The Mind Parasites

I’ve never embraced Colin Wilson’s philosophy of “existential optimism,” but I have devoured his work and feasted on his provocative and insightful ideas for many years. His work is a veritable garden of delights even if that delight comes in the form of horror. I’ve been re-reading his novel, The Mind Parasites (1967), a Lovecraftian-inspired work that embodies his aim of trying to create a “new type of novel.” What has become punctum[1] for me in this reading, is a feeling that the image of mind parasites is so apt as an image for thinking about our current political and cultural climate. Before I go into this directly, it will help to lay out some orienting observations.

We are aware of “virus” both in its biological and cyberlogical meanings and how both spread collectively. The word “virus” is Latin for “poison.” Virus is the most abundant life form, though its “living” status is more an “in-between” life form. Virus infection kills the host cell and can be quite lethal to the whole organism. The small pox virus brought to the Americas by Europeans killed more than 70% of the indigenous population. The Spanish Flu killed upward of 100 million people world-wide. Often there is little or no treatment for viral infections—particularly new ones. Security agencies are constantly looking for signs of virus, both biological and cyberlogical, that could be used as terrorist weapons.

A parasite works differently. The parasite takes up residence in a host and uses the host’s resources to satisfy the parasite’s survival needs. It does not work to kill the host, but to increase consumption of the host’s resources as well as changing the host’s behavior to secure the parasite’s ultimate aim—its propagation. The parasite conceals itself so that the host has little or no awareness of the parasite itself. The parasite is immune to efforts to treat it by treating the “symptoms” alone. The host can suffer in many ways: mental, emotional, and physiological. In a sense, the parasite “takes over” control of the host. While we know about parasites as living organisms, most are not aware of cyberlogical parasites. The best known example is the “bot,” which is a robotic script that takes up residence in one computer after another and begins its “feeding” off the host in various ways, often without any knowledge on the part of the computer user, as well as changing the behavior of the host systems.

Everyone who uses a computer connected to the internet is as risk. And like a parasite, the limits to which the parasite can grow in enabling is own ends to the detriment of the host (our computers and by extension almost every aspect of our life) are at present unbounded. The more everything becomes “smart” and “connected” the more we are at risk. To cite just one example from a recent report: “Bots are feasting on the economic bloodstream of the digital age.”[2] I believe it is useful to think of parasites in various forms: as biological, cyberlogical, and psychological entities.[3]

Using biological entities in cyberlogical and psychological space is a form of analogical research and a productive way of thinking (reasoning) “outside the box.”[4] We do this naturally in forming language metaphors. For example, we use the word “parasite” to speak of someone who “exploits others and gives nothing in return.” We might think of such behavior as the result of parasitic invasion. A parasitic invasion “takes over” and controls the behavior of the host. If we imagine that parasites can be spread in many ways (as are actual parasites), then we can imagine the spread of cultural, political and psychological mind parasites as an unsuspected form of control of human behavior.

With the ever increasing interaction of climate change processes in or entering in exponential phases, it is quite likely that biological parasites will become an evermore virulent phenomenon. With the increasing interaction of cyberlogical systems (the internet), which are also likely entering into exponential phases of penetration, it is quite likely that our interaction with cyber systems will become pervasive, ubiquitous and unpredictable. This would naturally include robotic systems of all types. And with the ever increasing exposure to psychological parasites of all kinds, we can expect increasing degrees of instability of traditional ways of functioning at all levels at both an individual and collective level.

The following questions, among others, I’ll take up in future posts on this topic are:

1.How do mind parasites spread? What purposes do they serve?

2. In addition to natural mind parasites, how are they engineered, and by whom (people,

            computers, robots, etc.)

3. Is everyone infected? Are there natural immunities? Is there any treatment for brain

            processes destroyed by mind parasites?

4. What characteristics “invite” or encourage mind parasite takeover?
5. What cognitive biases are a result of mind parasites?
6. When mind parasites take over, they likely destroy what we think of as the best human qualities and replace these qualities with parasitic qualities. This is how humans become parasites.
7. An insidious form of mind parasite is “money.” The danger of this is unreognized.

[1] Punctum is Roland Barthes’ term for the element in a photograph that attracts his psyche autonomously and makes the photograph “exist” for him. It is contrasted with stadium, which embodies the photographer’s intentionality. The value of this distinction has wide relevance. See Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981.

[2] Kellerman, Tom. “BOTS: Cyber-Parasites.” World Bank Security Team, July 2004.

[3] I use the term “entities” deliberately to emphasize the sense of “foreign” life (of whatever form) along the lines that Jung intended when he wrote, “We would do well, therefore, to think of the creative process as a living thing implanted in the human psyche.” Jung, C. G. “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry.” CW: The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature. Vol. 15, Para. 115. The question arises as to whether this sense of “implant” is different than parasite. This topic will be the subject of a future blog post.

[4] For emphasizing the value of analogical research, I am indebted to Dr. Mils Hills, of the Northampton Business School in the UK. His paper, “A New Perspective on the Achievement of Psychological Effects from Cyber Warfare Payloads: The Analogy of Parasitic Manipulation of Host Behavior” (Journal of Law & Cyber Warfare, Vol. 1, Winter 2012, Issue 1, p. 209-217) has proven invaluable to me.