural grassroots expressions of community energy, many gatherings today feel more orchestrated. This shift piques new avenues of exploration: how do crowd dynamics really affect participants’ energetic states? Why do some events pulsed with real coherence, while others fell strangely bland despite their surface success? By applying combined insights from quantum cognition and energetic field theory, we can explore these patterns through a scientific yet accessible lens: revealing why certain collective energies amplify and resonate, while others fragment and dissipate.

Scientific principles behind group energy can offer powerful tools for unpacking layers of group dynamic, namely: McTaggart et al. Energetic Entrainment & Coherence Fields, and The Hawthorne Effect. Lynne McTaggart and collaborators have explored how human intention and physiological states can entrain and sync up with those around us. When groups of people enter resonance, they create coherence fields: measurable energetic environments where emotions, heart rhythms, and even brainwaves align. In such states, individuals feel connected, empowered, and grounded in shared experience and emotion. When coherence is missing, participants often report feeling fragmented, overstimulated, or emotionally flat, even in large vibrant crowds. In other words, the field exists – but it’s incoherent. As for the Hawthorne Effect, it was drawn from early workplace studies. It suggests that people may change their behaviour when they know they’re being watched. In curated or heavily-observed events, participants often withhold genuine expression, or showcase desired behaviour. The result is a “synthetic” collective field, dampened by self-monitoring and external control – antithetical to spontaneous coherence.

If we explore four contemporary event types and how they affect crowd coherence, either amplifying or diffusing energy, the following apply:

• Ticketed Urban Festivals. Once open community events, many festivals now operate on pre-event purchase ticketing models. While this allows for crowd management, curated programming, and predictive outcome, it also introduces energetic fabrication. Attendees may include genuine punters mixed with passive consumers, observers, or disconnected onlookers – blurring the once-coherent intent. The result: the energy may rise in isolated peaks but never amalgamates into a unified field.
• Nightlife with High-Attraction Nodes. Modern nightlife often revolves around celebrity DJs, branded installations, or influencer “nodes.” These focal points act like gravity wells – drawing in energy and attention. However, instead of a coherent field, what emerges is a patchwork of localised peaks with minimal emotional carryover. Energy becomes siloed rather than shared.
• Coupling & Collision Experiments. Some events experiment with guided interactions – pairing strangers in installations or dance environments to simulate emotional or social “entanglement”. These are intended to mimic natural coherence but in factual, lack organic alignment. The analogy is lab-grown quantum pairings with incompatible spin states, the results often lack staying power. Interaction occurs, coherence enabled, but entanglement does not exist.
• Controlled Protest Staging. Activist and political events naturally hold strong, potent emotional state of the highest energy. Yet when these are overly choreographed, devised, or visually overexposed, the raw power dissipates. Instead of catalysing transformation, the crowd recites well-versed slogans and movements – generating resonance loops without amplitude.

The Conundrum of “Masked” Energies
This brings us to a critical insight: attempts to mask or blend mismatched energies risk undermining the intended result.

The Fluctuation Gap and Incoherence. Picture a celebration designed to uplift a specific group, into which large numbers of participants enter without shared intention, emotional or historical resonance. Even if well-meaning, these mixed energies introduce fluctuation gaps: disturbances in the field that prevent stable coherence. The event may still be visually impressive, but the felt experience remains diffuse and incoherent.

Quantum Coherence and Entanglement. Why mismatch matters can be explored through the parallel of how quantum theory gives us a fitting metaphor. In physics, quantum coherence refers to the phase connection among particles, and entanglement is the intangibly deep, genuine connection formed between particles with authentic compatibility (matter/antimatter) or natural symmetry. Though still under exploration, it is generally accepted that coherence and entanglement are interdependent, i.e. entanglement occur following a coherent phase connection. Translating this to human gatherings: when individuals or energies lack shared orientation or internal symmetry, their entanglement fails. The attempt to force coherence through artificial alignment or visual uniformity results in instant decoherence. The energy drops, the field disbands. This explains why events with mismatched energetic pairings (emotional, cultural, spiritual, or biological) struggle to generate real and lasting transformation. The system can stage proximity, but not resonance. Despite these patterns, engineered mixing persists either by inserting interference or disrupting natural coherence, which can delay or distort momentum. While it’s not always malicious, sometimes it’s simply a misread of what authentic alignment requires, in order to achieve what could have been a shared goal.

Reconsidering the Role of Resonance in Collective Design
When zoomed through this dual lens of physics and social dynamics, the message is clear: surface-level vibrancy is not equivalent to energetic transformation. Understanding collective gatherings as energy fields helps us see beyond attendance metrics, after-effect echo, social buzz, and commercial coverage. It points toward an undeniable potential: that when humans align naturally, even momentarily, the coherence generated becomes more than the sum of its parts. And in that resonance – that mesomeric state – real change emerges. In quantum theory, physicists explored whether quantum coherence (the ability of quantum states to remain in superposition, essentially “in sync”) could be equivalent or convertible to “quantum entanglement (a correlation between particles that can exist regardless of their physical proximity)”. While it’s not conclusively proven, coherence is widely accepted as a prerequisite for entanglement. But coherence alone doesn’t guarantee entanglement. If science is now considered as mirror of Society (Dual Allegory), many orchestrated events may be planned with the hope that social coherence will lead to deeper entanglement; i.e., transformation of systems, alignment of worldviews, or reshuffling of power structures.

