The ideas you dislike—whether wokeism, religion, or misinformation—are not “mind viruses” and do not spread via contagion. This framing seeks to demonise, not understand, and poisons public discourse.
While I largely agree with your reasoning regarding the formation and spread of beliefs, I wonder if you might be arguing against a straw man. I'm not suggesting that the mind virus concept is always used in good faith, or that it's particularly useful, but I do think there's more truth to it than you acknowledge.
First, if we accept that memes exist, they don't contradict your more nuanced understanding of belief formation and propagation. Rather, they offer a complementary explanation based on evolutionary theory. Memetic theory proposes that memes, like genes, undergo a process of natural selection in which the most adaptive, appealing, or easily replicated ideas thrive and spread. Those that do not go extinct. Importantly, memetic theory doesn't tell us WHICH traits are most adaptive, only THAT they are selected like genes. This is where your social-motivational theory comes in. The memes that are most adaptive and appealing are those that align with the social motivations and functions you describe.
Second, while one could argue that "mind viruses" are just a rebranding of memes, Gad Saad highlights why certain memes are more resistant to rational critique than others. He suggests that some ideologies have stronger "epistemological immune systems" against rational scrutiny, promoting dogmatic thinking in which beliefs are accepted as absolute truths and become self-reinforcing. This doesn't contradict your theory; it complements it. Your theory explains what motivates people to engage with certain ideas, while Saad's framework addresses why some ideas are more resistant to reasoning.
Finally, the hijacking of these concepts by figures like Elon Musk for their own purposes, whether consciously or not, actually supports both your theory and memetic theory. The anti-woke narrative, for example, is a highly adaptive meme and arguably a mind virus in itself, much like other ideologies that dominate discourse. Similarly, your own ideas can be considered memes in an evolutionary sense—appealing and persuasive to certain individuals not only because of their intellectual merit, but also because they fulfill certain social functions and motivations. However, your theory does not qualify as a mind virus because it does not constitute an ideology that shuts down rational discourse.
I would be very grateful if you could tell me what you think, where and if I'm wrong, and how I can improve my argument as I try to improve my writing. Also, I would like to ask how best to refer to your theory? What do you think is the most accurate way to label it?
Thanks for an excellent comment. I agree much more work would be needed to challenge the general approach of memetics. I'll have pieces in the future that go into this in more depth and I'd be interested in your thoughts then. Although I like the idea that my approach might be complementary with, say, Saad's, I don't see it that way for various reasons I'll be writing about in the future.
Biologist Jerry Coyne would agree with you. He argues that memetics is not very useful for understanding culture, as it doesn’t quite elucidate why and how memes—that is ideas, habits, norms, fashions, etc.—spread and prevail. As he’s written on his blog: “...memeticists always seem able to confect a reason why something had to spread, independent of human tastes, needs, or psychology. It is intrinsically an unfalsifiable theory.” I agree with his perspective. It’s worth reading the rest of his brief critique of memetics in the same post. Link: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/09/15/an-evolutionary-psychology-book-that-shows-the-disciplines-value/
I came to a similar opinion. I felt that Dan had stretched the definition of ‘mind virus’ far enough to make it easier to debunk. With a more modest definition of the term, it corresponds quite naturally with the idea of memes and other models for the social contagion of ideas and provides a good explanation of the phenomena we are seeing.
I think this raises an interesting and important question about the limits for responsible use of a particular metaphor: how apt it must be to the actual dynamics of reality, how far it can be stretched without losing its aptness, and how far its benchmark definition can be stretched before it becomes strawman. I commented elsewhere (Michael Kaplan) that "poisons public discourse" is unproblematic because it's totally appropriate to the point being made, whether or not you agree with that point.
I can see how more modest definitions of "mind virus" would plausibly correspond to documented models of social contagion. But it's still a default pejorative connotation of absolute pathology ("virus"); which leaves out individual agency in implying it takes over our "mind"; is used to target particular beliefs you happen to dislike ("woke"); and which in practice lends itself to exaggeration and irresponsible rhetoric (Elon Musk), even if technically you could make a case for certain parallels with a weaker version.
Yes exactly - I'm not against all metaphors in this context, but I think the “mind virus” one has several deep problems that (although maybe this is just me being self-serving) don't apply to the “poisoning” language I used.
No, your comments are great actually. I struggle myself with the impulse to go long - when the topic or conversation is rich and you're inspired it can take at least a page to do full justice - but it gets time-consuming especially when you don't know if anyone's even reading. So sometimes it's a useful exercise to get the one or two most burning things off your chest and then step away. Or see how little text you can use to say the same things. I violate this all the time though. Anyway, I like seeing other people's long comments.
I agree with this comment. One thing I was thinking is their may be pairs of belief systems that are similar in their social and epistemic benefits, but differ in their mimetic fitness. For example there might be two religions that have broadly similar social practices and theological tenets, except one is more evangelical. The epidemiological model will predict that the evangelical religion will be more successful over time; the economic model will predict that the two belief systems will be similarly successful, since they have similar benefits.
Regarding 'straw men' though, it is clear that the folk concept of 'woke mind virus' has gotten out of control. So might be worth distinguishing a messy folk concept that is broken and wrong from a more refined notion in the Saad ballpark that is more successful
Interesting idea - but I think “evangelism” is something to be explained in terms of incentives and agency, among other things, as I gesture at in the piece (in connection with active belief) and so not fruitfully analyses in terms of memetics/viral spread..
There may be two religions that both have active beliefs, in the sense of "passionate displays of commitment to shared realities socially rewarded—and hence incentivised—by fellow group members" and yet only one religion's active beliefs are focused on causing other people to share the religion. For example consider Judaism: Kosher is a costly signal; wearing a kippah displays group membership; but it isn't a proselytizing religion, and it has high barriers to entry. I think this limits its spread.
Interestingly memetic theory goes well with mimetic theory, a la Girard, though I think the latter is closer to the truth as there can be an arbitrariness or content-irrelevance to some ideas that isn't particularly analogous to evolution/inheritance. It's the human context, something like a phase transition, that sets up an ideology often with a number of contingent elements as part of it.
I read 'Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World' which is a dialogue where he covers off the main ideas of mimesis and scapegoating among others. He has that sociologist style of this is the absolute truth just because I say it and he sort of overgeneralises the utility of the ideas to try to explain pretty much everything. But nonetheless I did find the ideas deeply resonant and insightful.
1. Passes between hosts through social contact, or consumption of one-way broadcast media.
2. Takes over or hijacks the host’s behavior in order to replicate more efficiently.
3. Has some kind of deleterious effect on the host without any beneficial effects.
Something has to satisfy all three to be a mind virus. That excludes a lot of ideas often accused of being mind viruses, like religion (has positive benefits for the host) or memes (lacking deleterious effects), but not things like socially transmitted mental illnesses or cults.
If we use this definition then wokeness does qualify but "anti-wokeness" doesn't (whatever that means exactly), mostly because of point (3) but also point (2). For example, someone who gets really annoyed at wokeness will not usually cut off contact with a big chunk of their friends or family, a form of self-harm that woke people often engage in. Nor will they abuse their employers resources to spread their message, something so commonly done by woke people that it's hardly surprising anymore.
1.) Diffusion of ideas: I agree—ideas spread through various social mechanisms between individuals and social systems, shaping beliefs and behaviors.
2.) Memetics: I wouldn't characterize this as hijacking, I would call it replication through hosts.
3.) This is subjective. One might argue that being a Jewish or queer pro-Palestinian activist could seem idiotic or suicidal, but this belief and social signaling can be advantageous in an environment that rewards such position. Moreover, it's not inherently deleterious (suicidal), since these activists typically don't live in Palestine.
If "anti-wokeness" (whatever that means) simply refers to adopting an alternative perspective or expressing skepticism about woke ideology, then I don't think it should be "classified as a mind virus". However, when opposition extends to rejecting all aspects of mainstream culture as sick and the media as manipulative propaganda, when arguments are adopted simply because they are considered "non-conformist or edgy" without any willingness to critically evaluate and possibly revise those positions based on new evidence, and when this results in social marginalization, then yes, it can take on the characteristics of a mind virus.
For (2) I distinguish in my article between "hijacking" and non-behaviour-altering propagation. If someone believes something but they only attempt to spread their belief when it happens to naturally come up in conversation, then that's not a mind virus. If they find ways to artificially jack their beliefs into arbitrary situations or conversations, then they're taking explicit steps to replicate their ideas and that would meet the criteria.
For (3) I agree with you that it's subjective, probably the most subjective one of the three. In particular when we get into the question of indirect or future harms. I tried to keep it really narrow for now to avoid that problem. In particular I excluded other people punishing you under the harm criterion, so, being pro-queer even IN Palestine, would not count! Under the same rule, being socially marginalized for refusing {religion, wokeness, whatever} is also not considered self-harm.
