No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.

An idea is like a virus. Resilient. Highly contagious. The smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can grow to define...or destroy you.

Disease-carrying thoughts swarm and multiply in the dark and twisted labyrinths of our minds, and all that is needed is a mob and a good political slogan for the epidemic to be spread once again, with a burst of automatic weapons or a mushroom cloud.

Our continual connection to social media makes us prone to new forms of viral emotional effects. These are not media designed for calm reflection.

There is now a striking correlation between levels of education and holding stupid, destructive ideas, between being highly credentialled and falling for every fashionable conspiracy theory, every tribalistic affliction, every online fad.

Ideology is a virus.

A product is viral if its core functionality encourages users to invite their friends to become users too.

Disease Carrying thoughts swarm and multiply in the dark and twisted labyrinths of our minds, and all that is needed is a mob and a good political slogan for the epidemic to be spread once again, with a burst of automatic weapons or a mushroom cloud.

As a result of cumulative culture, we have ideas in our heads that are orders of magnitude smarter than we are.

Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions.

Around the country, ideas that originated on the hard right or in the fevered imaginations of conspiracy theorists are finding their way into the mainstream. In a number of cases, these ideas have become commonplace in American minds.

Stupid ideas are immortal. Each new generation invents them anew.

All ideas are second-hand, consciously or unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them.

It seems to me that in many ways, ideas have a life of their own. They appear to seize on people and make use of them.