20 May 2024

Richard Brodie - Collected Quotes

"A belief system, through its memes, can spread in a way that looks just like a conspiracy without any conscious intention on the part of the participants." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"A meme is a replicator that uses the medium of our minds to replicate. Meme evolution happens because our minds are good at copying and innovating - ideas, behaviors, tunes, shapes, structures, and so on." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"A mind is a terrible thing to waste." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"A mutation is an error in copying. It produces a defective -  or possibly improved in some sense - copy instead of an exact duplicate of the original." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"A virus is anything that takes external copying equipment and puts it to work making copies of itself." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"A virus of the mind is something out in the world that infects people with memes. Those memes, in turn, influence the infected people’s behavior so that they help perpetuate and spread the virus." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"All cultural institutions, regardless of their initial design or intention (if any), evolve to have but one goal: to perpetuate themselves." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"Associations are connections between memes. When you are programmed with an association-meme, the presence of one thing triggers a thought or feeling about something else. This causes a change in your behavior, which can ultimately spread the meme to another mind." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"Beliefs are like cow paths. The more often you walk down a path, the more it looks like the right way to go." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"Complicated things arise naturally out of the forces of evolution. No conscious intention is necessary." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"Evolution is a scientific model of how things become more complex; entropy describes how things become simpler. They are the creative and the destructive forces of the universe." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"Evolution requires two things: replication, with a certain degree of fidelity; and innovation, or a certain degree of infidelity." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"Gaining someone’s trust is an effective way to bypass their skepticism and make it possible to program them with new memes." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"If we want to combat the mind viruses responsible for the decline of culture, we need to be conscious of our own programming, consciously adopting memes that take us in the direction we want to go." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"If you currently believe in any concepts or subcultures or dogmas that meet these requirements, and you didn’t consciously choose to program yourself with these memes, you are infected with a mind virus." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"Memes enter our minds without our permission. They become part of our mental programming and influence our lives without our even being aware of it." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"Memetics is the study of the workings of memes: how they interact, replicate, and evolve." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"One of the ways the memes you are programmed with greatly affect your future is through self-fulfilling prophecy." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"Strategies are beliefs about cause and effect. When you are programmed with a strategy-meme, you unconsciously believe behaving a certain way is likely to produce a certain effect. That behavior may trigger a chain of events that results in spreading the strategy-meme to another mind." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"Taking over bits of your mind and pulling you in different directions, mind viruses distract you from what’s most important to you in life and cause confusion, stress, and even despair." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"The evolution of ideas, culture, and society revolves around the selfish meme just as the evolution of species revolves around the selfish gene." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"The most interesting thing about memes is not whether they’re true or false; it’s that they are the building blocks of your mind." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"The most popular and prevalent parts of our culture are the most effective at copying memes." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"The universe contains many mechanisms for copying and dispersing information, and viruses are some of the things that are often copied and dispersed." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"The very act of asking people a question can cause them to create or reinforce a meme in their minds. Asking enough of the right questions can actually change someone’s belief system, and therefore influence the person’s behavior." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"The world is full of memes spread by mind viruses, all competing for a share of your mind, your perception, your attention. They care nothing for your well-being, but instead add to your confusion and subtract from your fulfillment." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"Those new memes conflict with your old ones, and a mental tension is created. Your mind wants to resolve the conflict. It does so by creating a new meme." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"Truth is not one of the strong selectors for memes." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"Viewed through memetics, all values, morals, traditions, and ideas with respect to God and rights are the result of meme evolution. And meme evolution is guided by our genetic tendencies, which in turn evolved around sex." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"We can either give up on the hope of having a fulfilling life and a better world or consciously choose which memes to program ourselves with and which we want to spread." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"We have an enormous hunger to understand the world around us, which was extremely useful when the world was simple and mostly consisted of physical rewards and dangers. In the society of memes, however, we are constantly trying to make sense of things that simply have no sense." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

"You can be conditioned, through repetition, to acquire new distinction-memes that make reality look different to you and provide reinforcing evidence that keeps those distinction-memes in place." (Richard Brodie, "Virus of the Mind", 2009)

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