Every person, often without realizing it, carries hundreds, if not thousands, of viruses, but not biological ones—rather, a different kind. Those that are akin to computer viruses. Importantly, both computer and biological viruses meet the minimum requirements for living organisms: they are mortal, they reproduce, and they evolve.
Yes, a virus cannot live independently from its host. Yes, a virus requires a foreign replication machinery to reproduce, which it forces to work for itself. A cell infected by a virus starts producing not the proteins it is supposed to manufacture according to the program encoded in its DNA, but viruses instead. This is why malicious computer programs are called viruses and not bacteria. A computer virus cannot reproduce without a computer, but it can make the computer produce its own copies.
Now let’s imagine a certain idea. It could be a thought, an image, a document, a joke, or even an entire religious doctrine. If this idea somehow encourages its bearer to share it with those around them, and if there happens to be a sufficient number of receptive individuals among the audience, we end up with yet another variant of a virus. A purely informational virus. Or, as scientists say, a meme — a unit of cultural information. A meme can be any idea, symbol, mannerism, or way of acting that is consciously or unconsciously transmitted from person to person through speech, writing, video, rituals, gestures, and so on. The concept of the meme and the term itself were introduced by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 in his book “The Selfish Gene.” Dawkins proposed the idea that all cultural information consists of basic units — memes, just as biological information consists of genes; and just like genes, memes are subject to natural selection, mutation, and artificial selection.
The human brain is a fertile ground for the proliferation of cultural viruses. This is facilitated by five very interesting phenomena: rationalization, sticking, public opinion, self-persuasion, and mutual infection.
Table of Contents
Rationalization
People initially act instinctively, and only later do they consciously “rationalize” their actions. For example, aggression is a perfectly positive instinct that allows a species to spread over a larger territory so that individuals do not interfere with each other’s ability to live and reproduce. In urban environments, aggression is suppressed, but the instinct needs an outlet. This is where stadiums, video games, and action movies come into play. When there is a reason for “righteous anger,” a person eagerly releases their instinctive impulse, after which they find a thousand justifications for their actions. The rationalizing revolutionary doesn’t even try to stop and realize that throwing Molotov cocktails at the police doesn’t help solve their personal problems, which are primarily related to the corruption of power itself, rather than the presence of certain individuals in that power. The rationalizing revolutionary will overlook the glaring fact that the “opposition” doesn’t actually want a revolution or a change in the system. They want the same feeding trough and the same established system, but with themselves perched on the top rung of the pecking order instead of Yanukovych and Azarov.
The same kind of rationalization leads people to revel in quite instinctive things, such as the emergence of hierarchy and self-organization on Maidan. Meanwhile, the rationalizing revolutionary, intoxicated by the exhilarating drug of mass action euphoria, will overlook stories like the “abduction of Bulatov” or the “political retribution against Chornovil.” The press will assist in this by presenting information tailored for these brainwashed minds, feeding them what they are more receptive to. Of course, Bulatov was tortured. Of course, the SBU, FSB, and other shady figures were after Chornovil. The rationalizing revolutionary will passionately wish to continue spreading viral memes about “snipers on the rooftops shooting with hunting rifle ammunition,” about “tomorrow there will be an assault on Maidan,” and about “15 years for transporting tires.”
Sticking
Cognitive traits inherent to humans distortion …forcing them to consider sunk costs incurred in the past as a reason for making decisions in the future. Difficult? Okay, let me put it more simply: Often, girls are willing to say “yes” to a proposal from a guy just because “I’ve been dating him for so long.” They feel sorry for the time spent and want to make it “worth it,” even though they are making a completely illogical choice. Similarly, the Panama Canal was continued even after the proposal for the Nicaraguan Canal, which could have been completed more quickly, would have been significantly cheaper than the remaining part of the Panama Canal, required fewer resources and engineering structures, and would have been wider and more convenient for navigation. How could this be? So much has already been dug. Should we just throw it away and forget about it? Logically, yes — forget it and build the canal in Nicaragua.
Now let’s look at the revolutionary on the Maidan or the “militant of the DPR.” Did everyone understand? Was he standing in the cold for nothing? Was he risking his health and facing conflicts with law enforcement for no reason? Was he fighting all this time for nothing? No, we must continue to fight. Fight until the victorious end! After all, we didn’t waste so much effort and time for nothing, did we? But the truth is that it doesn’t matter whether the strength and resources were wasted or not. We cannot take into account what cannot be returned anyway.