However woke people do hold beliefs that are self-harming even in the absence of retaliation by other people. I give two examples:
1. Their beliefs seem to lead directly to mental illness (I argue for causality in the article).
2. Their beliefs often lead them to abuse and damage the institutions that pay them their salary, which they need to eat.
The latter is clearly more subjective than the former due to its indirectness, but I think it should count. By the way, I wouldn't characterize anti-wokeness as rejecting all aspects of mainstream culture as sick. Far from it. Anti-wokeness tends to celebrate mainstream culture. Look at how distressed they get over the wokeification of Star Wars. Hard to view rejection of regular old Star Wars as a generalized hatred of mainstream culture.
I mostly agree, and having read your article now I see your point, but I have some issues with your understanding of being harmed by beliefs if being punished by other people and social marginalization don't count. If you exclude those, then what is your definition of harmful effects?
For 1: I don't think there's clear evidence that woke beliefs lead directly to mental illness. Correlation is not causation, and while it's possible that woke beliefs affect your mental health, I wouldn't bet my money on it until we have more data. See the endless discussion about the effects of social media/smartphone use on mental health.
For 2.: Is there any evidence that people are losing their salaries because they are damaging their own institutions with their woke beliefs? I guess you mean people at Disney and so on, but I think this is not a mainstream problem, but a pretty industry-specific one.
I wouldn't characterize anti-wokeness as usually rejecting all aspects of mainstream culture as sick too, I just wanted to make clear what I meant. However, I have come across some writers here on Substack who fit that characterization.
Harmful effects = self-harming behavior. Emphasis on "self". I think there are quite a few self-harming effects, I didn't mention them all. For instance there is a long series of stories where woke children cut off their parents due to them not 'converting'. That's pretty harmful behavior for both sides but I believe especially so for the children. And of course there's the entire trans issue which I stayed away from.
For 1, I'm aware of this criticism and argue explicitly for causality (not mere correlation) in my essay. To recap the argument: the hypothesis that wokeness causes mental illness is highly plausible, so plausible that it should be the default working assumption unless proven otherwise. Woke beliefs are really depressing! We would naturally expect someone to get really sad or even suicidal if they believe the world is ordered by a giant conspiracy of Hitler-esque woman-hating oppressors who are constantly victimizing you. Also, "wokeness" is a specific subset of left wing beliefs, but other beliefs that usually tag along as part of wider leftism are also very depressing, especially the belief that the climate is doomed and the Earth will be uninhabitable in future. A significant number of leftists tell pollsters they refuse to have children because they think the Earth has no future. From a purely evolutionary perspective that's extremely self harming behavior, of course, and depending on one's views on children you might view it as depriving yourself of a great experience too. And then in the evidence bucket we have a long collection of stories of people who adopted woke beliefs, became incredibly depressed and then committed suicide, e.g.
So when you say correlation is not causation what you're doing is asserting that the correlation is spurious, but why would it be? The claim that believing sad things leads to mental health issues is ordinary and mundane, supported both by a wealth of scientific evidence, strong correlations and also common sense. If you wanted to argue these specific beliefs did NOT create unhappiness or mental health issues, that the correlation is merely a distracting curiosity, that would be the remarkable claim that would need to be evidenced.
For (2), Disney is a particularly famous and clear example right now but it's not isolated and these problems can be seen across industries. I myself became anti-woke after watching a startup I joined in the very early days blow itself up by going woke (which only happened once they felt secure, interestingly enough). The company had been a rapidly growing success story but entered near immediate decline both financial and otherwise due to replacing key staff with diversity hires, who quickly made some terrible decisions whilst the loss of the key people who'd built the teams originally caused a staffing exodus. It's not a well known company and I won't name it here, but this sort of thing is a widespread phenomenon.
Of course, the people involved don't blame wokeness. They think it's all just bad luck or would chalk it up to the market, COVID, etc. The easy money in the 2010s due to ZIRP meant they (we) were able to raise a large sum of money and it took years for them to burn through it all. So from the perspective of woke people, the institutions starting to fall apart around them is just generalized failure and dysfunction unrelated to their own bad decisions. Even when people at the top realize what's happening (and sadly in this case the CEO did realize), they feel powerless to do anything about it lest the wokies on the board nuke their career and make them unemployable in future. They'd prefer to drive the institutions into the ground one by one and get paid to do it, than have clean hands but be frozen out.
Are you claiming that, at least when it comes to politics, most of what the mainstream media produces these days is *not* manipulative propaganda?
Other than “well, they’re playing to their base”, you don’t really have much to defend such a claim, do you?
And while I am indeed a (non-card-carrying) member of the anti-woke, my position on this has little to do with woke, and everything to do with the overt leftist bias present in the MSM.
Gentzkow, M., & Shapiro, Jesse M. (2006). Media Bias and Reputation. Journal of Political Economy, 114(2), 280-316. https://doi.org/10.1086/499414
Hassell, H. J. G., Holbein, J. B., & Miles, M. R. (2020). There is no liberal media bias in which news stories political journalists choose to cover. Sci Adv, 6(14), eaay9344. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aay9344
Huang, H., Zhu, H., Liu, W. et al. Uncovering the essence of diverse media biases from the semantic embedding space. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11, 656 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03143-w
Vallone, R. P., Ross, L., & Lepper, M. R. (1985). The hostile media phenomenon: biased perception and perceptions of media bias in coverage of the Beirut massacre. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49(3), 577-585. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.49.3.577
Sorry, the two links you send prior to 2020 are utterly irrelevant.
The 2020 link claiming “There is no liberal media bias in which news stories political journalists choose to cover.” The headline is so OBVIOUSLY false, based simply on the Hunter Biden laptop story and how the Russia collusion “story” was handled (and I’m not referring to the first few months) that I cannot possibly take it seriously.
I may check out the 4th link.
I am not making any claims about “right-wing” media being “better” [well, other than the WSJ, which while imperfect and partly biased against Trump, really does operate the way you are supposed to (IMO) and how the MSM at least tried to appear to prior to 2015 (they were all at least slightly biased to the left even then, but they weren’t so obvious about it, and I would even be willing to accept Richard’s premise that prior to 2015 the MSM was good and was at least net honest)].
That you would send me 3 of those links demonstrates to me that you really should read this City Journal piece. The world of your pre-2024 links is not at all today’s world.
I guess, though functionally it's not dissimilar, and the cut off contact seems true.
More generally your three points could seem true of almost any kind of idea. Like heliocentrism (or scientism if you insist) in 16th century Italy could be seen to respect all three criteria.
I'm pretty sure this is all very subjective, having seen some people, including in my family, become pretty obsessed with anti-wokeism including trans issues that basically do not impact them at all materially in any way.
“… issues that basically do not impact them at all materially in any way.”
Why does the fact that the issue doesn’t impact them at all materially in any way matter?
My two female children ain’t athletes, and never were, but I still feel strongly that allowing biological males to compete in female sports is wrong. And I believe strongly that chemical and surgical procedures on children, before their age of consent, to change gender identity is wrong.
For that matter, while I happen to believe early term abortions should be legal, I feel very strongly that late-term abortion past viability of the fetus outside the womb is murder, and that states like NY that have such laws are doing something abominable. Even though said laws “basically do not impact [me] at all materially in any way”.
The “materially affect” standard seems pretty arbitrary to me.
It may be worth reading my article or the other comments I make on this thread with respect to the three rules.
Heliocentrism wouldn't satisfy all three; it would fail the third at minimum because what you believe about the arrangement of the solar system doesn't cause you any harm. What you're getting at (probably) is that the Catholic Church punished people for that belief, but my criteria excludes harm due to other people punishing you for holding a belief, exactly to circumvent the problem of every idea someone dislikes causing that criteria to be met. I give an example in another comment where being pro-queer in Palestine wouldn't count as a belief that "harms the host" even though it'd probably result in you being executed, because by analogy to real viruses, other people treating you badly/abandoning you because you're sick isn't a harm directly caused by the virus itself.
With respect to Musk specifically, the reason it's an important distinction is because the owner of the institution decides what its mission is. Woke people engage in self-harming behavior by abusing their employer - e.g. the mission is to sell groceries but they run marketing campaigns that directly attack large chunks of the potential customer base. Lots of examples of this sort of behavior abound, usually in marketing departments, but of course diversity hiring is another way they do this.
On the other hand, Musk - being the private owner of X - can choose the mission himself. If he decides the mission of X is anti-wokeness, then people can't really damage the institution by agreeing to work on that mission. The case of X is even more clear because X doesn't actually implement anti-wokeness, it implements (relatively) free speech, and being a platform that maximally encourages as much tweeting by as many people as possible is clearly in line with Twitter's original mission, so he hasn't even changed it!
