Symbiotic Information Organisms

Abstract

Ideas, ideologies, religions, and belief systems can be understood as “symbiotic information organisms” – non-material yet organized structures of information that use human minds as their hosts. This thesis explores the notion that such information systems behave as if alive or sentient, exerting influence and pursuing their own survival and propagation through the human individuals and societies they inhabit. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives – from Richard Dawkins’ concept of memes and cultural evolution, Daniel Dennett’s theories of consciousness and idea propagation, Michel Foucault’s analysis of discourse and power, Carl Jung’s archetypal psychology, to Yuval Noah Harari’s insights on collective myths – we examine how these “living” idea-systems form, spread, and impact domains including politics, religion, warfare, public discourse, and personal identity. We review literature and integrate insights from both scholarly sources and conceptual essays (notably a series of blog posts by Josh Plovanic) that articulate the agency-like behavior of complex ideas. A conceptual framework is developed to characterize the life-cycle of symbiotic information organisms, including their symbiosis with human hosts, their self-organizing into social hierarchies, and their competitive and adaptive behaviors akin to biological organisms. Through analysis of historical and contemporary examples – from religious movements and political ideologies to conspiracy theories – the thesis demonstrates how these information entities can direct human collective action, sometimes to beneficial ends (e.g. fostering cooperation and shared identity) and other times to destructive extremes (fanaticism, conflict). We discuss methodological approaches to study such phenomena and consider implications for understanding power dynamics, social resilience, and individual autonomy. The conclusion reflects on strategies for metacognitive self-awareness and critical discourse that might allow humanity to reap the benefits of powerful shared ideas while mitigating the risks of becoming unwitting hosts to maladaptive or “parasitic” information organisms.

Introduction

In the age of information, it has become increasingly apparent that ideas can possess a power similar to living organisms. Major ideologies and belief systems spread across the world, replicating from mind to mind, organizing groups of people, and driving historical events much as a biological organism might grow and influence its environment. From religious faiths inspiring acts of compassion or crusades, to political doctrines mobilizing nations for war or social reform, ideas often seem to take on a life of their own. We routinely say “freedom is on the march” or “communism is spreading,” implying that these concepts behave almost like autonomous agents, pursuing goals through human hosts.

This thesis explores the provocative notion that ideas, ideologies, religions, and other belief systems function analogously to living organisms, using human minds and societies as their hosts and habitats. We label these entities “symbiotic information organisms.” They are symbiotic in that they live in a mutually influential relationship with their human hosts: the ideas depend on humans for survival and propagation, while humans derive meaning, structure, and identity from the ideas. They consist of information – beliefs, narratives, values, and conceptual structures – rather than protein or flesh. Yet, like biological organisms, they appear to have self-preserving and self-propagating behaviors. They enact their “will” through human action, as if the information itself were directing outcomes in the physical world. In this perspective, a religion or ideology can be seen as an invisible entity living within a network of minds, striving to spread and endure across generations.

The concept of ideas as living entities is not entirely new. Nearly half a century ago, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins proposed the idea of memes – units of cultural information that replicate and evolve much like genes in biological evolution. Memetics suggests that tunes, catchphrases, beliefs, or any culturally transmitted information can be seen as replicators that “infect” human minds, spread via communication, and undergo variation and selection. Philosopher Daniel Dennett later described human beings as “creatures of memes,” even suggesting that our sense of self is a product of meme-complexes competing for control of our attention and behavior. Anthropologist and psychologist Carl Jung, in a different context, spoke of archetypes – primal ideas within a collective unconscious – which recur across cultures as if they were perennial psychic organisms inhabiting human imaginations. More recently, historian Yuval Noah Harari has argued that entire social orders are built on shared “imagined realities” (like religions, nations, or money) which exist only because many people believe in them. “There are no gods, no nations, no money and no human rights, except in our collective imagination,” Harari writes, noting that such ideas have enabled humans to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Intriguingly, Harari asks why humans often end up serving the very fictional entities (churches, nations, corporations) that we ourselves invented – a question at the heart of the symbiotic relationship between humans and the information structures we create.

What does it mean for an idea to behave like a living thing? For one, it means the idea shows agency-like behavior – it spreads itself (through communication, persuasion, conversion, education), it defends itself (by resisting critique or adapting to counterarguments), and it can organize resources (through the collective action of its adherents) to achieve effects in the world. For example, a political ideology might “seek” to implement policies or revolution by galvanizing its followers; a religion might “desire” to gain new converts and might develop internal structures (clergy, missionaries) to fulfill that goal. Of course, the idea has no consciousness or will in the literal sense that a human has. Rather, the aggregate behavior of the humans influenced by the idea mimics an intentional pursuit of the idea’s continuation and expansion. The concept of symbiosis from biology – wherein two different organisms live in close association often to mutual benefit – provides a useful analogy. Human minds supply ideas with a home and transmission vehicle; ideas supply humans with meaning, purpose, and social cohesion. In many cases this relationship can be mutualistic, benefiting both host and idea. In other cases, it can become parasitic, where the idea drives harmful behavior (to the host or others) solely to perpetuate itself (consider destructive cults or extremist conspiracies).

