Why Mind Viruses Are Real
Comparing other people’s beliefs to pathogens can be a cheap way of discrediting them, but the idea of “mind viruses” still has real merit.
Mind viruses seem to be all the rage these days. In his 2020 bestseller Parasitic Mind, evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad identifies “the tyranny of political correctness” and other “infectious ideas” that are harming our societies. A year later, from a different ideological angle, the philosopher Andy Norman published Mental Immunity, a guide to boosting your mental immune system against infectious “mind parasites.” And in his popular science book Foolproof (2022), psychologist Sander Van der Linden advocates “mental inoculation” against misinformation, fake news, and conspiracy theories. In various ways, each of these books suggests that beliefs act like infectious parasites spreading from one brain to the next.
Perhaps because of the devastation wrought by the coronavirus, we have all become more attuned to the possibility of tiny pathogens invading our bodies and propagating at our expense. In fact, while we were still in the throes of the pandemic, the WHO itself coined the portmanteau term “infodemic” to refer to outbreaks of disinformation and conspiracy theories about the coronavirus. But the idea itself is much older than that. More than thirty years ago, the biologist Richard Dawkins wrote about “viruses of the mind” (focusing mostly on religion), in line with his earlier idea of selfish “memes,” a phrase coined in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. And as far back as the late 19th century, sociologists like Gabriel Tarde and Gustave Le Bon argued that cultural ideas and behaviours spread through society much like infectious diseases, through imitation and repetition.
Still, many academics remain dubious. The whole register of disease metaphors (virus, infection, parasite, contagion), they argue, is tendentious and misleading. At best, it just redescribes something we have known all along: namely, that cultural ideas are transmitted from one person to the next. More worryingly, the metaphor suggests that humans are just hapless, gullible victims of whatever infectious ideas they come across. This is not just wrong, they argue, but can also lead to social panics. At worst, by pathologising beliefs, we can end up demonising those who hold them.