Anti-wokeness can be abstract, but for a lot of people it actually is personal. Woke people have directly attacked me and my career several times in response to literally nothing at all e.g. setting up ordinary hiring processes that interview people on the basis of their job skills (=not advancing the cause of women and minorities=evil). With respect to trans stuff, I guess the fear is that whilst it doesn't impact them today, maybe tomorrow it suddenly will, especially if they have kids. The stories that make people crazy are when a spouse or child turns up at home one day and announces they're actually now the opposite gender, sometimes having gone through medical procedures without even telling their loved ones. Happy family on Sunday, sudden gender change on Monday, no warning. The fact that the transitioned person often cuts off contact obviously increases the paranoia dramatically.
So I wouldn't say this stuff doesn't affect people. It very much can, and does, and does so without warning.
But as long as “imitation of high status individuals” is a human epistemic mechanism, you have self reinforcing dynamics, and “contagion” is a reasonable word.
It's basically "monkey see, monkey do", or peer pressure ("all the cool kids are doing it...we won't be your friend if you don't do it...it'll make you grown up...it'll make you feel good...what's the matter, chicken?"
This works better with low-self-esteem individuals...or individuals whose self-esteem has been busted down...like a cult does. Yeah, I said it.
I think another point against the phrase “woke mind virus” or its other pejoratives across the political spectrum, is that, ironically, it’s precisely the kind of language that won’t cure anyone of their “woke mind virus”, but instead makes it much more likely for them to retreat further into their system of belief.
I don't think the goal of using the term is to spontaneously cure anyone, it's to help frame the situation in the hope of understanding it better for those not yet infected.
“there’s no such thing as mind viruses; and here’s a deep dive into exactly what mind viruses are and how they work.”
But yes, “mind virus” is a defensive, unhelpful, dialogue- and inquiry-stopping term. But how fun it is to try to locate where “mind” is and to what extent an individual mind exists.
great post, but a quick caveat: maybe don't say that the metaphor "poisons" public discourse? if falsehoods are not "mind viruses," metaphors describing them are not "poisons." Plato's pharmakon, and all that…
But there's a difference between using an apt metaphor like "poison," to convey the simple observation that irresponsible rhetoric taking advantage of a misleading image is destructive and undermines public discourse (much as poison is destructive to the body's functioning). The problem is not using metaphors. It's 1) using an inappropriate metaphor for what is actually going on; 2) wielding that inappropriate metaphor misleadingly and hyperbolically, to take advantage of its intuitive appeal; 3) using that metaphor exclusively for pejorative purposes, even when the thing it describes may not necessarily be negative for some contexts.
Yours is a distinction without a difference, as using the “poison” metaphor is designed to shut down the conversation, rather than to enlighten and defend one’s argument or reasoning.
I would postulate that *both* “mind virus” and “poisons public discourse” do NOT violate your 1), while definitively each violates your 2) and 3).
You can quibble with my assertion, but that’s what you’re doing, then - quibbling. There is surely no bright line that makes “mind virus” poisonous while “poisons” is virtuous, fair, honest and appropriate.
All very good points. But alongside your reasons for why "mind virus" isn't an apt characterization, an equally interesting question is why people are so drawn to this virus metaphor in the first place. Putting aside any possible contribution of the pandemic in popularizing this image, I would highlight several imagined scenarios we find intuitively terrifying, which horror movies and dystopian fiction routinely play on. These include: 1) hijacking of self and independent thought by some alien force (zombie movies, Invasion of Body Snatchers brainwashing); 2) rapid "spreading" and overwhelming of defenses (it's not just one of us being taken over but the entire world, and it moves fast); 3) erasure of distinct individuals as they are absorbed into some faceless mass "hive mind"; 4) something that appears innocuous or appealing on the surface has a hidden sinister, Trojan-horse agenda. I think some or all of these subliminal fantasies are probably at work when you hear the mind virus talk.
In general, I think we're very susceptible to latching onto evocative metaphors that don't actually describe the phenomenon we like to imagine they describe. If "mind virus" *feels* apt for what someone has observed, this will matter much more to them than its technical accuracy.
I don't think that talk of mind-viruses implies that the truth is self-evident. Seems like when someone says something is a mind virus they mean something like:
1) it's an idea that spreads rapidly
2) it's bad
3) it induces irrationality generally when held.
On such a picture, one wouldn't say that all their beliefs are mind-viruses because a mind-virus needs to meet all three criteria.
(F is a mind virus if and only if at some time t...)
Fair. I think many mean much more than that but I agree bad ideas sometimes spread rapidly, and it's unobjectionable (although still, I think, counterproductive) when people use the "mind virus" framing to refer to that.
Yep. I lay out a more precise definition similar to yours here, with three criteria that must all be met simultaneously, and then give some examples of what does and doesn't meet it historically:
Whether something is true doesn't feature at all. In fact the word "true" only appears once, and only at the start to repudiate that as a useful way to understand mind viruses.
Yeah, didn't really catch me on that, you seemed to describe an awful lot of mind virus as far as I could tell. It's not exactly analogous to catching a germ it's a different sense people use when they say mind virus, it comes with the human dynamic/cult/ideological context, that's actually what it's describing. It doesn't preclude the origin being propaganda or status games being played. Of course these happen as part of the dynamic system that is human culture.
I think Girard's idea of mimesis is the critical contagion mechanism and because its pre/subconscious it is a kind of capture, like succumbing to a disease. There's a lot of evidence for social contagion a la madness of the crowds, manias, Ashe conformity etc (not wholly undermined by recent reinterpretations in my view). The idea of npc, zombies, invasion of the body snatchers is addressing the same phenomena.
It's really defined by the inability to reason. Some people are literally captured by their ideology in such a way they can't even see the alternative, it won't cohere in their mind to consider it rationally- you can actually know it in the flesh. We're not all floating in some relative swamp of bias and deception. We all suffer from these things by degrees but some of us, on some issues can point to real world phenomenon and say that is a woke-mind virus. Have you seriously never though this?
Fortunately the group of people who share my views are largely rational independent thinkers, unlike the sheep on the other side of the political fence!
Hard to parse. I'm not sure if you're sarcastically doing the both-sideism fallacy or not. The point is there's a zeitgeist that rises up as the new utopia, the reactionary is genuinely distinctive from this even if subgroups mirror a lot of the dynamics. Currently the hegemony is on the left, previously in other communities and places it might be on the right.
And your not so sceptical to suggest both sides are equally wrong on everything always surely, some times you can be rationally right about reality.
I largely agree with what you said, just making a joke that that criticism is rarely directed towards one’s own group or adjacent groups in a way that is socially/personally costly, as Dan mentions. As for whether it’s the both-sideism fallacy, your point (correct me if I’ve misinterpreted here) is that the “woke mind virus” of the left has had disproportionately damaged peoples critical thinking, compared to say (one of) the equivalents on (part of the right), like Trump’s cult of personality, unless it was just meant as an example and not meant to imply something unique about the left’s irrationality
Fair play. I'm more than happy to call out Trumpism as a mind virus dynamic. Personally I am that rare enlightened centrist and don't buy into sets of ideas wholesale. My biases and blind spots are more eclectic.
Hahaha, that was the perfect antidote joke to mine, fair play yourself. I personally lean left overall on the balance of things, so I know what you mean about not reducing both sides (if sides is even accurate, feels like more of a messy patchwork at times) to the same thing.
A point I made in a separate comment is that even in cases where “mind virus” aptly characterises a (set of) belief(s), that sort of language, ironically, seems to do little to cure said “mind virus”, and I’d argue worsens the situation
Another perceptive read. Thank you. Badly chosen (and/or weaponised) metaphor and simile can quickly lead from poisoning debate, and making it impossible, to making debate undesirable - because our antagonists are held to have shown themselves to be less than human. It is not a big step to go from saying 'Chris has a virus' to saying 'Chris IS a virus'. (And so with Russian 'capitalist swine and running dogs', Tutsi 'cockroaches', 'ethnic cleansing' passim, and Jewish, Roma and homosexual 'untermenschen'. That might sound alarmist, but in my experience of covering wars, the metaphors can be as lethal in their consequences as the hardware and ordnance.
Well put Chris. I’m afraid the change of the language used in political dialogue seems to suggest we’re a lot more like the 1930s than is comfortable. Like you say, when someone has a “mind virus”, they are no longer a person with their own desires and agency, just a sack of flesh that has become the host for something we must eliminate.
I agree that formation of beliefs is often far more complex than a simple contagion process. But there are lots of situations where understanding the diffusion of a specific piece of information/content can be useful to inform potential interventions. To give one example, the 2019 extremist attacker in Christchurch wanted to draw attention to his manifesto, with many media outlets inadvertently helping with this aim. So the spread of this content - and the ignoring of media best practice for such information - could be analysed by reconstructing these amplification events (https://www.cjr.org/analysis/christchurch-shooting-media-coverage.php). Such analysis doesn’t tell us why a journalist would amplify the content, or why a user might subsequently share it or whether they might adopt similar beliefs. But thinking about the diffusion process - alongside other more detailed reconstruction studies - can help identify how amplification of the underlying harmful information is happening, and hence how its reach could be reduced. Similarly, reporting guidelines around suicide were informed by studies of contagion effects following high profile coverage (although studies are necessarily observational, these events exhibit causal features like consistency, temporality, strength of association, and coherence).
