How do you measure the potency of a seemingly harmless thought? Just think of it as the kind of virulent string of information that could cripple a cybernetic infrastructure the size of a country. A simple infection of a node in the system, if not taken care of, could logarithmically multiply within moments to wreck havoc on the entire system, eventually bringing the backbone to its knees.
This kind of behavior can be seen in the danger presented by viruses, electronic or biological. Intelligent organisms that infiltrate the management of a system and feeding it redundant information until it succumbs to their will. This notion can be applied and experimented in biology and electronics, but how about our thoughts? The idea was first mentioned by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 when he related cultural and social trends to a term he called the "meme", a theoretical block of cultural information which spreads through diffusion propagating from one mind to another. Richard Dawkins saw this as more of an evolutionary organism that multiplies given the right circumstances, to create a new cultural/social trend.
But this theory is too broad for the discussion and its horizons are too general for the topic of "mind viruses". A meme could be anything from a tune, a catch phrase, a clothing fashion and etc, but a virus is an intelligent organism that multiplies within its host to gain control of the central nervous system. The discussion here is much more personal and in-your-face than the memeplex analogy of an evolutionary mechanism.
The mind virus is a virulent string of redundant information that integrates itself within the central command, feeding it false information until it acquires complete control over the faculties of the person, guiding it in every which way it wants. Picture yourself driving down a relatively empty country road during the day, you're running a small errand to the post office in town. As your autonomic drive is guiding the car through the curves and obstacles of the road, your mind is seemingly idle, or is it? The human mind is the most active part of the human body, the brain is an organ that never sleeps, it is constantly evaluating, measuring, imagining, interpreting and relaying information to the nervous system and other organs of the body. Your brain functions to psycho-analyze daily events even while you are asleep. Could such an intelligent system be susceptible to an infiltration by a backdoor Trojan or a malicious virus? Definitely.
As you are driving down that road, a million different thoughts are traversing through your mind begging for attention. How much of probability would you give that any one of those thoughts could be a mind virus, a seemingly harmless file waiting to be opened? In the average person, I could easily estimate a good 95% of those thoughts are mind viruses, but each has its own threat level. One is a harmless breeze of a memory of yesterday's encounter with your father, and another is a Trojan horse packed in a foolproof disguise of the memory of a quarrel with your fiancé which can have detrimental effects if opened and analyzed. This information comes in the form of an emotional attachment which demands your undivided attention and once it is acquired, it begins to unpack a string of poisonous and redundant data that could prove very damaging. The memory of the quarrel ignites a series of emotional flashes of anger, resentment and detest, taking you away on an emotional rollercoaster ride through irrational rationalities of how she was probably lying to trick you, or that she was cheating on you and other redundant series of information that could prove detrimental to your health and the health of those around you. Once it has successfully gained access to your central command, this virus then begins to proliferate madly, eventually gaining full access to the central core of the processing unit, replacing itself as your own perceptions. Once it has done this, you begin to think, walk and talk the virus, thinking it is you. It alters your perceptions of reality and shapes your worldview according to its own programmed software and before you know it, you have become the virus!
Sometimes one single powerful virus gains control of the central processing unit, shaping the behavior of its host, feeding it redundant information and molding its elementary components in its own image. And sometimes, just like a computer with no antivirus, the person is infected with a plethora of viruses that have each gained access to a part of the system's components, each one giving its own orders. This is a highly contaminated system that is inefficient in every way and could lead to some very tragic results. Highly contaminated people are so distorted that they usually don't know which way is what? This distortion leads to the mind-disease called depression and eventually followed by a host of other mental, physical and psychological disorders.
A mind virus can only be successful if it is not recognized by the antivirus software of the mind, the rationality filter. But this filter isn't always online; the best time a mind virus can infiltrate the system is when there is a system override and the filter is temporarily shut down during emotional outbursts of anger, fear, trauma, sadness, depression and etc. It has been largely recognized that these emotional bursts are unhealthy to the system, no matter how big or small, and once the damage is done and the virus has infiltrated the system, it could be impossible to wipe it out or identify the data as an alien string. The virus then immediately goes to work during the emotional phase, to latch itself on the system as a legitimate system file.
You arrive home and your fiancé has noticed that you forgot to buy milk on the way. Keep in mind that the virus has already made a run through your mind with irrational accusations and claims so it creates a background for a potential threat of another emotional outburst. A normal conversation suddenly turns sour and there is a system override on the rational filter as the emotional outburst of anger kicks in to "control" the situation. But what it has actually done is that it has opened a critical port for the virus to come in stronger than before and fortify its legitimacy. So what happens now is that when the fight is over, instead of forgetting about it, you become more trusting of this string of data and allow it to flourish in your system. As it gains more ground, it triggers more system overrides of anger, resentment, fear, sadness, depression and etc, allowing itself to gain access to vital resources within the system.
A successful mind virus establishes itself as rationality. It carefully analyzes the weak points of the system and tweaks itself to fit into the mental structure of the host. It could be anything from a philosopher, to a scientist, a dreamer, an economist, a socialist, communist, capitalist, fundamentalist etc. Once it has convinced its host of its legitimacy, it then sets off to build its own rational framework, carefully tailoring it to the measurements of its host, but making sure it ultimately gets its own way in the end. This doesn't mean that emotional people are more contaminated than rational people, we all have our moments of soap drama; emotional people could be less infected than the gaudy rational who could be a walking virus within his own rational guidelines dictated by the virus.
In the end, no one is 100 percent clean of mind viruses, but the variation in contamination levels, and susceptibility to fall prey to redundant information is what determines our aptitude to be good or bad hosts for these intelligent cyber-organisms. This was a very short introduction on the concept of "mind viruses" and their mechanism of infiltration, but it will suffice for now.
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