I have two new pieces on mind viruses on my Substack. If you’re not a subscriber over there yet, consider becoming one! If you want to support my work, you can even become a paid subscriber (though most of my content will be free). Just type your email address in the form below, and you’ll receive all new pieces in your inbox. I will continue to post my Dutch pieces here on my old website, but all my English writings will now be moved to Substack. I will only post them here occasionally, if I don’t forget.

So below are two snippets of the new pieces!

A Deadly Contagion

An evolutionary theory of witch-hunting (and other mind viruses?)

Why did people in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe burn “witches” at the stake, sometimes their own friends and loved ones, even though we now know that these supernatural creatures—flying on broomsticks and cavorting with the devil in nocturnal sabbaths—were just figments of their imagination?

In our thoroughly secularised age, where the power of religious belief is a pale shadow of what it once was, the European witch hunts seem difficult to comprehend. Not only do we no longer believe in witches, but we find it hard to believe that anyone else ever believed in witches. Still, despite a common misconception, the largest outbreaks did not happen in the Dark Ages, but at the cusp of modernity and Enlightenment, with the most deadly peaks happening around the time of Galileo’s discoveries of the solar system and Francis Bacon’s program for a new science.

[Continue reading this piece at Substack]

Why mind viruses are real

Yes, comparing other people’s beliefs to viruses can be cheap and gratuitous, but the idea of “mind viruses” has real scientific merit.

Are there any such things as mind viruses? And if you were infected by one, how could you tell? Viruses of the mind seem to be all the rage these days. In his 2020 bestseller Parasitic Mind, evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad identifies “the tyranny of political correctness” and other “infectious ideas” that are harming our societies. A year later, from a different ideological angle, the philosopher

Andy Norman published Mental Immunity, a guide to boosting your mental immune system against infectious “mind parasites.” And in his popular science book Foolproof (2022), psychologist Sander Van der Linden advocates “mental inoculation” against misinformation, fake news, and conspiracy theories. In various ways, each of these books suggests that beliefs act like infectious parasites spreading from one brain to the next.

Perhaps because of the devastation wrought by the coronavirus, we have all become more attuned to the possibility of tiny pathogens invading our bodies and propagating at our expense. In fact, while we were still in the throes of the pandemic, the WHO itself coined the portmanteau term “infodemic” to refer to outbreaks of disinformation and conspiracy theories about the coronavirus. But the idea itself is much older than that. More than thirty years ago, the biologist

Richard Dawkins wrote about “viruses of the mind” (focusing mostly on religion), in line with his earlier idea of selfish “memes,” a phrase coined in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. And as far back as the late 19th century, sociologists like Gabriel Tarde and Gustave Le Bon argued that cultural ideas and behaviours spread through society much like infectious diseases, through imitation and repetition.