The implications of viewing ideologies and beliefs as symbiotic information organisms are far-reaching. It offers a lens to understand phenomena such as:

• Political movements and state power: Why do nation-states or revolutionary ideologies sometimes demand extreme sacrifices? Perhaps because the idea of the nation or revolution has assumed priority, with people willing to die for flags and manifestos – essentially for ideas that have “colonized” their identity.
• Religious fervor and endurance: How can a religious creed persist for millennia? If the religion is an information organism, it has evolved strategies to survive – sacred texts (analogous to genetic code), rituals for transmission, norms to discourage apostasy (defense mechanisms), etc. Believers, in turn, derive community and existential meaning (a benefit to the host) even as they propagate the faith.
• War and conflict as clashes of ideas: Many wars can be seen not just as fights over resources or territory, but as battles between rival information organisms – for instance, democracy versus fascism in World War II, or capitalism versus communism in the Cold War. The people and nations involved are vehicles through which these abstract rivals contend.
• Social contagions and public discourse: In the modern information ecosystem, we witness how misinformation or conspiracy theories spread like wildfire online. These memeplexes (clusters of memes) can undermine public reason and prove exceedingly difficult to eradicate, almost as if society were battling an epidemic of mind viruses.
• Identity and self-concept: On an individual level, people often so closely identify with their beliefs (“*I am a Christian/*Muslim,” “*I am a socialist/*libertarian,” etc.) that the belief system integrates into the very sense of self. The symbiosis is so complete that a threat to the belief feels like a threat to the person, leading to fierce defense mechanisms. The idea protects itself through the person’s psychology.

In this thesis, we will develop a comprehensive framework for understanding these dynamics. In the Literature Review, we examine prior work and theories that have treated ideas as living or autonomous forces – from memetics and cultural evolution theory to philosophical and sociological perspectives on how ideas shape human reality. We also review a set of conceptual writings by Josh Plovanic, who articulates the notion of “living information” in detail, offering criteria and examples. In the Methodology section, we outline how we synthesize these interdisciplinary insights into a cohesive conceptual model, using analogical reasoning (between biological life and informational life) and case-study illustrations.

The core of the thesis is structured into thematic analysis chapters. Chapter 1 (Analysis) Characterizes Symbiotic Information Organisms, defining their key properties – complexity, abstraction, dependence on hosts, and profound influence on host behavior – and shows how they meet these criteria. Chapter 2 Examines Their Life Cycle and Evolution, describing how such information entities emerge (through human creativity or discovery), how they spread and mutate (communication, memetic selection), and how they persist or die out. Chapter 3 Focuses on Societal Structures, showing how symbiotic information organisms form collective structures – institutions, hierarchies, and cultures – to better achieve their “objectives” in the material world. We will see that governments and organizations can be viewed as physical avatars of ideas, acting to enforce an idea’s will. Chapter 4 Analyzes Conflict and Competition among these entities: ideological polarization, propaganda battles, and wars are recast as competition between information organisms for dominance (with human suffering often a byproduct of these titanic struggles between intangible foes). Chapter 5 Discusses the Individual Level – Identity and Mind, investigating how personal identity can be co-opted by ideas, the psychological mechanisms (confirmation bias, groupthink) that reinforce symbiotic relationships, and what cognitive tools (metacognition, skepticism) might enable individuals to regain agency from dominating beliefs.

Finally, the Conclusion reflects on the benefits and dangers of seeing ideas this way. This perspective can deepen our understanding of historical and current events – recognizing, for example, that to “defeat” an extremist movement requires more than killing its members; it requires discrediting or transforming the underlying idea (truly killing the information organism). It also raises ethical questions: If our noblest principles (freedom, justice, compassion) are themselves information organisms, should we not willingly serve them? At the same time, how do we guard against malignant ideas that hijack our minds? The thesis concludes with thoughts on developing a healthier information ecology – one that recognizes these symbiotic entities and seeks to moderate their excesses through education, open discourse, and resilience against misinformation. In sum, by treating ideologies and belief systems as symbiotic information organisms, we gain a powerful framework to understand the interplay between mind and ideas, enabling us to navigate the future of human collective life with greater insight and intention.

Literature Review

Understanding ideas as living, evolving entities requires drawing upon multiple streams of thought across disciplines. In this literature review, we will discuss key contributions from evolutionary biology (the meme concept), philosophy of mind, sociology of knowledge, psychology, and systems theory that inform the notion of symbiotic information organisms. We will also incorporate insights from contemporary essays and analyses that explicitly ponder the agency of ideas.

Memes and Cultural Replicators: Dawkins and Beyond

The foundation for viewing ideas as self-propagating units was laid by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976). In a brief but influential chapter, Dawkins introduced the term meme to describe a unit of cultural transmission – such as a melody, a catchphrase, or a belief – that propagates from person to person by imitation and learning. He famously suggested that “just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, memes propagate themselves by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation” (Dawkins, 1976). Memes, in Dawkins’ view, undergo variation (different versions of an idea), competition, and selection, leading to cultural evolution. This concept establishes a Darwinian perspective on ideas: the ones we see widely spread are those that proved good at getting copied – not necessarily those that are true or beneficial, but those that are memetically “fit.” For example, a catchy tune or an emotionally resonant rumor can spread rapidly simply because it sticks in minds (like an earworm or a piece of gossip), much as a virus spreads by exploiting host behavior. Dawkins even likened certain pervasive faith-based ideas to “viruses of the mind,” implying that they spread despite being harmful or false, by hijacking cognitive apparatus (just as a virus hijacks cellular machinery) – a controversial analogy that highlights the parasitic potential of memes.

