The Control Virus

                                                                by Gary Stimeling

 

Copyright 2004 Psychotropics Cornucopia, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 

                                             An idea is something you have.

                                 An ideology is something that has you.

                                     — cultural historian Morris Berman

 

The Bible does not contain the word “tolerance.” The Old Testament includes only one instance where religious toleration is presented as a virtue; the New Testament, two. In his famous “swords into plowshares” homily, the prophet Micah (4:3–5) looks forward to a time of peace when “all peoples may walk each in the name of their god.” Jesus’s disciples suggested that he pronounce a curse on a rival guru (Mark 9:38–40 and Luke 9:49–50), and that he curse a whole Samaritan village whose inhabitants rejected his teachings. Both times he refused, though once he spitefully blasted a fig tree for not bearing fruit out of season when he was hungry (Matthew 21:18–19).

      In contrast, hundreds of biblical passages extol bigotry and genocide against followers of other faiths. In telling the story of the 12th-century-bc Hebrew takeover of Palestine, the writers of Joshua and Judges gleefully describe the slaughter of Canaanites by the hundreds of thousands, justified by “abominations”—sexual and visionary rites—in their temples. In 621 bc, shortly after Judea regained independence as the Assyrian empire collapsed, an anonymous Jerusalem lawyer known today as D (the Deuteronomist) wrote the Book of the Law (the second half of Deuteronomy). The code enacted measures for relief of the poor but also established a Jehovist theocracy. The author then conspired with the high priest Hilkiah to “find” the book  in the temple and present it to king Josiah. After having its authenticity confirmed—by a witch named Huldah (Weasel)!—Josiah conducted a murderous jihad against other religions, chronicled in II Kings 22–23. Jehovah’s priests even built their new altars literally upon the bones of their predecessors.

      According to the ancient sources that survive, the Jews were the first people to practice religious persecution. It was restricted to their two small kingdoms, Israel and Judea, and it was only enforced sporadically, judging by the number of Jewish kings berated in the Bible for allowing worship of gods other than Jehovah. Most popular of these deities were the Levantine Great Goddess—known as Asherah, Ashtoreth, or Astarte—and her lover Baal or Bel.

      But religious toleration was the glue that held many ancient empires together. Travelers and immigrants regularly venerated local gods who were similar to those in their homelands. The Romans were scrupulous in letting conquered peoples retain their religious customs, and in preventing violence by one faith against another. This was the reason for their occasional persecution of Christians. Those Christians later known as orthodox made it quite clear that they intended to take over the state and make Christianity the only religion allowed. Their cult of martyrdom often led zealots to commit arson against pagan temples, and assault or murder pagan worshippers, then beg for the death penalty. So many followed this pattern that governor Antoninus of Antioch once asked an aide, “Don’t they have ropes or cliffs to kill themselves with?” Even so, other faiths gladly coexisted with the many variants of Christianity that had a more tolerant approach, and religious bigotry did not become the norm until orthodox Christians gained full control of the government at the end of the 4th century.

      Political intolerance was another matter. The ancient emperors enforced the loyalty of subject peoples—that is, paying taxes and providing spear-fodder for the army—by any means necessary. The Assyrians pioneered ethnic cleansing and forced resettlement of whole populations. Besides committing the standard massacres, the Romans liked to line the roads with crucified rebels as a warning to others who might be tempted to defy the ecumene. This was the one-world order that was the ideal of Stoicism, the most popular philosophy among the leaders of the Roman empire. The Caesars perverted it into little more than a global money-siphon sucking provincial riches to Rome. It was the Jews’ insistence on an independent state that led the Romans to destroy Jerusalem and scatter them in the Diaspora of ad 70. Only two or three decades later, the writer of the Gospel of John laid the blame for Jesus’s execution upon the Jews as a people, beginning two millennia of Christian anti-Semitism. This double disaster made the Jews perhaps the first victims of political and religious persecution—a “chosen” people indeed.

      Intolerance is the chief characteristic of what William Burroughs called the Control Virus. In his view it began with language, specifically the Word made God. Cumulatively, he conceived it as the dead carapace of all language that has gone before, ossified verbiage that takes on a pseudo-life of its own and virally replicates itself via people whom it makes as empty as their words: “Middle-aged men in dark suits with the cold dead look of heavy power.”

