Humanity is and always has been invested with mental parasites that alter their action, causing them to hate, murder, infect others, cause conflict, among other things.
These parasites are virus-like ideas. Memes, in the original meaning of the word. Religions and political ideologies are infested with them. Contrary to Dawkins it is possible to be religious without being a tool for parasitic memes, but this involves having the proper perspective of what religion is, which should have nothing to do with making claims about the external world.
If you think you are immune to this, you are the most vulnerable. We are all infested.
Since the rise of the internet and social media we've seen an acceleration of the evolution of ideas both symbiotic and parasitic memes and a pandemic of the former as numerous new infection vectors have opened up. Internet memes, the mostly benign germs of the meme world, are but one example.
We are in the middle of World War III, a memetic war, where ideas are both weapons and the true enemy. ISIS, conservative culture warriors / SJW's, the rise of conspiracy theories, the war on terror, the ever-growing media spectacle, are all symptoms of this.
We've opened Pandora's Box and there is no closing it. Before the internet TV, radio, cheap travel, and the printing press worked similarly, but the internet is qualitatively different. Cultural change is only going to continue to accelerate, which will in turn facilitate greater cultural change in a feedback loop. The Singularitarians are short-sighted in considering only machine intelligence, and not the power of millions of human brains being networked together via the internet. We are experiencing a "cultural singularity" right now.
Which will win? Will it be the symbiotic memes that replicate by benefiting their host, or the parasites that do it at their hosts' expense like the ISIS death cult? Will memes destroy the world, or liberate us?