Building on Dawkins, Susan Blackmore’s book The Meme Machine (1999) further developed memetic theory. Blackmore argues that humans are “meme machines,” evolved not just to pass on genes but also to serve as hosts and vehicles for memes. She posits that many distinctive human traits (our big brains, language, our tendency to imitate) arose through a process of memetic drive – early hominids who were better at copying useful memes (like tool-making techniques or social rituals) had an advantage, leading to brains increasingly adept at handling memes. Blackmore extends the idea to modern phenomena: religions, for instance, are seen as memeplexes – complexes of memes that coevolve to reinforce each other and ensure their joint replication. A religion’s memeplex might include doctrines (“belief in this creed will save you”), practices (rituals, prayers), and ethical injunctions (taboos against questioning the faith, or injunctions to spread it to others), all of which work together to preserve and spread the religion. Such a system can be analyzed in terms of memetic selection: those configurations of faith that retained believers and won converts (through promise of reward, fear of punishment, social bonding, etc.) outcompeted less “catchy” or less retentive faith-systems. The net result is that some religions have survived and grown over centuries (those that were memetically robust), while others have gone extinct as their memeplexes failed to propagate.

Dennett (1991; 2006) has been another prominent voice in the discussion of ideas as autonomous agents. In Consciousness Explained and later essays, Daniel Dennett describes human consciousness itself as an emergent property of competing cultural narratives (memes) within the brain. He uses the term “meme-infested” to describe human brains – suggesting that much of our thinking consists of linguistically mediated ideas that didn’t originate purely within ourselves but were adopted from culture. He argues that memes can be thought of as having an agenda: “A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library,” Dennett quips, highlighting how the drive to accumulate and transmit knowledge can be seen as the memes using scholars to replicate themselves (Dennett, 1990). In Breaking the Spell (2006), which examines religion through a scientific lens, Dennett portrays religions as evolving creatures that have developed strong survival strategies – such as discouraging skepticism (analogous to a virus suppressing the host’s immune response) or encouraging proselytizing and high birth rates among believers (analogous to increasing reproduction rate). While he stops short of claiming that ideas are literally conscious, Dennett suggests we adopt the “intentional stance” towards memes and cultural systems – that is, treat them as if they were agents with intentions – because this often provides a useful predictive model for their behavior. This is much like how we might say a plant “wants” to grow towards sunlight; we know the plant has no mind, but acting as if it has the goal of seeking light helps explain its behavior. Similarly, saying “Islam (or liberalism, etc.) wants to expand” is a shorthand for the observable reality that the belief system tends to motivate behaviors that result in its expansion.

Power of Discourse and Collective Constructs: Foucault and Harari

While memetics provides a biological and evolutionary framework, social theorists like Michel Foucault and historians like Yuval Noah Harari offer a macro-social perspective on how systems of ideas assert autonomous power.

Michel Foucault’s work, especially in Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976-1984), examines how certain discourses (systems of knowledge and language) structure society and even human subjectivity. Though Foucault does not use terms like “memes,” he effectively maps out how an “episteme” or dominant discourse can take on a life of its own within institutions. For instance, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault shows how the idea of a disciplinary society (with surveillance, normalization, etc.) permeated prisons, schools, factories, and armies, shaping behaviors without a single mastermind directing it – the idea of disciplinary power spread and instantiated itself through various human practices, using institutions and experts as carriers. Foucault’s concept of power/knowledge posits that what a society holds to be “true” or acceptable is not merely an independent rational discovery, but is intimately linked to power structures; once a certain narrative becomes dominant (say, the medical model of madness vs. the religious model of demonic possession), it reproduces itself by excluding alternative narratives and training individuals to think within its framework. This is analogous to an information organism defending and entrenching itself. A Foucauldian reading would say that it’s not individuals who control ideas, but ideas (via discourse) that control individuals. For example, the idea of criminality and the accompanying institutions of law, policing, and punishment in modern society can be seen as an autonomous regime – one might say “the justice system has its own logic” which officials and citizens alike end up serving. Similarly, political ideologies could be viewed in Foucauldian terms: liberalism, Marxism, etc., each produce certain “truths” and social norms that adherents take for granted, thereby perpetuating the ideology’s worldview through everyday practices and policies. In summary, Foucault provides evidence of ideas as social structures that act through us often unbeknownst to us, aligning with the notion of powerful ideas using human agents.

