Brief Book Review

Virus of the Mind by Richard Brodie

Do you know what a Meme (Meem, like beam) is? Rest assured there are many out there who do, and have implanted them into your mind without your permission, or in many cases even your knowledge.

In his book Virus of the Mind, Richard Brodie explains what memes are and how to use them. The book also contains what he calls a power virus (actually it contains a number of them, only a few of which he really calls attention to), for readers to go out and spread what they consider positive memes into the world.

Biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term Meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene to describe any idea or thought that acts as a virus and spreads itself. Brodie expands that notion with the idea of Mind Viruses, collections of individual ideas that are packaged together and gain a life of their own once away from the originator. He suggests that over the course of history most of these viruses have evolved on their own, simply by being the best replicaters and pushing the most buttons of people‘s primary drives (The four F’s--Fighting, Fleeing, Feeding and--Finding a mate). Those that survived through natural selection weren’t necessarily the ones that were the best ideas, but rather the ones that were able to make the most copies of themselves.

Ideas don’t necessarily survive by being good at anything, the survive by being the best at spreading themselves.

All that we are is built up out of these memes, either consciously or not, and Brodie attempts to explain the origins of this, and how to break free of pre-conditioned programming, or at the very least, to notice the programming that we have and judge its validity.

There are sections on the origins of religion and the idea of religions being power viruses, but this book is not an indictment of religion. In fact, Brodie says that religion does make many people’s lives better by giving them purpose, he merely wants to point out how religions work using memetics, much like companies and governments do. He presents it from both sides and lets the reader decide which one is better for them. At no point does he say “Your beliefs are wrong, you shouldn’t believe them.” He merely suggests that people examine what they think and believe and decide if it is really doing them good to think and believe that way.

In many ways this is much like any self help book., those that apply its memes about memetics will get results, but it goes further by suggesting ways to create thought viruses that can infect others and build. This is good practical knowledge that anyone living in an information age should know, to avoid unwillingly being programmed with someone else’s ideas.

Wake up and think for yourself and decide what you think. You can gain some enlightenment without studying Zen in a cave for twenty years. The sufi’s said that if you could break free from all conditioned for ten entire minutes you are enlightened.

The primary power virus in Brodie’s book is for readers to spread the word about memetics, so that is what I am doing. Perhaps since I have gone so far as writing this, now others will read the book and spread it further.