I’d also add that when it comes to actual infectious diseases, it can also sometimes be suboptimal to focus too much on just the pathogen, rather than wider context and environment. For example, good hygiene in healthcare that prevents outbreaks in the first place is preferable to poor hygiene followed by reactive attempts to chase down infections.
Right on -- I've always thought that "mind virus" is a totally perverse metaphor. You give a lot of good, nuanced reasons why it distorts efforts to persuade. But, to me, the main danger is that it tells us that our enemies have no agency in forming their beliefs. Thus, we have no reason to respect their agency or independence when we try to "cure" them.
I agree with your point, but I believe a reason why the term mind virus is pretty apt is because many of those who have it really fail to recognize and exercise their own agency. It’s oftentimes why they find themselves following these ideas to begin with.
I agree, of course, that the 'virus' metaphor is misleading in the ways you say; and also that claims made on its behalf betray mistaken assumptions about how ideas spread, and sometimes a patronising attitude to the supposed gullibility of others. The points are true and important.
However, there is also an upside to the language of medical science. Here is what I wrote in Part III of my essay, On Nature, Science & Culture:
"Here is how the comparison between culture and viruses is insightful and true. In both cases the phenomenon exists at two distinct and complementary levels: the individual and the population; the micro and the macro. In the medical domain, we study how the body works and hence how and why individuals get sick: this is called pathology. We study also whole populations, looking at how they are structured and how disease spreads among them: this is called epidemiology. Then putting these two sources of knowledge together, epidemics are explained, scientifically, as the cumulative effect of countlessly many individual moments of transmission and propagation. Cultural things can and should be explained in the same way, as the macro product of countlessly many micro-moments of behaviour and interpretation. To put the point concisely: psychology should be to anthropology as pathology is to epidemiology."
In other words: medical science is our most advanced science in terms of connecting the micro and the macro in human life, and its terminology and conceptual frames may, accordingly, have some positive use.
This doesn't negate what you say here, not at all. But it does seem worth saying alongside it.
I have been reading the comments, and I wanted to briefly address some of the pushback. To me, the most common source of resistance appears to be not allowing or not following the distinction of rationality per se and the one reference to social rationality as being distinct. This introduces two kinds of sufficiency, and the common claim that the "mind virus" metaphor is sufficient is conflating the two, for example by reading resistance to that specific metaphor as also resisting the idea of "social contagion" more generally. The latter, while still containing some rhetorically negative effects ("contagion") is nevertheless treated as a source for both good and bad sentiments and ideas. That, to me, is the part of the metaphor worth keeping.
In distinguishing rationality (the more globally informed, science-minded kind) and social rationality (the more local navigation of situational and social pressures), you also made the distinction that social contagion does not happen "via mere contact or exposure," but you did so in the negative by saying that "mind viruses" do not spread that way. I think some people interpreted this as throwing out the full contagion model. Though I am not sure of how technical the audience, one way to clarify the distinction is that exposure and overcoming/overriding/circumventing "epistemic vigilance" (if I remember your term correctly) are INUS conditions, which is to say they are individually insufficient but jointly sufficient. That the latter is not independently sufficient requires a bit of reframing, but in brief, it approximates to the difference between a lack of resistance (neutral awareness for example) and "adoption," which would be a source of resistance to change.
Another subset of pushback in the responses perhaps DID include epistemic vigilance in their modelling, but that only served as evidence that those spreading the "mind virus" are guilty of doing so willfully and/or maliciously by manipulation or brute social force.
I want to offer a couple demonstrative counterexamples to address the pushback as directly and concretely as I am able. First is an example to establish that epistemic vigilance is a real and active thing.
1. We discount information by how much we distrust the source. I point this out, not because it is insightful, but to trigger the reaction that it is obvious, trite or quaint. Such reactions, along with labelling something as cliche shows that we intuitively discount would-be-insights by how "common-sense" they have become. No case could be made that objective truth value diminishes with its distribution across the population unless it is a statistical fact about that population or some other distribution-sensitive phenomena. Instead, we seem to presume that information and even insights are akin to a resource with limited reach and application, OR we must presume that people as CARRIERS of information and insights have an active role in shaping, resisting and proliferating information such that the fidelity naturally declines with time and exposure. This discounting reaction is at least a case of epistemic vigilance, but it also seems to acknowledge that epistemic vigilance itself plays a role in shaping information.
2. One of the lowest hanging fruits of wokeism can be steel-manned in a way that is easily understood: Sensitivity to "Micro-aggressions." The most salient feature is that the reaction is disproportional to the offense... micro- met with... not micro. This seems sufficient to deem it irrational, and laughably so.
But if we zoom out to the level of "what is objectively true," we can recognize that there walk among us those that are just a handful of unkindnesses from literally ending their own life. If, instead of a SJW who has never met such a person, we instead think from the perspective of someone who works in a mental health clinic or for a suicide hotline, the "overreaction" is suddenly easily seen as proportional. The local reality they are confronted with is high stakes of unkindness. Returning to the SJW, again it stands out that they are annoyingly disconnected from that reality, but if we don't presume their whole set of motives, that there exist such vulnerable people still creates a potentially special condition for virtue signaling. If they can let them know that they are not alone, then it might literally save a life by creating the conditions where they would call such a help line.
But we must also steel-man their detractors. Empty virtue-signaling, especially when prolific, can CAUSE feelings of disconnection and loneliness. There exists no socially rational world with zero people sensitized to or zero people engaging in "micro-aggressions" except some "utopian delusion" that everyone accuses their detractors of naively reaching for.
I involuntarily roll my eyes at the label, but I am not going to presume that any given overreaction to "microaggressions" is pure reactionary garbage.
Awesome comment as always, William - I agree with pretty much all of it.
'The latter, while still containing some rhetorically negative effects ("contagion") is nevertheless treated as a source for both good and bad sentiments and ideas. That, to me, is the part of the metaphor worth keeping.' - yes, good insight.
By the time I was wrapping up that comment, my brain had turned to mush.
I forgot to include a point that coincides with your post about strange beliefs. The virtue signaling of an online SJW may rely on the disproportion of response to "microagressions" writ large to indicate both the level of support on offer for the vulnerable and the fit with other signalers.
This may reflect the conditions which we describe as "polarization." The reactive dissonance to insensitivity (here towards presumably vulnerable) is leveraged as blame. Those being blamed inherit some of this dissonance and redistribute it with options among sensitization (the implicit request), desensitization to the source of the blame, analyzing the contents of the accusation (how insensitive/inspecific it is to the blamed), and distributing/returning the blame accordingly. After suffient cycling, desensitization reaches a kind of equilibrium where blame is more ritual than meaningful.
I imagine this applies widely, well beyond online activity. Codependent relationships can work like this, as well as complaining of shitty bosses in corporate pecking orders. If you have an impatient boss at work and at home, it's no wonder the road is full of impatient premadonnas. The life and limb threat of real harm (giant, metal boxes rolling at lethal speeds) is way out of proportion with our sense of risk in escalation. And yet we implicitly judge roaf offenders less, essentially by social contagion. Everyone has more permission to be an asshole (despite operating deadly machinery) because, hey, we gotta take it out on someone!!
I was also going to comment on some of Dawkins' mistakes, but I have a soft spot for him. Also, that comment, and this one, need not get any longer!
I agree. While there are some similarities between religions/ideologies to viruses, I think it is lazy-thinking to use the term: “mind virus” as anything more than slang.
Woke ideology appeals to people for many of the same reasons as other ideologies do. How useful it is for society is another issue:
For those who are interested, I have my own theory on how ideologies are formed and spread:
Even if "virus" was a great metaphor, it's not like we have rock-solid techniques for dealing with physical viruses. Public health and managing viruses are deeply contentious issues.
While I largely agree with your reasoning regarding the formation and spread of beliefs, I wonder if you might be arguing against a straw man. I'm not suggesting that the mind virus concept is always used in good faith, or that it's particularly useful, but I do think there's more truth to it than you acknowledge.
First, if we accept that memes exist, they don't contradict your more nuanced understanding of belief formation and propagation. Rather, they offer a complementary explanation based on evolutionary theory. Memetic theory proposes that memes, like genes, undergo a process of natural selection in which the most adaptive, appealing, or easily replicated ideas thrive and spread. Those that do not go extinct. Importantly, memetic theory doesn't tell us WHICH traits are most adaptive, only THAT they are selected like genes. This is where your social-motivational theory comes in. The memes that are most adaptive and appealing are those that align with the social motivations and functions you describe.
Second, while one could argue that "mind viruses" are just a rebranding of memes, Gad Saad highlights why certain memes are more resistant to rational critique than others. He suggests that some ideologies have stronger "epistemological immune systems" against rational scrutiny, promoting dogmatic thinking in which beliefs are accepted as absolute truths and become self-reinforcing. This doesn't contradict your theory; it complements it. Your theory explains what motivates people to engage with certain ideas, while Saad's framework addresses why some ideas are more resistant to reasoning.