      Considered as a germ that spreads a “social” disease, the Control Virus has three paradigms, two ancient and one modern.

      The first is the paradigm of religious control of the individual as “the will of God.” It’s left over from the theocracies established by some Jews, Christians, and Muslims. (Let us not lose sight of the fact that there always have been humanist groups in all three religions who have opposed the authoritarians, often at cost of their lives.) The Temple Scroll was a significant stage in the evolution of this paradigm. It stands midway between, on the one hand, the Book of the Law, and, on the other hand, the theocratic states established by the Christian emperor Theodosius in 391 and by Mohammed in 622.

      The Temple Scroll was the law code adopted about 150 bc after a revolt freed Jerusalem from the rule of the dynasty of Greek kings established by Alexander the Great. It was the most important of the Dead Sea Scrolls and a primary influence on the apostle Paul. Its laws subordinated every aspect of daily life to religious control. It prohibited divorce for any reason; prohibited marriage, sexual intercourse, and toilets anywhere in Jerusalem; and prohibited defecation during the Sabbath. It bears an eerie resemblance to the teachings of the Ayatollah Khomeini.

      The second paradigm is that of political control of the individual “for the greater good of society.” It was first spelled out in the plan for a hierarchical fascist state devised by Plato in his Republic. Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar put it into practice, though they watered down Plato’s restrictions on nonpolitical behavior.

      Socrates had been appalled by the Athenian democracy. Its voters had pursued a ruinous war against Sparta and depleted the public treasury. Even though only a small fraction of the Athenian people could vote—slaves, women, and men without property were excluded—Socrates reasoned that the people should have less voice in government, not more. He supported the aristocratic tyranny of the Thirty in 404–403 bc, then died a willing martyr when the restored democrats prosecuted him.

      Plato, Socrates’ most brilliant student, conceived of an ideal society made up of four classes in a pyramid arrangement, much like the caste system that was developing in India at about the same time. Social harmony was to depend on the subservience of each class to the ones above it. Plato disregarded the lowest and most numerous class, the slaves, whom he considered more or less as machines, or labor-saving devices.

      Of non-slaves, Plato wrote that there are three kinds of men. Being a male homosexual in a macho culture, he took no account of women, who had no role in public life. He said all “free” men are leaders, enforcers, or followers. Their roles, as in the platonic republic’s modern apotheosis, the Third Reich, are genetically determined.

      Followers, the most numerous group (after the slaves), are fitted by nature to be workers. Being forced to sell their time for money, they are actually little better than slaves. They are ruled, Plato said, by the most basic desires—for food and the other physical comforts. They are to be kept in their place by encouraging their tendency toward submissive conformity, and by a minimal, controlled gratification of their physical needs. Their morality is their next meal or a warm cloak. They are to be kept at the bottom of the pyramid, for society like a pyramid needs a broad base. In our day, Plato would’ve been a big fan of advertising.

      The next most numerous class of men are virtuoso instruments of force. They are the key to the republic, for they enjoy the feel of power flowing through them without the onus of directing it themselves. Enforcers are like dogs, Plato said, and must be ruled by the will of those above them. Their morality consists of their orders. Cunning and fanatically loyal but an without independent ethical sense, they will attack anyone their trainers sic them on, and so make ideal soldiers and police. However, even Plato couldn’t answer the question, “Who will police the police themselves?”

      The smallest group was the most problematical. They are the leaders, whom Plato equated with thinkers, at least in his ideal world, where philosophers are kings. Rulers are to be guided by reason toward the greater good of society. In practice, unfortunately, they tend to seek the greater good of themselves.

      Plato should have realized his error when he got the Sicilian king Dionysius I to take him on as advisor. Dionysius soon got so fed up with thinking that he sold Plato into slavery, from which his thoughtful friends chipped in to buy him back. But the experience taught him little, for he went on to write his Laws, a sequel to the Republic complete with a sexual Gestapo climbing into people’s bedroom windows to arrest them for erotic activities that don’t promote male supremacy and class hierarchy.

      Plato recognized another class of men, the poets, by which he meant all writers, graphic artists, and musicians—in other words, those who unite reason with emotion in self-expression. He wanted to banish them from the republic. He abhorred emotion and considered artists too independent to govern, since through empathy they follow a human morality independent of the state. Plato himself had been a superb love poet in his youth, but burned his verse when he “found philosophy” after his lover died.