So, why Destructive Coherence is deemed unsuccessful in induced mismatched entanglement? Planned interference or “destructive coherence” assumes that disruption, clash, or friction between mismatched identities can be used to engineer entanglement – like forcing pairing through theatrical contrast. But this fails due to: no shared intrinsic link (particles/entities came from different source functions); no phase match (internal frequencies diverge too much); protected spin states / identity cores in natural particles (resist external rewiring), decoherence triggers: the more mismatch is introduced, the quicker coherence collapses. Hence, the energy doesn’t “settle” into entanglement, but instead dissipates or loops inwards as reaffirmation of identity boundaries. In human terms, this is when people walk away even more confirmed in who they are – not transformed. Successful and vibrant event gatherings may create synthetic coherence such as tuning the instruments in a room to the same frequency without writing a symphony. It’s not “fake,” but it doesn’t lead to entangled states unless participants come with resonant intent or compatible.

Interestingly, as synthetic and orchestrated the set ups are, natural particles will still go unaffected, and so do natural pairings (read: naturally entangled human pairs). This is because coherence can be induced like matching surface rhythms, but true entanglement requires authentic compatibility (matter/antimatter), compatible properties, and naturally-embedded internal identity. Natural particles resist destructive entanglement because their spin, history, and entropic stability are conserved. Events engineered under the belief that “clash = transformation”, may not achieve this on deeper level as destructive coherence (via clashing values or forced proximity) can’t generate stable entanglement without intrinsic compatibility. As the saying goes: A laser show can sync the crowd’s eyes, but connectedness is more than meets the eye.

Across history, technological and political transitions have been narrated through the lens of archetypes: offerings, sacrifice, disruption, and balance. Communities and individuals have often been cast as carriers of mythic roles, symbols of continuity or rupture, regardless of their actual contribution. The rhetoric of sacrifice in particular has been durable, in cultural scripts that recycle legitimacy by suggesting that progress demands an offering. In a world where data analytics pipelines can parse terabytes of signals from energy grids, markets, and biological systems, the persistence of such narratives is less a quaint tradition than a distortion. Symbolic scripts operate on perception, while the true mechanics of continuity rest on infrastructure design, feedback, and algorithmic optimisation. Recognising that they are not the substitute for systems that operate on physics, law, and mechanics, is imperative.

Symbolic practices attempt to assert themselves in many places. In South Sudan, the highly publicised case of under-age “marriage competition” brides illustrated how ceremonial customs collide with national laws intended to protect children. In South Africa, the practice of ukuthwala – once a form of consensual elopement, has, in some regions, shifted into coerced child unions. These practices function as forms of entanglement, assigning individuals roles of twinning, switching, mirroring, sacrifice, or symbolic example. Yet they demonstrate a key mismatch: without genuine connection or consent, such bonds do not carry systemic weight. They may be enacted ceremonially, but they unravel quickly when tested against the physics of autonomy, rights, and institutional frameworks. The same kind of distortion can be seen in modern sectors that should be governed by science. Energy transitions are often cast as moral crusades, but the technical challenge is one of optimisation under constraints: orchestrating distributed grids, balancing intermittency, and integrating storage at scale. Artificial intelligence is still debated in the register of saviour versus destroyer, rather than through the lens of its architecture: training efficiency, safety protocols, and scaling thresholds. Geopolitical narratives too recycle archetypes, branding some nations as eternal balancers or troublemakers, even though digital simulations and predictive analytics reveal behaviours that are mostly driven by supply chains, capital flows, systemic balance/imbalance, and infrastructure choices. The difference between ritual narrative and systemic mechanics becomes sharper when looking at how societies calculate value. Old scripts elevate individuals as sacrificial figures, suggesting their worth is in removal. Modern systems, however, quantify value in terms of functional contribution. A thought leader designing resilience through cross-sector data analytics generates measurable outcomes. Their value is not symbolic but systemic. To target such actors as ritual figures of sacrifice is to weaken the very systems that depend on their resonance. When contribution is lost, it cannot be replaced through a twin substitution. Ritual unions may have various purposes – entanglement, mirroring, twinning, switching, sacrifice, making an example – but without genuine bonding and real direct connection, they remain conceptual. And as concept only, where there is no shared resonance of consent or collaboration, the connection lacks foundation and durability. Such arrangements are fragile in principle and can be voided at the moment of realisation, rejection, or recognition of misalignment. They do not bind physically, legally, or functionally. In systemic terms, they are null, void. These unions are also structurally fragile because they often hinge on a single archetype or designated figure. If that individual is never aware of their supposed role, never informed, and never connected through genuine contact or bonding, then the script lacks any real anchor. In such cases, the person may simply disengage without constraint, not out of evasion of but because no binding mechanism ever existed. The entire narrative then collapses under its own weight, revealed as conceptual rather than realistic. This fragility raises a further question: if the leading archetype of a ritual concept withdraws or fails to align, what contingency exists? In engineered systems, continuity is preserved through contingency, backup, distributed function, substitute, and fail-safes. Power grids have reserve capacity, AI platforms have backup nodes, and biological systems adapt through parallel pathways. Ritual frameworks, by contrast, rarely provide for substitution. They depend and persist on one chosen symbolic actor to sustain the entire script, and when that resonance is absent, the programme has no fallback. The absence of contingency highlights the difference between symbolic entanglements, which collapse quickly under stress, and adaptive infrastructures, which are designed to endure variability.