Finally, the hijacking of these concepts by figures like Elon Musk for their own purposes, whether consciously or not, actually supports both your theory and memetic theory. The anti-woke narrative, for example, is a highly adaptive meme and arguably a mind virus in itself, much like other ideologies that dominate discourse. Similarly, your own ideas can be considered memes in an evolutionary sense—appealing and persuasive to certain individuals not only because of their intellectual merit, but also because they fulfill certain social functions and motivations. However, your theory does not qualify as a mind virus because it does not constitute an ideology that shuts down rational discourse.
I would be very grateful if you could tell me what you think, where and if I'm wrong, and how I can improve my argument as I try to improve my writing. Also, I would like to ask how best to refer to your theory? What do you think is the most accurate way to label it?
Thanks for an excellent comment. I agree much more work would be needed to challenge the general approach of memetics. I'll have pieces in the future that go into this in more depth and I'd be interested in your thoughts then. Although I like the idea that my approach might be complementary with, say, Saad's, I don't see it that way for various reasons I'll be writing about in the future.
Biologist Jerry Coyne would agree with you. He argues that memetics is not very useful for understanding culture, as it doesn’t quite elucidate why and how memes—that is ideas, habits, norms, fashions, etc.—spread and prevail. As he’s written on his blog: “...memeticists always seem able to confect a reason why something had to spread, independent of human tastes, needs, or psychology. It is intrinsically an unfalsifiable theory.” I agree with his perspective. It’s worth reading the rest of his brief critique of memetics in the same post. Link: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/09/15/an-evolutionary-psychology-book-that-shows-the-disciplines-value/
I look forward to reading it!
I came to a similar opinion. I felt that Dan had stretched the definition of ‘mind virus’ far enough to make it easier to debunk. With a more modest definition of the term, it corresponds quite naturally with the idea of memes and other models for the social contagion of ideas and provides a good explanation of the phenomena we are seeing.
I think this raises an interesting and important question about the limits for responsible use of a particular metaphor: how apt it must be to the actual dynamics of reality, how far it can be stretched without losing its aptness, and how far its benchmark definition can be stretched before it becomes strawman. I commented elsewhere (Michael Kaplan) that "poisons public discourse" is unproblematic because it's totally appropriate to the point being made, whether or not you agree with that point.
I can see how more modest definitions of "mind virus" would plausibly correspond to documented models of social contagion. But it's still a default pejorative connotation of absolute pathology ("virus"); which leaves out individual agency in implying it takes over our "mind"; is used to target particular beliefs you happen to dislike ("woke"); and which in practice lends itself to exaggeration and irresponsible rhetoric (Elon Musk), even if technically you could make a case for certain parallels with a weaker version.
Yes exactly - I'm not against all metaphors in this context, but I think the “mind virus” one has several deep problems that (although maybe this is just me being self-serving) don't apply to the “poisoning” language I used.
Agreed. And is not “poisons public discourse” itself a poisonous metaphor?!?
Well said, and with much more brevity than I managed!
No, your comments are great actually. I struggle myself with the impulse to go long - when the topic or conversation is rich and you're inspired it can take at least a page to do full justice - but it gets time-consuming especially when you don't know if anyone's even reading. So sometimes it's a useful exercise to get the one or two most burning things off your chest and then step away. Or see how little text you can use to say the same things. I violate this all the time though. Anyway, I like seeing other people's long comments.
I agree with this comment. One thing I was thinking is their may be pairs of belief systems that are similar in their social and epistemic benefits, but differ in their mimetic fitness. For example there might be two religions that have broadly similar social practices and theological tenets, except one is more evangelical. The epidemiological model will predict that the evangelical religion will be more successful over time; the economic model will predict that the two belief systems will be similarly successful, since they have similar benefits.
Regarding 'straw men' though, it is clear that the folk concept of 'woke mind virus' has gotten out of control. So might be worth distinguishing a messy folk concept that is broken and wrong from a more refined notion in the Saad ballpark that is more successful
Interesting idea - but I think “evangelism” is something to be explained in terms of incentives and agency, among other things, as I gesture at in the piece (in connection with active belief) and so not fruitfully analyses in terms of memetics/viral spread..
There may be two religions that both have active beliefs, in the sense of "passionate displays of commitment to shared realities socially rewarded—and hence incentivised—by fellow group members" and yet only one religion's active beliefs are focused on causing other people to share the religion. For example consider Judaism: Kosher is a costly signal; wearing a kippah displays group membership; but it isn't a proselytizing religion, and it has high barriers to entry. I think this limits its spread.
Interestingly memetic theory goes well with mimetic theory, a la Girard, though I think the latter is closer to the truth as there can be an arbitrariness or content-irrelevance to some ideas that isn't particularly analogous to evolution/inheritance. It's the human context, something like a phase transition, that sets up an ideology often with a number of contingent elements as part of it.
Do you have any recommendations for an introduction to Girardian mimetic theory?
I read 'Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World' which is a dialogue where he covers off the main ideas of mimesis and scapegoating among others. He has that sociologist style of this is the absolute truth just because I say it and he sort of overgeneralises the utility of the ideas to try to explain pretty much everything. But nonetheless I did find the ideas deeply resonant and insightful.
Definitions are important. I lay out a definition of mind viruses here that eliminates a lot of unhelpful thinking on the topic:
https://penbroke.substack.com/p/mind-virology
1. Passes between hosts through social contact, or consumption of one-way broadcast media.
2. Takes over or hijacks the host’s behavior in order to replicate more efficiently.
3. Has some kind of deleterious effect on the host without any beneficial effects.
Something has to satisfy all three to be a mind virus. That excludes a lot of ideas often accused of being mind viruses, like religion (has positive benefits for the host) or memes (lacking deleterious effects), but not things like socially transmitted mental illnesses or cults.
If we use this definition then wokeness does qualify but "anti-wokeness" doesn't (whatever that means exactly), mostly because of point (3) but also point (2). For example, someone who gets really annoyed at wokeness will not usually cut off contact with a big chunk of their friends or family, a form of self-harm that woke people often engage in. Nor will they abuse their employers resources to spread their message, something so commonly done by woke people that it's hardly surprising anymore.
Thanks for your comment!
1.) Diffusion of ideas: I agree—ideas spread through various social mechanisms between individuals and social systems, shaping beliefs and behaviors.
2.) Memetics: I wouldn't characterize this as hijacking, I would call it replication through hosts.
3.) This is subjective. One might argue that being a Jewish or queer pro-Palestinian activist could seem idiotic or suicidal, but this belief and social signaling can be advantageous in an environment that rewards such position. Moreover, it's not inherently deleterious (suicidal), since these activists typically don't live in Palestine.
If "anti-wokeness" (whatever that means) simply refers to adopting an alternative perspective or expressing skepticism about woke ideology, then I don't think it should be "classified as a mind virus". However, when opposition extends to rejecting all aspects of mainstream culture as sick and the media as manipulative propaganda, when arguments are adopted simply because they are considered "non-conformist or edgy" without any willingness to critically evaluate and possibly revise those positions based on new evidence, and when this results in social marginalization, then yes, it can take on the characteristics of a mind virus.
For (2) I distinguish in my article between "hijacking" and non-behaviour-altering propagation. If someone believes something but they only attempt to spread their belief when it happens to naturally come up in conversation, then that's not a mind virus. If they find ways to artificially jack their beliefs into arbitrary situations or conversations, then they're taking explicit steps to replicate their ideas and that would meet the criteria.
For (3) I agree with you that it's subjective, probably the most subjective one of the three. In particular when we get into the question of indirect or future harms. I tried to keep it really narrow for now to avoid that problem. In particular I excluded other people punishing you under the harm criterion, so, being pro-queer even IN Palestine, would not count! Under the same rule, being socially marginalized for refusing {religion, wokeness, whatever} is also not considered self-harm.
However woke people do hold beliefs that are self-harming even in the absence of retaliation by other people. I give two examples:
1. Their beliefs seem to lead directly to mental illness (I argue for causality in the article).
2. Their beliefs often lead them to abuse and damage the institutions that pay them their salary, which they need to eat.
The latter is clearly more subjective than the former due to its indirectness, but I think it should count. By the way, I wouldn't characterize anti-wokeness as rejecting all aspects of mainstream culture as sick. Far from it. Anti-wokeness tends to celebrate mainstream culture. Look at how distressed they get over the wokeification of Star Wars. Hard to view rejection of regular old Star Wars as a generalized hatred of mainstream culture.
Interesting - thanks for sharing
I mostly agree, and having read your article now I see your point, but I have some issues with your understanding of being harmed by beliefs if being punished by other people and social marginalization don't count. If you exclude those, then what is your definition of harmful effects?
