What Is a Thought Virus?
The idea of a thought virus has been rolling around in my head for far too long. Years ago, the young, naive me thought it was a very important topic being completely ignored by popular consciousness but I was wrong, of course, As it turns out I have just not been introduced to this magical, mystical place called: the internet. I recently watched Elon musk’s second appearance on the Joe rogan podcast where he talked about something similar to idea virus, this renewed my interest in the topic and so I decided to write about it. There is a book about this subject which I don’t know how I missed before today ( I Google everything) anyway I chose to avoid reading it before recording my own thoughts on the matter.
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What Is a Thought Virus?
A thought virus is an idea or a thought that latches on to your mind and grows exponentially, consuming your thought process and devouring your ideological beliefs and ultimately changing your world view. This can be beneficial for some, becoming a primary source for a drive or passion, improving their standard of living, or end up taking them down a path of madness.
One of the most prominent ways in which a thought virus might affect you is by strengthening a specific bias and then the long grasping arms of this bias will reach out and grow doubts and fears into almost every thought you have and every decision you make. Did you visualize a positive outcome for something and get disappointed? maybe the disappointment was a result of that positive visualization then. The core message of this thought virus is: never to be confident about your chances. Some thought viruses start positively and end up becoming a corrupted twisted version of themselves. Sometimes, standing up for the powerless can turn into an idea that all the powerful are bad even if they happen to be formerly powerless people who gained power by the original form of the thought: to stand up for the powerless.
How Powerful Can They Be?
A powerful enough thought virus can infect millions of people. One such virus is the sense of racial superiority as seen in nazi Germany, that one single thought virus corrupted every aspect of their lives from politics to science. It is obsolete to study whether all the german people who believed in nazism were inherently good or bad because the problem was less about their conscience and more about them surrendering their conscience to an ideological virus. Once you allow the thought virus to take hold of you, you do not get to decide what you feel, everything is subservient to the thought virus. That is why it was so easy for the soldiers to say “But I was just following orders” because those orders were subservient to the thought virus and so were they, they let the virus choose their actions, they completely surrendered to the idea and that is where the corruption began. This, however, does not absolve them of responsibility since the choice to surrender to the idea was theirs, to begin with.
Our Symbiotic Relationship With Ideas
A person not lucky enough to be consumed by an idea will not have a strong enough purpose to live and thus will always suffer in passivity. Everyone has an innate thirst to be ruled over by an idea, a powerful thought. In that never-ending search, we sometimes fall prey to toxic thought viruses. Not all thoughts mutate to be viruses, some become ideas that ignite our passion. Thoughts and ideas are organisms which latch onto people and multiply, we have always enjoyed a productive, symbiotic relationship with them, it has served us well for millions of years but in an era of hyper-connectivity and high idea-combustibility, it becomes prudent to be mindful of the thoughts we allow to latch onto us.