Yuval Noah Harari, in his sweeping histories Sapiens (2014) and Homo Deus (2016), emphasizes the role of collective fictions or shared myths in enabling large-scale human cooperation. Harari identifies religion, nationhood, money, and corporations as examples of intersubjective realities – things that exist not physically, but in the shared imagination of many people. “There are no gods, no nations, no money and no human rights, except in our collective imagination,” Harari writes (2014). These imagined orders are incredibly powerful: they coordinate the actions of thousands or millions of people. Harari goes a step further to observe a kind of inversion of control: humans invented these constructs to serve our needs, yet we often end up serving them, sometimes with extreme devotion. “We invented them to serve us; why do we find ourselves sacrificing our lives in their service?” he asks. This poignant question resonates with the idea of symbiotic information organisms. It implies that once created, an idea like “the nation” or “the corporation” acquires an autonomous impetus – institutions and individuals will sacrifice, fight, even die under these banners. In effect, the idea (e.g., the nation) ensures its own survival by compelling hosts (citizens) to prioritize it over their personal survival. Harari also hints at the evolutionary competition of ideas: weaker myths (e.g., small tribal religions) gave way to stronger ones (universal religions, or modern secular ideologies) as societies merged and grew; those shared fictions that could knit large groups together (like the myth of a divine king or the idea of universal human rights) outcompeted those suited only to small clans. In Harari’s framework, the story is the fundamental unit – much like Dawkins’ meme – that spreads and adapts. We can see the convergence: whereas Dawkins gives the microscopic view (memes in brains), Harari gives the macroscopic view (stories ruling civilizations), but both suggest that information replicators drive historical change.

Collective Unconscious and Archetypes: Jungian Perspectives

Another perspective comes from depth psychology, particularly Carl Jung’s concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious. Jung proposed that humans share a deep layer of mind – the collective unconscious – populated by universal prototypes of ideas, or archetypes (the Mother, the Hero, the Shadow, etc.). These archetypes manifest in myths, dreams, and artistic creations across all cultures, as if they are living ancient entities expressing themselves through human minds. While Jung’s framework is more mystical and not about idea propagation per se, it reinforces the notion that certain powerful ideas (or symbols) persist and recur beyond any one individual. An archetype might be thought of as a meme-like structure that has always been part of the human psyche, effectively using generation after generation of humans to live on in stories and behaviors. For example, the archetype of the Apocalypse or the Flood recurs in myths globally; one could say this idea has survived for thousands of years by embedding itself in different religions and legends. Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz once remarked that archetypes “have a dynamic of their own” – when an archetype is activated in a person, it can overwhelm the ego and direct behavior. This aligns with our theme: a deep-seated idea (say, the notion of a Messiah or a Utopian Savior) can seize entire communities (mass movements expecting a messianic figure, secular or religious) and drive historical events (e.g., the Taiping Rebellion in China was spurred by a man’s vision of himself as a divine son – an archetypal story that mobilized millions). Thus, Jungian theory, in its metaphorical way, treats some ideas as quasi-autonomous forces that transcend individual minds.

Systems Theory, Complexity, and Information Ecology

The idea of symbiotic information organisms also resonates with systems theory and the study of emergent phenomena. In the mid-20th century, systems theorists and cyberneticians like Norbert Wiener and Gregory Bateson began to look at society and mind as information systems. They noted that feedback loops of information can create self-regulating or self-perpetuating patterns. For instance, in a complex system (like an ecosystem or a society), certain patterns – including belief systems – might reach a stable self-perpetuating state (an attractor in complexity science terms). The concept of a “self-organizing system” is key: it means order or behavior emerges without a central controller, through local interactions. A symbiotic information organism can be viewed as a self-organizing information pattern at the societal level. Sociologist Niklas Luhmann even argued that society consists of communications and that different “communication systems” (like art, law, religion, politics) operate with their own internal codes and logics, autopoietically (self-producing). Luhmann’s social systems theory essentially describes society as made up of idea-systems communicating with themselves and through people, quite akin to information organisms that maintain themselves. Likewise, in complex adaptive systems, agents follow simple rules but can give rise to emergent entities – one might say individual people following social norms and talking to each other “compute” an emergent entity which is the culture or ideology itself, maintaining itself through those interactions.

Some thinkers have explicitly combined evolutionary and systems thinking in social contexts. The concept of the “global brain” (Heylighen, 2015) envisions human society’s information networks behaving like a giant brain, with ideas as the neural patterns. In such models, information organisms could be thought of as large-scale “thoughts” in the global brain – they emerge, compete, and either dissipate or stabilize. Another related notion is the superorganism: biologist EO Wilson and others have described ant colonies or bee hives as superorganisms where individual animals act like cells in a larger body. By analogy, we can consider whether a political or religious movement is a superorganism where individual humans function like cells serving the collective mind of the movement (the information organism). This analogy has been drawn in literature – e.g., science fiction author Stanislaw Lem in The Invincible speaks of “necroevolution” where swarms of tiny robots form a collective intelligence, and some sociologists have likened humanity’s cities and networks to superorganisms. The novelty in our thesis is focusing on the informational nature of this superorganism: it’s not just a mass of bodies, but a mass of minds linked by shared information, that constitutes the organism.

