“Mimicry is a profound asset in terms of its relationship to human skill, sensing, and intelligence development. In fact, our minds are not really possessions as much as they are potentials which mimicry is catalytic in activating and enstructuring.

Perhaps because it is so fundamental it was selected for as the primary intrusion vector for a wide range of cognitive vulnerabilities which convert us into vectors for transmission, resources, or defense assets, in a way reminiscent of (but radically different from) viruses. The locus of similarity is that ideas and models of value, relation, identity or circumstance can, to varying nontrivial degrees, ‘take over’ the mind and body of recipients for purposes that primarily serve to entrench and propagate what we might understand as a peculiar form of cognitive (and thus behavioral) disease.

That is to say that ideas can ‘take over’ and drive people’s lives, cultures, even the world, from within humans and groups, even though — unlike viruses — the ‘ideas’ are fairly hard to get any objective grasp upon. They do not have genomes. They are not organisms. But the analogy stands because once installed in human minds and cultures, they act like aggressive infective agents bent upon conversion, slavery and domination. We believe we drive cars, and their roads and bodies surround our homes like parasites. But who is driving whom? And toward what?

Something is wrong in our happy paradise where we have been pretending that the stuff we call intelligence qualifies simply because animals cannot easily mimic it. The reason we are largely unaware of our own vulnerabilities to mimicry have to do with the fact that we are not paying attention to how fundamental these behaviors are to our awareness and humanity. As we are not aware of their value, we are not paying close enough attention to discern when our natural mimetic predilections are turned against us by forces estranged from both sense and human (or even biological) reality.

Clearly, then, we must learn both to better take advantage of the developmental assets best suited to our intelligence and well-being… and to become vigilant for the signs that these have been co-opted and are now being deployed not for human, or biorelational purposes — but against them — for alien purposes having to do with bizarre and often dangerous feedback effects that occur between human intelligence and its strange representational substrates.”

— an anonymous lecturer