It has been said before that ideas are similar to viruses, traveling from host to host and replicating. How many times have you had a song stuck in your head, and not been able to get it out until you passed it on to someone else? Or, perhaps, you contracted a bad mood that infected those around you. Of course, the clich that the best way to cure a bad mood is to spread it is a clich for a reason. Evangelical, hysterical, or revivalist religion, another example of various types of intellectual virii, behaves in a very similar fashion to religion. To paraphrase Stephenson in Snow Crash, Christianity swept through the American aborigines faster than smallpox. Information even mutates like a virus. Take gossip, or even the simplest game of telephone, and one can see the amazing mutation rate that information can achieve, always adapting, evolving, until it achieves some sort of pattern that is easily remembered and easily transmissible. Look at email forwards, look at franchises, and look at fashion, for heavens sake. Were living in a viral culture perpetuated by the transmission of viral ideas.
Now, naturally, the gut reaction to this idea, if one accepts it, is to be pissed, scared, amused, or otherwise discomfited. The picture, however, is not entirely without hope. If one assumes that information can behave like a virus, then it becomes possible to imagine pieces of information that can combat these viruses, be they similar to vaccines, anti-viral medications, receptor blockers, or similar. Religion of other types than the hysterical variety, for example, with the emphasis on ritual, repetition, and hard and fast laws, tend to make people a little less susceptible to informational infection. Education in philosophy, psychology, or logic helps as well, apparently. Books, which are set in print (might as well be stone), can act as carriers of either virus source or anti-virals. The only problem, however, is that the anti-virals need to be used before infection, because only rarely will the anti-viral treatment work after.
And, of course, we cant forget about the helpful, symbiotic type viruses, which some posit are the basis for the root, deep structures of thought in our brain.
Now, naturally, the gut reaction to this idea, if one accepts it, is to be pissed, scared, amused, or otherwise discomfited. The picture, however, is not entirely without hope. If one assumes that information can behave like a virus, then it becomes possible to imagine pieces of information that can combat these viruses, be they similar to vaccines, anti-viral medications, receptor blockers, or similar. Religion of other types than the hysterical variety, for example, with the emphasis on ritual, repetition, and hard and fast laws, tend to make people a little less susceptible to informational infection. Education in philosophy, psychology, or logic helps as well, apparently. Books, which are set in print (might as well be stone), can act as carriers of either virus source or anti-virals. The only problem, however, is that the anti-virals need to be used before infection, because only rarely will the anti-viral treatment work after.
And, of course, we cant forget about the helpful, symbiotic type viruses, which some posit are the basis for the root, deep structures of thought in our brain.
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Warning! You have just been infected with a bit of viral Buddhism.