Josh Plovanic’s “Living Information” Essays

In addition to academic literature, this thesis draws on a series of essays by Josh Plovanic (2017-2021) who articulates a coherent view of ideas as living, agent-like entities. These blog posts serve as a conceptual bridge, marrying insights from philosophy, theology, and information theory. Plovanic explicitly asks: *“What if complex information, especially abstract conceptualizations and complex ideas, like ideologies and belief systems, have a significant level of agency or possibly even will and awareness?”*. He proposes criteria for **“living information”**, which closely parallel points raised by other thinkers but are worth summarizing:

• Complexity: Only sufficiently complex information structures can exhibit agency-like properties. Simple facts or shapes (like “red” or a triangle) are inert, but a system of ideas (an ideology with many interlinked concepts) can behave in an adaptive way.
• Abstraction: The information must be abstract – it cannot exist or propagate on its own in the physical world, but requires minds as hosts. For instance, the idea of “justice” or “karma” doesn’t float in the air; it lives in people’s minds and conversations.
• Symbiosis with Hosts: The information depends on conscious beings to instantiate it, and it influences those beings’ behavior to its advantage. Plovanic uses the term “symbiote” to describe how an idea attaches to a person’s mind as host and then operates through that person.
• Profound Impact on Behavior: Truly living information drastically alters the behavior of its host in service of the idea’s propagation. For example, a political ideology might inspire a person to devote their life to activism – the person’s resources and efforts are harnessed to spread the ideology.

Plovanic observes that people who strongly believe in these complex ideas often form hierarchies and groups centered around the ideas, effectively creating organized structures (churches, political parties, militant cells) that execute the will of the information. This echoes what we’ve noted in other literature: ideas organizing human collectives to act. He writes, *“these ideologies and belief systems centralize and systemize their believers and followers into hierarchies and groups”*. From Plovanic’s Christian-influenced perspective, even governments and institutions themselves become agents of ideas, as *“these groups will always act on behalf of ideas and ideologies”*. This is strikingly similar to Foucault’s notion of institutions enacting discourses, and to Dennett’s idea of people as unwitting agents of memes.

A particularly important insight from Plovanic’s essays is how information organisms ensure their survival and expansion. He argues that if information were “living and calculating,” it would realize that its success depends on systematizing more hosts and eliminating competition. Indeed, he notes: *“it knows that the only way it can achieve its goals and objectives and do ‘work’ in the physical world is through the systemization and organization of organisms like human beings… it is stronger and more powerful the more hosts it obtains and systemizes.”*. Thus, these information entities naturally drive their hosts to proselytize and recruit others. One can see this in many human activities: evangelical movements sending missionaries worldwide, revolutionary ideologies spreading their creed, even fan communities of a theory or art trying to get others on board. Additionally, Plovanic discusses how “living” information will compete with rivals and attempt to neutralize or absorb them, which is a clear parallel to interspecies competition or predation in biology. This can manifest as sectarian conflict, ideological propaganda wars, or intellectual debates – the underlying information structures are vying for memetic territory (human minds and cultures).

Plovanic’s work also delves into the psychological entrenchment of beliefs. Once an idea has latched onto a host mind, it can be extremely resistant to removal. Even evidence that disproves a belief may be ignored if the belief has become part of the person’s identity or worldview. He compares conspiracy theories to “viral symbiotic information” that, once accepted as true, “latches on to [the] mind like a symbiote to a host,” turning the believer into an agent who spreads the theory further. This description aligns well with modern research in social psychology on the confirmation bias and the backfire effect – people often reject information that contradicts their deeply held beliefs, effectively acting to preserve the integrity of the belief-system. In our framework, that is the information organism’s immune system at work, using the host’s cognitive biases as defenses to survive inside the mind.

Overall, the literature converges on several key points:

• Ideas can be analyzed as self-replicating entities (memes, narrative units) that follow an evolutionary logic.
• On larger scales, clusters of ideas form systems (discourses, memeplexes, imagined orders) that exhibit emergent agency-like behavior, influencing human society in a top-down manner.
• Humans and ideas exist in a symbiotic relationship: humans give ideas persistence and causal power in the material world, while ideas give humans frameworks of meaning and coordination.
• These information organisms have adaptations for survival: they encourage behaviors in hosts that spread them (teaching, preaching, writing), they discourage disbelieving or disobeying them (sometimes via social or psychological penalties), and they may actively compete by undermining alternative ideas (through argument, censorship, or even violence).
• The metaphor of virus or parasite is often invoked for ideas that harmfully exploit hosts (e.g., destructive cults or malicious rumors), whereas mutualistic symbiosis might describe ideas that benefit their hosts (e.g., a shared belief in human rights that helps maintain peace and justice – good for society as a whole, though even that can be debated).
• Recognizing the quasi-autonomous role of ideas helps explain why rational individuals, en masse, can sometimes act against their immediate self-interest but in line with some ideological interest – because that ideology has infiltrated their priorities.

With this theoretical foundation established, we can move to constructing our methodology for analyzing symbiotic information organisms and then to the substantive analysis of how these entities function in various realms of human affairs.

Methodology (Conceptual Framework)

This thesis is primarily a theoretical and interpretive study, aiming to synthesize existing ideas into a cohesive framework rather than to gather new empirical data. The subject – “symbiotic information organisms” – is itself a conceptual construct that we will refine and test against historical and contemporary phenomena. Our methodology thus involves:

1. Conceptual Analysis and Definition: We begin by clearly defining what we mean by a symbiotic information organism, drawing from the criteria identified in both scholarly literature and Plovanic’s essays. This involves breaking down the concept into attributes (complexity, ability to propagate, host dependence, etc.) and ensuring these attributes are meaningful and observable. We also delineate sub-concepts like host, symbiosis, propagation, mutation in the context of information rather than biology. Defining analogies carefully is important to avoid mere metaphor; we aim to establish an analytic equivalence – for instance, if in biology a symbiont is an organism that lives on/in a host and has effects on that host, then for information we specify what counts as “living on/in” (residing in a mind or a repository) and what “effects on host” means (changes in behavior or thinking).