In a ritual script basing itself on a physics blueprint, an electron and positron pairing has definable symmetry and predictable annihilation properties. But if the positron is redirected toward a non-electron partner with different properties and qualities, or enforced to pretend to swap roles, the mismatch generates anomalies and irregularities. The bond lacks coherence because the underlying particles were never designed to pair in that way. Attempts to reinforce the link by adding further nodes or intermediaries; stretching the network through layers of association or even invoking a “six degrees of separation” logic; only reveal weaknesses in the mechanism. Each added layer highlights the absence of a genuine anchor and accelerates disconnection. Conceptual entanglements that are redirected, multiplied, or artificially substituted expose their lack of systemic foundation in the same way. Rather than strengthening continuity, such diversions hasten collapse and render the bond void. Enforced contrasts such as a prince-and-pauper analogy forced to swap roles, or particles never designed to calibrate together, will quickly be flagged as compromised systems and thus isolated. Paired systems endure through symmetry and calibrated reciprocity; by contrast, deliberate mispairings or artificially extended networks are flagged as unsustainable and void. Once collapse in the scripting occurs, all consecutive attempts have no effect and produce no change, and naturally, the individual archetype in the pairing will and should look for a new compatible partner.

A further weakness is the absence of proper remuneration and appreciation. Modern systems recognise value through compensation, acknowledgement, and functional integration. When a ritual framework demands the presence of an archetype while offering neither recognition nor reward to one or more, it creates the conditions for disengagement. Why sustain a script that extracts without reciprocation? The mismatch is inevitable: undervaluation accelerates collapse of the scriptures. Conceptual rituals, then based on the circumstances above, are questionable to serve as universal mechanisms. They may carry significance for believers, but they cannot impose themselves upon those who do not share the same wavelength. An enforced bond or ritual placement without authentic connection collapses easily, revealed instead as systemic mislead – from an exploitation of perception, to attempt to reverse engineer a concept – rather than a foundation in any level of physics or mechanics. Continuity in modern societies depends on bonds that are verifiable. Legal contracts, biological interaction, or collaborative outputs generate measurable consequences in physics, law, everyday life, and institutional design. Symbolic scripts cannot override these, even when it is being used as a concept or blueprint. Whether or not the chosen archetypes are under strict control, vicinity and boundaries; the absence of realistic, factual interaction between the pair, suggest a vague forced line between the two that can easily collapse and be easier to deny. The implication is not whether or not ritual entanglement should be dismissed, but that they cannot operate as binding systems across populations. For those attuned to them, they may hold cultural and mythical resonance. For those outside or attempted to be removed, they remain overlays that easily collapse. Therefore infrastructures that distinguish between symbolic association and design, measuring worth by merit and contribution rather than sacrificial placement may be favourable. Once exploitation or persistent misalignment is recognised, conceptual scripts collapse, and continuity reverts to and searches for systems grounded in clarity, real connection, and compatible resonance.

When such conceptual entanglements collapse, the outcome must be accepted rather than resisted. A bond that was never anchored in reality cannot be sustained indefinitely, and recognition of its failure is part of systemic clarity. Once the pairing no longer resonates, it ceases to pair at all. In many cases, one or both parties will form new entanglements; grounded in compatible connection and alignment. Continuity does not depend on enforcing and preserving every script; it depends on recognising when scripts have ended and allowing new bonds, based on merit and resonance, to emerge.

References

Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton University Press.

Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo.

Hubert, H., & Mauss, M. (1964 English edition; widely reissued 1970s). Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. University of Chicago Press.

Jung, C. G. (1968). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton University Press.

Routledge. Smil, V. (2017). Energy and Civilization: A History. MIT Press.

Bostrom, N. (2014). Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford University Press.

Arthur, W. B. (2009). The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves. Free Press.

Kissinger, H., Schmidt, E., & Huttenlocher, D. (2021). The Age of AI: And Our Human Future.

John Murray. “South Sudan girl ‘sold’ in Facebook child marriage auction.”

The Guardian. 27 Sept 2024. “Ukuthwala.” Wikipedia. Accessed 2025.