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about the author
r
ichard Brodie is best known as the original author of Microsoft Word.
His self-help book, Getting Past OK, is an international best-seller. His
ground-breaking book on memes, Virus of the Mind, spent 52 weeks on the
Amazon.Com Hot 100 and is used as a text in many college courses. An
accomplished speaker, Mr. Brodie has appeared on dozens of television and
radio shows. And yes, he did finally get on Oprah!
Mr. Brodie is married and lives in the Seattle area. He continues to pur-
sue wide and varied interests. His current hobby is teaching himself to play
poker well enough to get on the World Poker Tour.
His web site is www.memecentral.com.
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© 1996 Richard Brodie
All rights reserved.
Cover design and illustration © 1996 Lightbourne Images
ISBN 0-9636001-2-5
FIRST PAPERBACK PRINTING FEBRUARY 2004
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Manufactured in the United States of America
contents
Introduction: Crisis of the Mind 13
1. Memes 23
2. Mind and Behavior 39
3. Viruses 55
4. Evolution 65
5. The Evolution of Memes 81
6. Sex: the Root of All Evolution 103
7. Survival and Fear 123
8. How We Get Programmed 137
9. Cultural Viruses 157
10. The Memetics of Religion 187
11. Designer Viruses (How To Start a Cult) 199
12. Disinfection 213
Recommended Reading 231
Acknowledgments 235
Index 237
introduction
crisis of the mind
What a waste it is to lose one’s mind or not to have a mind
is very wasteful.
–Dan Quayle,
mutating the memes
in the United Negro College Fund’s motto
“A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”
t
here is some good news in this book. So before I get into how
mind viruses are spreading wildly throughout the world—
infecting people with unwanted programming like the
Michelangelo computer virus infects computers with self-
destruct instructions—I’ll start with the good news.
The good news is that the long-awaited scientific theory
unifying biology, psychology, and cognitive science is here. An
interdisciplinary effort by scientists in all those fields over the
last 20 years or so—really back to 1859 and Charles Darwin, if
you like—has produced a new science called memetics.
The science of memetics is based on evolution. Darwin’s
theory of the evolution of species by natural selection utterly
transformed the field of biology. Scientists are now applying
modern evolutionary theory to the way the mind works, the
14 (cid:2) virus of the mind
way people learn and grow, the way culture progresses. In so
doing, the field of psychology will ultimately be as transformed
by the scientists researching memetics as biology was by
Darwin.
For those of us who yearn to understand ourselves, learning
about memetics gives us a huge amount of satisfaction. I also
believe that people who understand memetics will have an
increasing advantage in life, especially in preventing themselves
from being manipulated or taken advantage of. If you better
understand how your mind works, you can better navigate
through a world of increasingly subtle manipulation.
Now the bad news. The bad news is that this book raises
more such questions than it answers. In particular, memetics
has uncovered the existence of viruses of the mind, but gives us
few insights into what to do about them.
Viruses of the mind have been with us throughout history,
but are constantly evolving and changing. They are infectious
pieces of our culture that spread rapidly throughout a
population, altering people’s thoughts and lives in their wake.
They include everything from relatively harmless mind viruses,
such as miniskirts and slang phrases, to mind viruses that
seriously derail people’s lives, such as the cycle of unwed
mothers on welfare, the Crips and Bloods youth gangs and the
Branch Davidian religious cult. When these pieces of culture
are ones we like, there’s no problem. However, as the
Michelangelo computer virus programs computers with
instructions to destroy their data, viruses of the mind can
program us to think and behave in ways that are destructive to
our lives.
This is the most surprising and most profound insight from
the science of memetics: your thoughts are not always your own
original ideas. You catch thoughts—you get infected with them,
both directly from other people and indirectly from viruses of
the mind, People don’t seem to like the idea that they aren’t in
control of their thoughts. The reluctance of people to even
consider this notion is probably the main reason the scientific
work done so far is not better known. As we’ll see, ideas people
don’t like have a hard time catching on.
Further compounding the problem, you don’t immediately
know whether the programming you get from a given mind virus
is harmful or beneficial. Nobody every joined a religious cult
with the intention of getting brainwashed, moving to Guyana, and
committing suicide. When the teenage Bill Gates caught the
poker-playing mind virus at Harvard, was that harmful because it
kept him from his studies? Or was it beneficial
virus of the mind (cid:2) 15
because it helped sway his decision to drop out, start Microsoft,
and become a multimillionaire?
paradigm shift
Every so often, the world of science experiences something
called a paradigm shift. That happens when one of the basic,
underlying assumptions we’ve been living with changes, such as
when we shifted from looking at the universe as revolving
around the earth to the earth revolving around the sun. Another
shift occurred when Einstein discovered the relationships
between space and time and between energy and matter. Each
of these paradigm shifts took some time to penetrate the
scientific community, and even longer to become accepted by
the general public.
Viruses of the mind, and the whole science of memetics,
represent a major paradigm shift in the science of the mind.
Because understanding this new science involves a
significant change in the way people think about the mind and
culture, it has been difficult for people to grasp. As with any
paradigm shift, memetics doesn’t fit into our existing way of
looking at things, of understanding the world.
The trick to learning a new paradigm is to set aside your
current one while you’re learning rather that attempt to fit the
new knowledge into your existing model. It won’t fit! If you’re
willing to set aside your current thinking long enough to
consider four concepts, some or all of which may be new to you,
you’ll be rewarded with an understanding of memetics. With
that understanding, I hope, comes a call to action for anyone
concerned with the future of human life.
The first concept—the star of the show—is the meme,
which I introduce in Chapter 1 and which plays a leading role
throughout this book. The meme, which rhymes with “beam,” is
the basic building block of culture in the same way the gene is
the basic building block of life. As I outline in Chapter 2,
memes are not only the building blocks of culture on a large
scale—making up countries, languages, religions—but also on a
small scale: memes are the building blocks of your mind, the
programming of your mental “computer.”