2. Interdisciplinary Synthesis: The framework leverages analogical reasoning from biology (especially parasitology and symbiosis theory) and evolutionary theory (natural selection, adaptation) to apply to the domain of ideas. We treat major idea-systems as analogous to species of organisms. This analogy is not taken as exact identity but as a guiding model. By mapping features of living organisms (birth, growth, competition, reproduction, co-evolution) onto idea-systems, we generate hypotheses about how idea-systems behave. For example, the biological notion of a niche (an environment to which an organism is adapted) can be translated into the idea context as a socio-cultural niche – conditions under which a certain ideology thrives (e.g., a period of economic distress might be the niche for the growth of a revolutionary ideology). Through such analogies, we structure our examination of case studies: we ask what “environmental pressures” acted on, say, Christianity in the Roman Empire or on Marxism in the 19th century, and how those idea-systems adapted or perished.

3. Qualitative Case Studies: While we do not perform new archival research, we use a case study approach to illustrate and evaluate our framework. These cases are drawn from historical records and secondary sources. For example, to show how a religion functions as a symbiotic information organism, we might recount the spread of Buddhism or Islam, highlighting the mechanisms of propagation (missionaries, conquest, trade) and adaptation (syncretism with local beliefs, formation of institutions) – then interpret these in our framework’s terms (the idea’s “reproductive strategy” and “mutation” to fit new hosts). For ideologies and political movements, we might examine something like the dissemination of Enlightenment ideas in the 18th century leading to revolutions, or the 20th-century ideological struggle between democracy and totalitarianism. We also consider modern cases such as the rise of internet conspiracy theories (e.g., QAnon) to observe high-speed memetic evolution in the digital realm. Each case is analyzed in a structured way: identifying the core information organism (the belief system or narrative), its host population, its symbiotic effects (how it influences hosts and what it gives them), and its interactions with rival idea-systems.

4. Use of First-Person Accounts and Reflections: Given that part of our source base is essayistic and reflective (Plovanic’s blog, which itself sometimes uses introspection and anecdote), we incorporate some first-person or subjective accounts to illustrate the inner experience of hosting a powerful idea. For instance, Plovanic’s reflections on how it feels to have one’s mind “programmed” by certain ideas provide qualitative data on the phenomenology of being a host. We treat these accounts not as proof but as rich descriptive material that can be thematically coded – e.g., themes of loss of agency, identity fusion with belief, perception of higher purpose, etc. These themes inform our understanding of the symbiosis.

5. Analytical Induction and Theory Refinement: As we examine various instances of information organisms and compare them, we look for common patterns that inductively strengthen the components of our framework, or for deviant cases that require refining the theory. For example, we ask: Do all successful information organisms rely on some method of recruiting new hosts (be it through persuasion, inheritance (parents teaching children), or force)? If we find a case where an idea spread without active recruitment (perhaps purely through observation and imitation), we adjust our understanding of propagation. Or, we consider whether mutual benefit is necessary – are there cases where an idea flourished while severely harming its hosts (like a deadly cult)? If so, how did that sustain (perhaps hosts were replaced quickly, akin to a high-host-turnover parasite)? These comparisons help ensure our framework is not a just-so story but has explanatory robustness.

6. Intentional Stance and Heuristic Modeling: Following Dennett’s recommendation, we often adopt an intentional stance as a heuristic – speaking of the idea as if it has intentions – and then verify if this generates valid explanations that could also be translated into more neutral language. For instance, we might say “Communism strategically adapted to different cultures” and then translate that to a mechanistic explanation: communist ideology was reinterpreted by local thinkers in China, resulting in Maoism, which allowed it to fit the Chinese socio-economic context (the “strategy” in anthropomorphic terms corresponds to actual intellectual adaptation by proponents). This two-step approach (intentional description, then mechanistic explanation) guards against misleading anthropomorphism. It allows the narrative clarity of treating ideas like agents while maintaining scientific rigor by ultimately grounding those descriptions in human actions and interactions.

7. Ethical and Philosophical Reflection: Since the concept veers into philosophical territory about autonomy, will, and self, we include a reflective mode in the methodology. We acknowledge our own role as hosts to the very ideas we discuss – for example, the thesis itself is an idea that will spread to readers. This reflexive awareness adds an additional layer: we apply the theory to itself in a meta-analytic way to ensure coherence (if we claim all idea-systems bias their hosts, we must be aware of the biases in our analysis due to the frameworks we adopt).

The scope of this methodology is admittedly broad and theoretical. It does not rely on statistical or quantitative analysis; instead, it uses comparative historical and qualitative analysis anchored in a novel conceptual lens. The validity of the results will therefore be judged by explanatory power and coherence rather than predictive precision or falsifiability in the Popperian sense (though we will point out observable implications of our theory that could be tested in future research, such as patterns of idea propagation under certain conditions).

