posted on Jul, 2 2005 @ 04:41 PM
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Logically, I will speculate that radical ideologies probably is not a biological infection [but it would be interesting to check it out], and say it
is probably more like an infectious Engram.
An Emgram is sort of a unit of thought, an idea, a concept. Like the idea of a wheel, or the idea of short, or the idea of long, or the idea of
two.
Most infections are about replicating the original entity, a virus creates more [copies of the] virus, bacteria create more of the same bacteria, and
computer viruses create copies of themselves in your computer and possibly on disks.
A sociological infection is when an idea [Emgram] is focused [solely?] on replicating itself in a society without regards to actual effects for good
or ill that it may have.
If an idea is obviously useful [time/energy saving?] people will readily take it up, without any need of heavy promotion, barring any social/religious
restraint from doing so.
I like to think there are good ideas that people simply take up, like the wheel, controlled fire, etc. Since they are not generally taken up as some
social contrivance, they are more like intellectual nutrition. They are take up as a physical time/energy/money saving device and are almost Universal
in their application. Their basic function makes it easier to or enables satifying of natural desires.
Pure economic ideas, when not treated as political or religious bludgeons, are in this category of good ideas IMO. They are more sophisicated/complex
so they are not as clear to people as to how they work and the effects they will have.
Politics can be a functional mechanism for promoting some general vision of improvement for people's lives, or it can be the domain of selfserving
moneygrubbers and/or ideologues.
Commericial products run the gamut between being simple minimally expensive improvements to people's lives to expensive, heavily promoted, costly to
maintain, status symbols. The more focused a commercial venture is on high [excess?] profit and the less focused it is on improving people's lives
the more parasitic it becomes and the less beneficial it is to a society.
Religions can be vehicles to good in all people's live, to improve health and welfare. But far too often become extremely dogmatic, with a ravenous
need to have everyone constantly reinforce some non-evidentiary ideas to keep people in some kind of delusional haze.
They take on the princess and the pea aspect that every single thing in society and nature must be forced to adhere to some pre-conceived idea(s).
They become hypersensitive to anything that is even slightly outside their constraints. Remember the burning of heretics?
Many religious engrams have the evasive tactic of being able to claim benefit to you after you are dead. Sort of like current string theory, they are
totallly unprovable, and in a sense completely safe from being disproved (although looking at a corpse sure makes me doubt them).
The newest radical religious movement in the US has sort of taken up the method of AIDs, and bubonic & pneumonic plague, of directly attacking the
[neutral] immune system [government] itself. The government, by all traditional conservatives, is to be preserved as religiously neutral. But this
radical religious movement seeks to target government into promoting and thereby reinforcing their religious tenants.
If you can co-opt the the immune system itself, it disables any resistance and makes it an easy place of replication. But just as with Aids or
Beubonic plague it devastates and destroys the host.
The opportunists commerical entities may see this reduced immune state as an easy road to advantageous gain for them, but they usually forget the
devastating/destructive consquences of this happening to a society. They are, if too greedy, very short sighted.
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