A Mind Virus

Wielding ideas as weapons and conservatism

“The most grisly of all weapons, smuggled back into Russia in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus by the Germans”. This was a quote from Churchill, he was referring to the German Empire in WW1. The Germans saw a weakness in the the Russian system, their Czar just fell and they were currently off balance, ripe for disruption. The Germans would then decide to send Vladimir Lenin over in a train to Russia.

The effects of this chess move are being felt to this day.

Lenin was a formidable character but he was possessed by a highly contagious mind virus. The virus being the ideology of Carl Marx, communism, Lenin was the perfect weapon. It came back to bite Germany in the long run but it achieved their short term goal of getting Russia out of World War 1 so they can focus westward. Always makes me wonder though, how dangerous(competent) were the Germans that they could come up with something like this and actually pull it off?

The Germans knew something people had known for centuries but never really applied it in this manner. When you design the security of your nation or business you’re always going to remove the low hanging fruit. When most of the low hanging fruit is removed the weakest link in the security chain will now be the humans in that system. If you can influence the humans you can control the system. How many stories have you heard where the executives of a company click a phishing email and gets their organization’s data held for ransom by hackers? A lot, even more than they like to admit, companies usually just pay the hackers and move on. Unfortunately states are not like companies, sometimes you can’t just take a lost a move on. Communism killed around 100M people give or take, these are not things to be taken lightly.

Good Contagions?

I kicked this off with a grim picture, but “mind viruses” are not always bad. The American revolution was a contagion of new ideas. John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson “The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington”. Just read the declaration of independence, at the time it was written was complete blasphemy, this was the time of royals and autocrats. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are *created equal*, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.