Public opinion
The overwhelming majority, 95-98%, of the population are conformists. These are people who look to those around them to form their own, or rather, what they believe to be their own opinion. In the 1970s, when these phenomena were discovered, many psychological experiments were conducted in which individuals, under societal pressure, began to believe in obvious falsehoods and would argue the same points as others.
Once upon a time, to the students showed Pairs of faces were shown in photographs, and they asked whether the same person was depicted in the images. In the audience, they took turns asking “fake” students, who stood up and argued that the two people in the photos were actually the same person, just in different makeup. The last one questioned was a “test” student who… yes, also started coming up with his own arguments to support the idea that two completely different people in the photos were actually the same face. Additionally, the researchers “played tricks” on children in kindergarten by asking all the kids if the porridge was sweet, and all the kids answered yes, it was sweet. Then they asked the last child, who was given salty porridge, and he replied that… the porridge was sweet.
Religious preachers take advantage of this aspect of human behavior. Typically, 10% of the people in the congregation are part of the “theater” troupe that travels with the preacher. They are the first to shout “Hallelujah,” the first to make donations, and the first to sing religious hymns. The rest simply behave like fish in a school—following the leaders.
A person who finds themselves in an environment where everyone is saying the same thing will, in 99% of cases, become infected with those ideas and start to spread them further. Revolutionary memes find fertile ground, just as the “soil” in the minds of members of totalitarian sects is equally fertile.
Self-persuasion
The Chinese made very effective use of this property of the human brain when they re-educated American prisoners of war captured during the Korean War. First, they would ask the prisoner if he considered the system in the U.S. to be ideal. The person would respond that it wasn’t quite so. Then they would ask him to write a short essay on the topic: what he would like to improve in the U.S. and what good aspects he sees in communism that could be implemented in America. Well, why not? He wrote it. Then this essay would be read over the loudspeaker to the entire camp. “Here is John Smith’s opinion on unemployment in the U.S. and how that issue is addressed in China.” John’s fellow soldiers would then start attacking him, accusing him of being a traitor. And John… John would start to defend himself, thus believing even more in what he had written. So, after a couple of sessions, John becomes a communist. This issue later confronted American psychologists and sociologists when they began observing soldiers returning from enemy captivity who had turned into ardent supporters of China and communism and opponents of the “decaying West.” The more you ask a person why they stand on the barricades, the more they will engage in self-persuasion and defend the validity of their point of view. A conversation with such a person will boil down to them acknowledging that: yes, Maidan/DNR is a dead end and a channel for protest, yes, it’s not about changing the thief but restructuring the system, yes, the West/Russia won’t help, yes, if Maidan/DNR wins, the Shvonders will come to power, yes, I am being manipulated, yes, yes… But Maidan/DNR is better than nothing. Hand me a new tire!
Mutual infection
In the summer of 2005, a group of researchers selected 63 residents of Colorado to discuss three controversial issues: same-sex marriage, policies aimed at addressing the effects of discrimination, and global warming. About half of the participants were conservatives from Colorado Springs, while the other half were liberals living in Boulder. After the participants filled out questionnaires about their personal views on the three topics, they were divided into ten groups: five conservative and five liberal. Each group then discussed the issues for a period of time with the goal of reaching a consensus on each one. After the discussions, the participants filled out the questionnaires again.
The results of the study were striking. In every case, discussions among like-minded individuals led to what the researchers termed “ideological amplification.” People’s views became more intense and entrenched:
“First, the groups from Boulder adopted even more liberal views on all three issues, while the groups from Colorado Springs became even more conservative. As a result, the discussions contributed to an increase in extremism. Second, there was a noticeable increase in consensus within each group and a decrease in the diversity of participants’ views… Third, the discussions sharply intensified the differences in opinions between the liberal residents of Boulder and the conservative residents of Colorado Springs. Before the discussions, there were significant overlaps in the views of people from the two different cities. After the discussions, the number of these overlaps significantly decreased.”
The study revealed a characteristic of human nature and group dynamics that psychologists have long noted: the more people exchange information with others who share similar worldviews, the more extreme their own views become. One of the organizers of the Colorado experiment, University of Chicago professor Cass Sunstein, explains in his book “Infotopia”: “When like-minded individuals come together, it often leads to an intensification of their biases and the spread of false beliefs.” They “ultimately adopt a more extreme position than they held before the discussion began.” This phenomenon, reported by Sunstein and documented “in hundreds of studies conducted in more than ten countries,” can, in the worst case, “lay the groundwork for extremism and even fanaticism and terrorism.”