I think “mind virus” is fair. Vassar spoke a lot about how the world as it is can’t be trusted. I remember that many of the people in his circle spoke, seemingly apropos of nothing, about how bad involuntary commitment is, so that by the time someone was psychotic their relationship with psychiatry and anyone who would want to turn to psychiatry to help them was poisoned. Within the envelope of those beliefs you can keep a lot of other beliefs safe from scrutiny.
The thing with “bad influence” is that it’s a pretty value-laden thing. In a religious town the biology teacher who tells the children about evolution and explains how it makes sense that our history goes back a lot further then a few thousands years is reasonably described as bad influence by the parents.
The religion teacher gets the children to doubt the religious authorities. Those children then can also be a bad influence on others by also getting them to doubt authorities. In a similar war Vassar gets people to question other authorities and social conventions and how those ideas can then be passed on.
Vassar speaks about things like Moral Mazes. Memes like that make people distrust institutions. There are the kind of bad influence that can get people to quit their job.
Talking about the biology teacher like they are intend to start an evolution cult feels a bit misleading.
Perhaps the proper word here might be “manipulation” or “bad influence”.
I think “mind virus” is fair. Vassar spoke a lot about how the world as it is can’t be trusted. I remember that many of the people in his circle spoke, seemingly apropos of nothing, about how bad involuntary commitment is, so that by the time someone was psychotic their relationship with psychiatry and anyone who would want to turn to psychiatry to help them was poisoned. Within the envelope of those beliefs you can keep a lot of other beliefs safe from scrutiny.
The thing with “bad influence” is that it’s a pretty value-laden thing. In a religious town the biology teacher who tells the children about evolution and explains how it makes sense that our history goes back a lot further then a few thousands years is reasonably described as bad influence by the parents.
The religion teacher gets the children to doubt the religious authorities. Those children then can also be a bad influence on others by also getting them to doubt authorities. In a similar war Vassar gets people to question other authorities and social conventions and how those ideas can then be passed on.
Vassar speaks about things like Moral Mazes. Memes like that make people distrust institutions. There are the kind of bad influence that can get people to quit their job.
Talking about the biology teacher like they are intend to start an evolution cult feels a bit misleading.