In terms of sources, aside from the theoretical works already reviewed, we use historical accounts (e.g., of religious expansions, social movements), psychological studies on belief and identity (for example, research on extreme group behavior or deprogramming of cult members), and contemporary observations in media studies (for how information spreads on social networks). The blog sources (Plovanic) are cited frequently to ground abstract points in concrete, accessible language and examples, while academic sources provide credibility and depth. All references are cited in APA style and listed in the References section, ensuring scholarly rigor.

By combining these approaches, the methodology enables us to see known events under a new light and to weave together insights from multiple disciplines into the unified idea of symbiotic information organisms. It is a deliberately integrative method, suitable for the interdisciplinary nature of the question at hand.

With methodology in place, we now proceed to the core analysis, where we apply this framework to explore how symbiotic information organisms manifest and operate in various domains – from politics and religion to warfare, society, and personal identity.

Core Analysis

Defining Symbiotic Information Organisms: Properties and Dynamics

To analyze how ideas function as symbiotic information organisms, we must first clearly define this concept and its key properties. Drawing on the criteria from Plovanic’s “Living Information” hypothesis and the interdisciplinary literature, we identify several defining characteristics:

• Non-material Information Structure: A symbiotic information organism is not a physical entity but an organized information structure. It consists of interrelated concepts, narratives, values, and symbols. For example, “Marxism” is not just one idea but a structured set of ideas (class struggle, historical materialism, labor theory of value, etc.) along with symbols (hammer and sickle), texts (Das Kapital), and associated rituals (singing “The Internationale”, workers’ rallies). This structure is typically recorded in various media (books, oral tradition, digital media) and in human memory. It is systematized – meaning the ideas reinforce each other and create a coherent worldview or framework.

• Dependence on Human Minds (Hosts): These information structures inhabit human minds; they require minds to interpret, believe, and enact them. Without people who understand and internalize the ideology or religion, it would cease to have any effect (it would be “dead” information). Plovanic emphasizes that abstract ideas *“cannot exist outright without a mind… being a host to it”*. A book sitting unread on a shelf (though it contains the information pattern) is inert until a mind engages with it. In this sense, human brains and communication networks are the ecosystem or biome in which information organisms live. Each individual mind that holds the beliefs is a host organism for the idea. Much like a cell hosting a virus, the mind hosting an idea will start to behave in ways dictated by the idea’s “instructions”.

• Agency-like Behavior / Will to Propagate: Once residing in hosts, the information structure influences behavior in a direction that tends to perpetuate or spread the information. We can say the information organism behaves as if it has a will – specifically, a will to survive and propagate. For instance, a person “infected” with a revolutionary ideology often feels compelled to spread the message, to convert others or take actions that align with the ideology’s goals (overthrowing the old order, etc.). As Plovanic notes, these ideas *“have a will of their own, but are dependent on… human beings… to operate and complete their objectives.”*. The idea’s “will” is inferred from consistent patterns: nearly every major religion includes missionary or pedagogical components (built-in propagation), and every major ideology encourages advocacy. These are not coincidences but evolved traits of the information organism. Memetics would explain this by saying memes that didn’t encourage propagation left fewer copies and were outcompeted. From our intentional stance, we simply say the idea “wants” to spread and thus makes its hosts spread it.

• Symbiosis: Mutual Influence and Dependency: The term symbiotic underscores that there is a relationship between the information organism and the human host that can range from mutualistic to parasitic. In many cases, there is a mutual benefit: the idea provides the human with meaning, community, purpose, or explanatory frameworks (which help reduce uncertainty about life’s questions), and in return the human provides the idea with a vehicle for existence and reproduction (by believing, practicing, and teaching it). For example, consider a charitable religious creed – the person gains comfort, moral guidance, and social support through their faith, while the faith (as an information system) gains a devoted practitioner who will likely socialize their children into the faith and perhaps do charitable works that improve the faith’s reputation, attracting more converts. Both host and idea prosper. This is analogous to a gut bacterium that helps its human host digest food (benefiting the host) while getting a nourishing environment for itself.

  However, symbiosis can shift to commensal or parasitic forms. Some ideas might benefit greatly from the host while giving little or nothing in return (commensalism or slight parasitism), and extreme cases actually harm the host (parasitism) while furthering themselves. For example, a doomsday cult that leads members to commit suicide clearly harms hosts; yet, if the cult’s story is recorded or sensationalized, it might ironically spread the cult’s core ideas posthumously (through news or legend, inspiring copycats). Another example: extremist terrorist ideologies often drive their adherents to martyrdom – deadly for the individual, but the act itself propagates the ideology by inspiring others or by advertising the cause. This resembles a pathogen that kills a host but in the process spreads to new hosts (like a virus that makes a person cough their lungs out, thereby infecting bystanders). Such cases show the information organism’s drive to propagate can override host wellbeing.

  In most enduring relationships, though, some balance is struck – a too-lethal meme (like one prompting immediate self-destruction of all believers) tends not to spread widely or last long, for obvious reasons. There is an evolutionary pressure for information organisms to keep their hosts alive and capable of further transmission – hence many religions have doctrines promoting family life and health, and many ideologies will moderate extreme demands to avoid burnout of followers. It’s akin to how successful parasites often evolve to be less lethal over time.