For 1: I don't think there's clear evidence that woke beliefs lead directly to mental illness. Correlation is not causation, and while it's possible that woke beliefs affect your mental health, I wouldn't bet my money on it until we have more data. See the endless discussion about the effects of social media/smartphone use on mental health.
For 2.: Is there any evidence that people are losing their salaries because they are damaging their own institutions with their woke beliefs? I guess you mean people at Disney and so on, but I think this is not a mainstream problem, but a pretty industry-specific one.
I wouldn't characterize anti-wokeness as usually rejecting all aspects of mainstream culture as sick too, I just wanted to make clear what I meant. However, I have come across some writers here on Substack who fit that characterization.
Harmful effects = self-harming behavior. Emphasis on "self". I think there are quite a few self-harming effects, I didn't mention them all. For instance there is a long series of stories where woke children cut off their parents due to them not 'converting'. That's pretty harmful behavior for both sides but I believe especially so for the children. And of course there's the entire trans issue which I stayed away from.
For 1, I'm aware of this criticism and argue explicitly for causality (not mere correlation) in my essay. To recap the argument: the hypothesis that wokeness causes mental illness is highly plausible, so plausible that it should be the default working assumption unless proven otherwise. Woke beliefs are really depressing! We would naturally expect someone to get really sad or even suicidal if they believe the world is ordered by a giant conspiracy of Hitler-esque woman-hating oppressors who are constantly victimizing you. Also, "wokeness" is a specific subset of left wing beliefs, but other beliefs that usually tag along as part of wider leftism are also very depressing, especially the belief that the climate is doomed and the Earth will be uninhabitable in future. A significant number of leftists tell pollsters they refuse to have children because they think the Earth has no future. From a purely evolutionary perspective that's extremely self harming behavior, of course, and depending on one's views on children you might view it as depriving yourself of a great experience too. And then in the evidence bucket we have a long collection of stories of people who adopted woke beliefs, became incredibly depressed and then committed suicide, e.g.
https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/03/31/man-ends-his-life-after-an-ai-chatbot-encouraged-him-to-sacrifice-himself-to-stop-climate-
So when you say correlation is not causation what you're doing is asserting that the correlation is spurious, but why would it be? The claim that believing sad things leads to mental health issues is ordinary and mundane, supported both by a wealth of scientific evidence, strong correlations and also common sense. If you wanted to argue these specific beliefs did NOT create unhappiness or mental health issues, that the correlation is merely a distracting curiosity, that would be the remarkable claim that would need to be evidenced.
For (2), Disney is a particularly famous and clear example right now but it's not isolated and these problems can be seen across industries. I myself became anti-woke after watching a startup I joined in the very early days blow itself up by going woke (which only happened once they felt secure, interestingly enough). The company had been a rapidly growing success story but entered near immediate decline both financial and otherwise due to replacing key staff with diversity hires, who quickly made some terrible decisions whilst the loss of the key people who'd built the teams originally caused a staffing exodus. It's not a well known company and I won't name it here, but this sort of thing is a widespread phenomenon.
Of course, the people involved don't blame wokeness. They think it's all just bad luck or would chalk it up to the market, COVID, etc. The easy money in the 2010s due to ZIRP meant they (we) were able to raise a large sum of money and it took years for them to burn through it all. So from the perspective of woke people, the institutions starting to fall apart around them is just generalized failure and dysfunction unrelated to their own bad decisions. Even when people at the top realize what's happening (and sadly in this case the CEO did realize), they feel powerless to do anything about it lest the wokies on the board nuke their career and make them unemployable in future. They'd prefer to drive the institutions into the ground one by one and get paid to do it, than have clean hands but be frozen out.
“media as manipulative propaganda”
Are you claiming that, at least when it comes to politics, most of what the mainstream media produces these days is *not* manipulative propaganda?
Other than “well, they’re playing to their base”, you don’t really have much to defend such a claim, do you?
And while I am indeed a (non-card-carrying) member of the anti-woke, my position on this has little to do with woke, and everything to do with the overt leftist bias present in the MSM.
I'm not saying that the mainstream media is never manipulative or propagandistic, just canonized, self-referential, and has a left-liberal bias,, but "very rarely lies" (see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies and https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sorry-i-still-think-i-am-right-about). Nor, in my opinion, is the right-wing mainstream and alternative media any more factual or unbiased.
See also:
Gentzkow, M., & Shapiro, Jesse M. (2006). Media Bias and Reputation. Journal of Political Economy, 114(2), 280-316. https://doi.org/10.1086/499414
Hassell, H. J. G., Holbein, J. B., & Miles, M. R. (2020). There is no liberal media bias in which news stories political journalists choose to cover. Sci Adv, 6(14), eaay9344. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aay9344
Huang, H., Zhu, H., Liu, W. et al. Uncovering the essence of diverse media biases from the semantic embedding space. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11, 656 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03143-w
Vallone, R. P., Ross, L., & Lepper, M. R. (1985). The hostile media phenomenon: biased perception and perceptions of media bias in coverage of the Beirut massacre. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49(3), 577-585. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.49.3.577
Sorry, the two links you send prior to 2020 are utterly irrelevant.
The 2020 link claiming “There is no liberal media bias in which news stories political journalists choose to cover.” The headline is so OBVIOUSLY false, based simply on the Hunter Biden laptop story and how the Russia collusion “story” was handled (and I’m not referring to the first few months) that I cannot possibly take it seriously.
I may check out the 4th link.
I am not making any claims about “right-wing” media being “better” [well, other than the WSJ, which while imperfect and partly biased against Trump, really does operate the way you are supposed to (IMO) and how the MSM at least tried to appear to prior to 2015 (they were all at least slightly biased to the left even then, but they weren’t so obvious about it, and I would even be willing to accept Richard’s premise that prior to 2015 the MSM was good and was at least net honest)].
That you would send me 3 of those links demonstrates to me that you really should read this City Journal piece. The world of your pre-2024 links is not at all today’s world.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/slouching-toward-post-journalism
Cheers.
Isn't Musk himself a counter example to your last paragraph?
Musk isn't an employee of X, he's the owner.
I guess, though functionally it's not dissimilar, and the cut off contact seems true.
More generally your three points could seem true of almost any kind of idea. Like heliocentrism (or scientism if you insist) in 16th century Italy could be seen to respect all three criteria.
I'm pretty sure this is all very subjective, having seen some people, including in my family, become pretty obsessed with anti-wokeism including trans issues that basically do not impact them at all materially in any way.
“… issues that basically do not impact them at all materially in any way.”
Why does the fact that the issue doesn’t impact them at all materially in any way matter?
My two female children ain’t athletes, and never were, but I still feel strongly that allowing biological males to compete in female sports is wrong. And I believe strongly that chemical and surgical procedures on children, before their age of consent, to change gender identity is wrong.
For that matter, while I happen to believe early term abortions should be legal, I feel very strongly that late-term abortion past viability of the fetus outside the womb is murder, and that states like NY that have such laws are doing something abominable. Even though said laws “basically do not impact [me] at all materially in any way”.
The “materially affect” standard seems pretty arbitrary to me.
It may be worth reading my article or the other comments I make on this thread with respect to the three rules.
Heliocentrism wouldn't satisfy all three; it would fail the third at minimum because what you believe about the arrangement of the solar system doesn't cause you any harm. What you're getting at (probably) is that the Catholic Church punished people for that belief, but my criteria excludes harm due to other people punishing you for holding a belief, exactly to circumvent the problem of every idea someone dislikes causing that criteria to be met. I give an example in another comment where being pro-queer in Palestine wouldn't count as a belief that "harms the host" even though it'd probably result in you being executed, because by analogy to real viruses, other people treating you badly/abandoning you because you're sick isn't a harm directly caused by the virus itself.
With respect to Musk specifically, the reason it's an important distinction is because the owner of the institution decides what its mission is. Woke people engage in self-harming behavior by abusing their employer - e.g. the mission is to sell groceries but they run marketing campaigns that directly attack large chunks of the potential customer base. Lots of examples of this sort of behavior abound, usually in marketing departments, but of course diversity hiring is another way they do this.
On the other hand, Musk - being the private owner of X - can choose the mission himself. If he decides the mission of X is anti-wokeness, then people can't really damage the institution by agreeing to work on that mission. The case of X is even more clear because X doesn't actually implement anti-wokeness, it implements (relatively) free speech, and being a platform that maximally encourages as much tweeting by as many people as possible is clearly in line with Twitter's original mission, so he hasn't even changed it!
Anti-wokeness can be abstract, but for a lot of people it actually is personal. Woke people have directly attacked me and my career several times in response to literally nothing at all e.g. setting up ordinary hiring processes that interview people on the basis of their job skills (=not advancing the cause of women and minorities=evil). With respect to trans stuff, I guess the fear is that whilst it doesn't impact them today, maybe tomorrow it suddenly will, especially if they have kids. The stories that make people crazy are when a spouse or child turns up at home one day and announces they're actually now the opposite gender, sometimes having gone through medical procedures without even telling their loved ones. Happy family on Sunday, sudden gender change on Monday, no warning. The fact that the transitioned person often cuts off contact obviously increases the paranoia dramatically.