      It takes a little popular wisdom to complete this diagnosis of the political Control Virus. In Naples, which in Plato’s day was a Greek colony, people say there are four genders—men, women, homosexuals, and politicians. Power-seekers, they say, derive their primary sexual pleasure not from interaction with other people but from controlling other people’s lives. That’s why Henry Kissinger said power is the greatest aphrodisiac. It’s also why we call politicians amoral: Their morality consists of whatever it takes to get an election.

      Plato’s baleful ghost haunts nearly every concept of government since then, whispering that freedom is not suitable for the “lower orders,” whether they are defined politically by birth or religiously by behavior. By combining Judaic religious proscriptions with the Roman empire’s system of spies and informers, medieval Christian states welded the two ancient control paradigms together.

      Today the religious and political forms of the virus are being absorbed by a new paradigm, that of economic control. The Supreme Court set disembodied piles of money on the road to ultimate power with an 1884 decision that gave corporations the legal standing of persons. As a result, capital has gained the ability to buy government, while its handmaiden, advertising, promotes a consumerist version of the old religious values of conformity and submission to a bland new world. A 1980 Supreme Court decision allowed corporations to patent life-forms, opening up possibilities for control that even Plato never dreamt.

      Burroughs wrote that viral ideas take control of minds, just as a virus commandeers the genetic chemistry of a cell, and just as heroin or other addictions subvert the will. Thus he anticipated biologist Richard Dawkins’s concept of memes. In The Selfish Gene (1976), Dawkins invented the term to refer to ideas that propagate themselves like genes, often like the genes of viruses and other parasitic disease organisms. In social evolution, they compete with other memes in much the same way as genes compete with other genes in the process of natural selection. Burroughs considered the Control Virus a fundamental lie that under-lies all victimless crime persecutions. It’s a seemingly addictive need to control the behavior and consensual interactions of other people, rather than living one’s own life as one sees fit and letting others do the same.

      Dawkins and later writers have identified several gene-like characteristics of successful memes:

·       Entry. Like a virus, an infectious meme must disable the mental immune response. “Faith is superior to reason.” “Trust me. I’m a dispassionate scientific expert.”

·       Copying-fidelity. To be successful, a meme must be simplistic enough to be passed intact to a large number of followers. “Our god is the one true god.” “Alcohol is the only good drug.”

·       Circularity. Just as a virus needs an impenetrable shell, a meme needs to be impervious to logic. “God is the source of all truth. All truth is contained in the Bible. We know God is the source of all truth because the Bible says so. We know what the Bible says is true because God wrote the Bible, and God is the source of all truth.”

·       Promotion and reward. Successful memes promise advantages to those who carry them. “Our god makes you better than other people. You’ll go to heaven; they’ll go to hell.” “Coffee helps you work and be successful. Marijuana makes you a lazy bum who’ll be a failure.”

·       Fecundity. A successful meme produces lots of new memes that help keep the whole meme scheme alive. “Our god says don’t do this, don’t do that, but do this, that, and the other.” A successful meme also encourages its believers to reproduce faster than other people by suppressing sex for pleasure in favor of sex as infrequent duty. Equating material success with righteousness helps achieve the same end.

·       Exclusivity. Censorship prevents rival memes from reaching new hosts. In religion, this is the doctrine that “Error has no rights.” In secular debate, the opponent is unfit to speak. “Drug users are disqualified by reason of their subjectivity.”

·       Jamming. Lies about rival memes help prevent them from spreading. “Witches worship Satan.” “Marijuana leads to mainline.” Lies about one’s own meme promote its success. “God is love.” “We’re arresting them for their own good.”

·       Attack. Successful memes often ensure their own survival by destroying the carriers of other memes. “Our God says kill those who disobey him. War against us is sin; our war against others is just.” “We need a law against spreading information about drugs.”

·       Special attention to the cured. Former adherents who have discarded a meme are especially dangerous to it because such “acquired immunity” can spread like another meme. Julian the Apostate, the Roman emperor who ruled 361–363 and tried to restore religious freedom, was raised as a Christian but converted to paganism as an adult. Christians said he was the Devil incarnate.

·       Longevity. A successful meme must adapt to changing circumstances. “God’s laws are forever, until He gives a new dispensation.” “Marijuana produces insanity…no, addiction…no, gynecomastia…no, amotivational syndrome…no, lung damage…no, loss of sex drive….”

