In 2016, Hipatia Press published an article stating that feminism was most effectively viewed as a mind virus. I didn’t read that paper at the time, but I’d known this since the late 80’s, because I’d been observing its spread since the early 1970’s.
When the Minneapolis Terrorist Network formerly Known As Anti Racist Action formed in 1988, they had it.
When a Macalester College student told me about Male Privilege, the Patriarchy, and Gender as a Social Construct in the 90’s, I intuitively knew this would spread.
These beliefs give an immediate sense of moral superiority and absolution for being an asshole. Believers received membership in a righteous club and their anti-social behavior was rewarded by ingroup esteem.
The beliefs were unshakable, impervious to facts, reason, logic, or ethics, and were often propelled by motivated reasoning.
Perhaps worst of all, they proposed over-simplified solutions for very complex problems for new believers.
Elon Musk
I first began writing about the exploits in the human operating system that make this virus stick in 2017. I’ve written extensively about how it spreads via media and technology.
Following the George Floyd Riots of 2020, I published my “Swamp Leak Hypothesis” which traces 3 variants of this mind virus back to Stearns County Minnesota.
The social justice upgrade of the Catholic Church’s Operating System, Vatican II, began there in the ‘50s. The Marxist Pro Life variant and the Marxist Feminist variants soon followed.
For as small as my audience is, they’re very smart and they’re very connected. Until last month, I’d done a lot to popularize the idea that the “Woke Religion” is actually a mind virus.
Greater minds than mine have speculated about parasites. Dr. Gad Saad describes the symptoms brilliantly but my observations are that this behaves like a computer script that gets kernel access and replicates by overwriting all of the files in memory.
But then, on Dec. 18th, Elon Musk tweeted:
Traceroute: woke_mind_virus
I can answer your query in less than a dozen hops, Mr. Musk, the second to the last one, within walking distance of Jawed Karim’s high school in St, Paul, Minnesota.
In an interview with the Babylon Bee, Musk says the Woke Mind Virus is “arguably one of the greatest threats to modern civilization.”
“We should be moving toward a positive society. Wokeness wants to make comedy illegal. Do we want a humorless society that is rife with condemnation?”
He goes on to say, “At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful. It gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel, armored in false virtue.”
He’s 100% right.
The only two things he left off, which I believe are implied in the significance he places on the threat, are:
- It’s self-replication features
- Mandated distortions of reality
The first problem is often identifying a threat and its root cause. By correctly naming wokeness as a woke_mind_virus, rather than cancer, parasite, or even a religion, Musk has taken significant steps to eradicate the problem.
Naming the virus, accurately identifying the threat level, and crowdsourcing the source and root cause analysis are major movements toward a technical solution in Natural Language Processing… my best is on AI Humor.
At this point, it’s “just an engineering problem.” That’s a nerd joke.
In all seriousness, I will write a technical paper on it, one day.
James Lindsay
I have to admit when I first heard of the Grievance Studies Papers I couldn’t tell that they were fake.
To my eyes, The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct and Feminist Mein Kampf read like logical, if incremental, extensions of what people in the Twin Cities believe, if they know what’s good for them.
Anti Racist Action, many of whom attended St. Paul Central when I attended there in the 1980s, would beat the hell out of anyone who went against any of the current orthodoxy.
Further, in Minnesota’s professional, academic, and corporate circles, signaling greater fealty to increasingly absurd ideas is a sign of party loyalty.
Paraphrasing Lindsay from a recent podcast, ‘The dumber the idea, the better it wears like a party uniform.’
This is remarkably consistent with my field observations.
Lindsay was also the first to refer to the political rise of Donald Trump as a Cytokine Storm, responding to the mind virus.
This is entirely possible, but from my observations, it may also be the original Pro-Life variant making a resurgence.
In August 2017, based on chatter in the Twin City Echochamber of Commerce, I publicly predicted a “Sex Trafficking Moral Panic,” and on Oct. 28th of that year, QAnon was launched on 4Chan.
The Blue Church has their conspiracy theories and boogie men (Systemic Racism, Patriarchy, White Nationalists) and the Red Church has theirs. (Swamp Monsters and Sewer Clowns – QAnon is both.)
In Lindsay’s most recent podcast, he describes how Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that he knew the tactics of the Woke, and it pissed him off enough to hijack them and create his own version to combat them.
I’ve been observing this for years and just waiting for the wrong person to get precisely that kind of pissed off.