So I wouldn't say this stuff doesn't affect people. It very much can, and does, and does so without warning.
Trans ideology is the most pervasive ideology of the last 10 years, it burst on the scene like rock music -where have you been living?
But as long as “imitation of high status individuals” is a human epistemic mechanism, you have self reinforcing dynamics, and “contagion” is a reasonable word.
It's basically "monkey see, monkey do", or peer pressure ("all the cool kids are doing it...we won't be your friend if you don't do it...it'll make you grown up...it'll make you feel good...what's the matter, chicken?"
This works better with low-self-esteem individuals...or individuals whose self-esteem has been busted down...like a cult does. Yeah, I said it.
I think another point against the phrase “woke mind virus” or its other pejoratives across the political spectrum, is that, ironically, it’s precisely the kind of language that won’t cure anyone of their “woke mind virus”, but instead makes it much more likely for them to retreat further into their system of belief.
Yes very good point
I don't think the goal of using the term is to spontaneously cure anyone, it's to help frame the situation in the hope of understanding it better for those not yet infected.
But if that is the sole goal, then frankly “mind virus” is a completely apt metaphor for the social contagion by which it has spread so widely.
So I seem to be among the few here who believes that the phrase is BOTH accurate AND unhelpful.
And that it’s net harmful without actually being “poisonous”.
Love your thinking 🙏
Still comes off a bit like:
“there’s no such thing as mind viruses; and here’s a deep dive into exactly what mind viruses are and how they work.”
But yes, “mind virus” is a defensive, unhelpful, dialogue- and inquiry-stopping term. But how fun it is to try to locate where “mind” is and to what extent an individual mind exists.
I riffed off the same idea.
great post, but a quick caveat: maybe don't say that the metaphor "poisons" public discourse? if falsehoods are not "mind viruses," metaphors describing them are not "poisons." Plato's pharmakon, and all that…
But there's a difference between using an apt metaphor like "poison," to convey the simple observation that irresponsible rhetoric taking advantage of a misleading image is destructive and undermines public discourse (much as poison is destructive to the body's functioning). The problem is not using metaphors. It's 1) using an inappropriate metaphor for what is actually going on; 2) wielding that inappropriate metaphor misleadingly and hyperbolically, to take advantage of its intuitive appeal; 3) using that metaphor exclusively for pejorative purposes, even when the thing it describes may not necessarily be negative for some contexts.
Yours is a distinction without a difference, as using the “poison” metaphor is designed to shut down the conversation, rather than to enlighten and defend one’s argument or reasoning.
I would postulate that *both* “mind virus” and “poisons public discourse” do NOT violate your 1), while definitively each violates your 2) and 3).
You can quibble with my assertion, but that’s what you’re doing, then - quibbling. There is surely no bright line that makes “mind virus” poisonous while “poisons” is virtuous, fair, honest and appropriate.
Ha yes - fair
All very good points. But alongside your reasons for why "mind virus" isn't an apt characterization, an equally interesting question is why people are so drawn to this virus metaphor in the first place. Putting aside any possible contribution of the pandemic in popularizing this image, I would highlight several imagined scenarios we find intuitively terrifying, which horror movies and dystopian fiction routinely play on. These include: 1) hijacking of self and independent thought by some alien force (zombie movies, Invasion of Body Snatchers brainwashing); 2) rapid "spreading" and overwhelming of defenses (it's not just one of us being taken over but the entire world, and it moves fast); 3) erasure of distinct individuals as they are absorbed into some faceless mass "hive mind"; 4) something that appears innocuous or appealing on the surface has a hidden sinister, Trojan-horse agenda. I think some or all of these subliminal fantasies are probably at work when you hear the mind virus talk.
In general, I think we're very susceptible to latching onto evocative metaphors that don't actually describe the phenomenon we like to imagine they describe. If "mind virus" *feels* apt for what someone has observed, this will matter much more to them than its technical accuracy.
A perfect response - demonstrates exactly the sort of analysis the virus metaphor seeks to preclude, applied to its adoption
I don't think that talk of mind-viruses implies that the truth is self-evident. Seems like when someone says something is a mind virus they mean something like:
1) it's an idea that spreads rapidly
2) it's bad
3) it induces irrationality generally when held.
On such a picture, one wouldn't say that all their beliefs are mind-viruses because a mind-virus needs to meet all three criteria.
(F is a mind virus if and only if at some time t...)
Fair. I think many mean much more than that but I agree bad ideas sometimes spread rapidly, and it's unobjectionable (although still, I think, counterproductive) when people use the "mind virus" framing to refer to that.
Yep. I lay out a more precise definition similar to yours here, with three criteria that must all be met simultaneously, and then give some examples of what does and doesn't meet it historically:
https://penbroke.substack.com/p/mind-virology
Whether something is true doesn't feature at all. In fact the word "true" only appears once, and only at the start to repudiate that as a useful way to understand mind viruses.
Yeah, didn't really catch me on that, you seemed to describe an awful lot of mind virus as far as I could tell. It's not exactly analogous to catching a germ it's a different sense people use when they say mind virus, it comes with the human dynamic/cult/ideological context, that's actually what it's describing. It doesn't preclude the origin being propaganda or status games being played. Of course these happen as part of the dynamic system that is human culture.
I think Girard's idea of mimesis is the critical contagion mechanism and because its pre/subconscious it is a kind of capture, like succumbing to a disease. There's a lot of evidence for social contagion a la madness of the crowds, manias, Ashe conformity etc (not wholly undermined by recent reinterpretations in my view). The idea of npc, zombies, invasion of the body snatchers is addressing the same phenomena.
It's really defined by the inability to reason. Some people are literally captured by their ideology in such a way they can't even see the alternative, it won't cohere in their mind to consider it rationally- you can actually know it in the flesh. We're not all floating in some relative swamp of bias and deception. We all suffer from these things by degrees but some of us, on some issues can point to real world phenomenon and say that is a woke-mind virus. Have you seriously never though this?
Fortunately the group of people who share my views are largely rational independent thinkers, unlike the sheep on the other side of the political fence!
Hard to parse. I'm not sure if you're sarcastically doing the both-sideism fallacy or not. The point is there's a zeitgeist that rises up as the new utopia, the reactionary is genuinely distinctive from this even if subgroups mirror a lot of the dynamics. Currently the hegemony is on the left, previously in other communities and places it might be on the right.
And your not so sceptical to suggest both sides are equally wrong on everything always surely, some times you can be rationally right about reality.
I largely agree with what you said, just making a joke that that criticism is rarely directed towards one’s own group or adjacent groups in a way that is socially/personally costly, as Dan mentions. As for whether it’s the both-sideism fallacy, your point (correct me if I’ve misinterpreted here) is that the “woke mind virus” of the left has had disproportionately damaged peoples critical thinking, compared to say (one of) the equivalents on (part of the right), like Trump’s cult of personality, unless it was just meant as an example and not meant to imply something unique about the left’s irrationality
Fair play. I'm more than happy to call out Trumpism as a mind virus dynamic. Personally I am that rare enlightened centrist and don't buy into sets of ideas wholesale. My biases and blind spots are more eclectic.
Hahaha, that was the perfect antidote joke to mine, fair play yourself. I personally lean left overall on the balance of things, so I know what you mean about not reducing both sides (if sides is even accurate, feels like more of a messy patchwork at times) to the same thing.
A point I made in a separate comment is that even in cases where “mind virus” aptly characterises a (set of) belief(s), that sort of language, ironically, seems to do little to cure said “mind virus”, and I’d argue worsens the situation
Another perceptive read. Thank you. Badly chosen (and/or weaponised) metaphor and simile can quickly lead from poisoning debate, and making it impossible, to making debate undesirable - because our antagonists are held to have shown themselves to be less than human. It is not a big step to go from saying 'Chris has a virus' to saying 'Chris IS a virus'. (And so with Russian 'capitalist swine and running dogs', Tutsi 'cockroaches', 'ethnic cleansing' passim, and Jewish, Roma and homosexual 'untermenschen'. That might sound alarmist, but in my experience of covering wars, the metaphors can be as lethal in their consequences as the hardware and ordnance.
Thanks Christopher. And yes - that seems right to me. The language and concepts we use matter
Well put Chris. I’m afraid the change of the language used in political dialogue seems to suggest we’re a lot more like the 1930s than is comfortable. Like you say, when someone has a “mind virus”, they are no longer a person with their own desires and agency, just a sack of flesh that has become the host for something we must eliminate.