      In conventional usage, “mythology” is often a disparaging term, while “religion” has a positive connotation. Yet mythology is, at worst, innocuous, while religion is often extremely harmful. Memetics, the study of memes, can help explain why. Mythology is an attempt to understand reality by symbolizing it in the form of a story. Religion is often an attempt to control people by convincing them that the story is reality.

      Take the statement “Our holy scriptures tell us to burn your profane fables.” In that form it’s a cute axiom that makes it easy to see what’s going on. But expand and obfuscate it, and it becomes an effective meme. “Our scriptures were dictated by God to his inspired prophet. They contain all truths necessary for a proper life. If other writings restate scripture, they are inferior copies or distractions. If they contradict the holy book, they are evil. Therefore destroy them all.” This is in fact the reasoning used by Omar I, Mohammed’s general and successor, to eliminate the last remnants of the Alexandrian libraries in ad 642.

      Like genetics, memetics must try to answer a fundamental problem of natural selection: Why does bad money drive out good? Ideas that are destructive in the long run often outcompete good ones due to a short-term selective advantage. This “bad money effect” drastically reduces the options available to a society, or to life itself, in confronting new challenges.

      Biologists used to believe that life started out simple and evolved into more complex forms. The Burgess Shale taught them otherwise. This fossilized seabed from the early Cambrian period shows that the first multicellular organisms developed a dizzyingly creative array of body types. Since then, evolution has worked like an obsessive tyrant to reduce variety, creating ever more detailed variations on an ever dwindling number of basic allowable patterns. In the course of 300 million years, warm-blooded proto-mammals developed at least three times, only to be killed off by dominant reptiles. It took an asteroid hit to wipe out the dinosaurs and give the fourth try a chance to evolve.

      The same rule seems to hold true for human social evolution. Some 7,000 past and present human societies are known, most of them now either extinct or dying on the periphery of Western industrial culture. During the Neolithic period, roughly 10,000–4000 bc, a diverse, peaceful, egalitarian group of gardening cultures spread throughout Eurasia. Then, from 4300 to 1050 bc, these societies were all destroyed by invading waves of Kurgans (also known as Aryans or Indo-Europeans) from the Volga valley and central Asia. They found that an ethic of hierarchy, domination, and war gave them a tremendous short-term advantage that negated the benefits of long-term sustainability. Descendents of this same culture are now completing their conquest of the earth under the banner of globalization.

      Westerners are accustomed to think of religion only in terms of the authoritarian model, but other religions—notably Buddhism, Taoism, the Western magical traditions, and some forms of Hinduism, as well as esoteric movements within Judaism, Christianity and Islam—all teach specific methods to clear oneself of bad memes. Memeticist Susan Blackmore describes such practices as “running a virus check on your mind.” They include:

·       Testing. Nonauthoritarian, nonproselytizing religions don’t emphasize faith in absolute truth revealed to the few and passed down to the many. Rather they ask each person to put ideas to the tests of experience and reason before accepting them.

·       Meditation. The practice of working to clear the mind of all thought for a few minutes at a time lets outworn indoctrinations rise from the unconscious to the surface like scum, where they can be skimmed off and tossed.

·       Circles. Ritual enclosure within a temporarily protected space can help the individual, or better yet, a group of like-minded people, raise the psychic energy needed to break the spell of destructive memes and banish them.

·       Entheogens. An experience of initiation into universal love triggered by certain drugs in a supportive environment can be a powerful mind-cleanser. The method is not without danger, however. Under a teacher of hatred it can even have the opposite effect.

·       The Internet, maybe. Today there is more information available more easily than ever before. But a deluge of information can have the same effect as a lack of it, especially when one lacks the leisure to compare competing sources.

      Unfortunately, all of these techniques require a person’s assent and effort, which already indicate some resistance to control memes. Such methods can be effective on the individual level, but what are we to do about the Control Virus on the social level, attacking us by means of other people? Patience? Compassion? Persuasion? As memes, these are not very successful, and they’re unsatisfying when so many are imprisoned or dying because of bad memes. Violence is self-defeating, especially against overwhelmingly superior firepower. Must we fall back on a Stoic acceptance of the inevitable cycles of history? Short of praying for another asteroid, what is to be done? This is the fundamental question of our time.