I agree that formation of beliefs is often far more complex than a simple contagion process. But there are lots of situations where understanding the diffusion of a specific piece of information/content can be useful to inform potential interventions. To give one example, the 2019 extremist attacker in Christchurch wanted to draw attention to his manifesto, with many media outlets inadvertently helping with this aim. So the spread of this content - and the ignoring of media best practice for such information - could be analysed by reconstructing these amplification events (https://www.cjr.org/analysis/christchurch-shooting-media-coverage.php). Such analysis doesn’t tell us why a journalist would amplify the content, or why a user might subsequently share it or whether they might adopt similar beliefs. But thinking about the diffusion process - alongside other more detailed reconstruction studies - can help identify how amplification of the underlying harmful information is happening, and hence how its reach could be reduced. Similarly, reporting guidelines around suicide were informed by studies of contagion effects following high profile coverage (although studies are necessarily observational, these events exhibit causal features like consistency, temporality, strength of association, and coherence).
I’d also add that when it comes to actual infectious diseases, it can also sometimes be suboptimal to focus too much on just the pathogen, rather than wider context and environment. For example, good hygiene in healthcare that prevents outbreaks in the first place is preferable to poor hygiene followed by reactive attempts to chase down infections.
Very good points.
Right on -- I've always thought that "mind virus" is a totally perverse metaphor. You give a lot of good, nuanced reasons why it distorts efforts to persuade. But, to me, the main danger is that it tells us that our enemies have no agency in forming their beliefs. Thus, we have no reason to respect their agency or independence when we try to "cure" them.
Yes exactly 💯
I agree with your point, but I believe a reason why the term mind virus is pretty apt is because many of those who have it really fail to recognize and exercise their own agency. It’s oftentimes why they find themselves following these ideas to begin with.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-149049668?source=queue
I’d be curious your response to Kling’s post, as well as to the book, once you’ve read it.
Looking forward to the book - I might review it if I can find the time. I actually responded in the comments section on Arnold’s post.
Hi Dan. Good article, as always.
I agree, of course, that the 'virus' metaphor is misleading in the ways you say; and also that claims made on its behalf betray mistaken assumptions about how ideas spread, and sometimes a patronising attitude to the supposed gullibility of others. The points are true and important.
However, there is also an upside to the language of medical science. Here is what I wrote in Part III of my essay, On Nature, Science & Culture:
"Here is how the comparison between culture and viruses is insightful and true. In both cases the phenomenon exists at two distinct and complementary levels: the individual and the population; the micro and the macro. In the medical domain, we study how the body works and hence how and why individuals get sick: this is called pathology. We study also whole populations, looking at how they are structured and how disease spreads among them: this is called epidemiology. Then putting these two sources of knowledge together, epidemics are explained, scientifically, as the cumulative effect of countlessly many individual moments of transmission and propagation. Cultural things can and should be explained in the same way, as the macro product of countlessly many micro-moments of behaviour and interpretation. To put the point concisely: psychology should be to anthropology as pathology is to epidemiology."
In other words: medical science is our most advanced science in terms of connecting the micro and the macro in human life, and its terminology and conceptual frames may, accordingly, have some positive use.
This doesn't negate what you say here, not at all. But it does seem worth saying alongside it.
nb Link to the essay is here: https://thomscottphillips.substack.com/p/on-nature-science-and-culture-part-06e
Thanks Thom - yes, excellent point
This is so so so good, Dan!!
I have been reading the comments, and I wanted to briefly address some of the pushback. To me, the most common source of resistance appears to be not allowing or not following the distinction of rationality per se and the one reference to social rationality as being distinct. This introduces two kinds of sufficiency, and the common claim that the "mind virus" metaphor is sufficient is conflating the two, for example by reading resistance to that specific metaphor as also resisting the idea of "social contagion" more generally. The latter, while still containing some rhetorically negative effects ("contagion") is nevertheless treated as a source for both good and bad sentiments and ideas. That, to me, is the part of the metaphor worth keeping.
In distinguishing rationality (the more globally informed, science-minded kind) and social rationality (the more local navigation of situational and social pressures), you also made the distinction that social contagion does not happen "via mere contact or exposure," but you did so in the negative by saying that "mind viruses" do not spread that way. I think some people interpreted this as throwing out the full contagion model. Though I am not sure of how technical the audience, one way to clarify the distinction is that exposure and overcoming/overriding/circumventing "epistemic vigilance" (if I remember your term correctly) are INUS conditions, which is to say they are individually insufficient but jointly sufficient. That the latter is not independently sufficient requires a bit of reframing, but in brief, it approximates to the difference between a lack of resistance (neutral awareness for example) and "adoption," which would be a source of resistance to change.
Another subset of pushback in the responses perhaps DID include epistemic vigilance in their modelling, but that only served as evidence that those spreading the "mind virus" are guilty of doing so willfully and/or maliciously by manipulation or brute social force.
I want to offer a couple demonstrative counterexamples to address the pushback as directly and concretely as I am able. First is an example to establish that epistemic vigilance is a real and active thing.
1. We discount information by how much we distrust the source. I point this out, not because it is insightful, but to trigger the reaction that it is obvious, trite or quaint. Such reactions, along with labelling something as cliche shows that we intuitively discount would-be-insights by how "common-sense" they have become. No case could be made that objective truth value diminishes with its distribution across the population unless it is a statistical fact about that population or some other distribution-sensitive phenomena. Instead, we seem to presume that information and even insights are akin to a resource with limited reach and application, OR we must presume that people as CARRIERS of information and insights have an active role in shaping, resisting and proliferating information such that the fidelity naturally declines with time and exposure. This discounting reaction is at least a case of epistemic vigilance, but it also seems to acknowledge that epistemic vigilance itself plays a role in shaping information.
2. One of the lowest hanging fruits of wokeism can be steel-manned in a way that is easily understood: Sensitivity to "Micro-aggressions." The most salient feature is that the reaction is disproportional to the offense... micro- met with... not micro. This seems sufficient to deem it irrational, and laughably so.
But if we zoom out to the level of "what is objectively true," we can recognize that there walk among us those that are just a handful of unkindnesses from literally ending their own life. If, instead of a SJW who has never met such a person, we instead think from the perspective of someone who works in a mental health clinic or for a suicide hotline, the "overreaction" is suddenly easily seen as proportional. The local reality they are confronted with is high stakes of unkindness. Returning to the SJW, again it stands out that they are annoyingly disconnected from that reality, but if we don't presume their whole set of motives, that there exist such vulnerable people still creates a potentially special condition for virtue signaling. If they can let them know that they are not alone, then it might literally save a life by creating the conditions where they would call such a help line.
But we must also steel-man their detractors. Empty virtue-signaling, especially when prolific, can CAUSE feelings of disconnection and loneliness. There exists no socially rational world with zero people sensitized to or zero people engaging in "micro-aggressions" except some "utopian delusion" that everyone accuses their detractors of naively reaching for.
I involuntarily roll my eyes at the label, but I am not going to presume that any given overreaction to "microaggressions" is pure reactionary garbage.
Awesome comment as always, William - I agree with pretty much all of it.
'The latter, while still containing some rhetorically negative effects ("contagion") is nevertheless treated as a source for both good and bad sentiments and ideas. That, to me, is the part of the metaphor worth keeping.' - yes, good insight.
By the time I was wrapping up that comment, my brain had turned to mush.
I forgot to include a point that coincides with your post about strange beliefs. The virtue signaling of an online SJW may rely on the disproportion of response to "microagressions" writ large to indicate both the level of support on offer for the vulnerable and the fit with other signalers.
This may reflect the conditions which we describe as "polarization." The reactive dissonance to insensitivity (here towards presumably vulnerable) is leveraged as blame. Those being blamed inherit some of this dissonance and redistribute it with options among sensitization (the implicit request), desensitization to the source of the blame, analyzing the contents of the accusation (how insensitive/inspecific it is to the blamed), and distributing/returning the blame accordingly. After suffient cycling, desensitization reaches a kind of equilibrium where blame is more ritual than meaningful.
I imagine this applies widely, well beyond online activity. Codependent relationships can work like this, as well as complaining of shitty bosses in corporate pecking orders. If you have an impatient boss at work and at home, it's no wonder the road is full of impatient premadonnas. The life and limb threat of real harm (giant, metal boxes rolling at lethal speeds) is way out of proportion with our sense of risk in escalation. And yet we implicitly judge roaf offenders less, essentially by social contagion. Everyone has more permission to be an asshole (despite operating deadly machinery) because, hey, we gotta take it out on someone!!
I was also going to comment on some of Dawkins' mistakes, but I have a soft spot for him. Also, that comment, and this one, need not get any longer!
I agree. While there are some similarities between religions/ideologies to viruses, I think it is lazy-thinking to use the term: “mind virus” as anything more than slang.
Woke ideology appeals to people for many of the same reasons as other ideologies do. How useful it is for society is another issue:
For those who are interested, I have my own theory on how ideologies are formed and spread:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/where-does-ideology-come-from
Interesting - thanks for sharing Michael.
Even if "virus" was a great metaphor, it's not like we have rock-solid techniques for dealing with physical viruses. Public health and managing viruses are deeply contentious issues.
Very true