• Structured Reproduction (Communication) Mechanisms: Symbiotic information organisms propagate primarily through communication – speech, text, imagery, ritual. These are the analogs of reproduction. A meme reproduces when one person communicates it to another and it “takes hold” in the second person’s mind. Therefore, these idea-systems typically develop robust methods of transmission:

  • Language and Labeling: As one blog post title suggests, “Language, Labeling, and the Understanding of Systems” is crucial. Ideas carve out semantic space – they coin terms and slogans that carry their content. Mastery of language is pivotal for any information organism. For example, political ideologies create powerful labels (“freedom”, “bourgeoisie”, “jihad”) that encapsulate key concepts and can evoke strong responses. The more intuitively and emotionally resonant the language, the more effectively the idea replicates (people remember and repeat it). Narratives and myths are another vehicle – converting abstract principles into stories (e.g., the hagiography of saints in a religion, or anecdotes of founding fathers in nationalism) helps embed the idea in memory and culture. In short, symbiotic information organisms use all the tools of human symbolic communication as their reproduction strategies.

  • Education and Indoctrination: Formalized transmission, such as religious schooling or political indoctrination programs, are essentially the reproductive organs of these information organisms. They ensure that new generations of hosts are infected with the idea from a young age, when minds are most malleable. This is analogous to heredity in biology – passing the information down from parent to child. A child raised in a devout household often adopts the same faith, not through independent discovery but through constant exposure (akin to vertical transmission of a virus from mother to offspring, though here socially mediated). Many ideologies also incorporate rituals of initiation (baptism, pledges, etc.), which serve to bind the host to the idea and mark the successful implantation of the information organism in a new person.

  • Media and Technology: As technology evolves, so do the propagation methods of ideas. The printing press, radio, television, and the internet each dramatically increased the reach and speed of memetic spread. A symbiotic information organism that masters a new medium can experience explosive growth – consider how the Protestant Reformation (an idea complex challenging Catholic doctrine) coincided with the spread of printed pamphlets, or how modern extremist movements exploit social media algorithms to disseminate propaganda rapidly. The internet era has given us a nearly pure view of memes-as-replicators: viral videos, hashtags, and conspiracy theories that can achieve worldwide penetration in days, using humans as inadvertent vectors (sharing, liking). Our framework thus pays attention to the infrastructure supporting an idea’s reproduction. If we map an information organism’s “body,” we might say a religion’s body is its community of believers, but its reproductive system is its clergy and missionaries, its genetic material is its scriptures, and nowadays its mutation labs are internet forums where doctrine can morph.

• Adaptation and Evolution: Over time, information organisms can mutate and evolve. This may happen by design (deliberate reform, reinterpretation by thought leaders) or organically (misinterpretations, syncretism with local culture). Those variations that better fit the cognitive and societal environment tend to spread more. For example, when Buddhism spread from India to China, it had to adapt to Chinese culture – the result was Chinese Buddhism (e.g., Ch’an/Zen) which incorporated elements of Taoism. One could view the original Buddhist memeplex encountering a new host environment and mutating to survive in it. Ideas also adapt in response to competition. If one ideology is attracting the youth, a rival ideology might adjust its messaging to match appeal. Politicians often “steal” rhetoric from each other – essentially memes jumping between memeplexes – which is adaptation in action. This dynamic confirms their pseudo-life: living things adapt to survive, and so do vigorous ideas. Those that stayed rigid often became obsolete or niche (Latin as a lingua franca died out largely because it refused to evolve like vernacular languages did). Meanwhile, languages that changed (like English, absorbing words from many sources) thrived and spread.

  Plovanic suggests that “living” information competes with and attempts to neutralize challenging or incompatible ideologies or belief systems. History provides ample examples: dominant religions declaring heresies and launching inquisitions (the information organism’s immune system attacking invading memes), states instituting censorship or propaganda to maintain the dominant ideology, or on a softer level, scientific paradigms resisting new theories (as described by Thomas Kuhn – perhaps the reigning paradigm is an info-organism holding institutional power until it is overthrown by a new one in a “paradigm shift,” akin to one species outcompeting another). The outcome of such competition can be assimilation (the rival ideas merge or one is absorbed – e.g., elements of pagan festivals being incorporated into Christian holidays), extinction (one idea so thoroughly debunks or displaces another that the losing idea survives only in historical texts), or coexistence (each finds a niche, sometimes by differentiation – e.g., different religions focusing on different aspects of life or different geographic areas).

• Formation of Collective Bodies (Organizations and Systems): A crucial property that emerges from the above is that successful symbiotic information organisms often create macroscopic structures – social, political, or institutional “bodies” – that act on behalf of the idea. This is where individual behavior scales up to collective behavior. For instance, Islam as an idea gave rise not only to individual believers but also to the Caliphate as a political institution, Sharia as a legal system, and a transnational ummah (community of believers). These structures allowed the idea to wield power in the world similar to how a multi-cellular organism can do more than a single cell. A lone host can spread an idea to a few friends, but an organized church or party can convert or coerce thousands. Plovanic notes: *“Even governments and the systems and agencies they create become agents and representatives of these ‘sentient’ ideas in their own right”*. In other words, once an idea has formed an institution, that institution perpetuates the idea beyond the original believers. We see this clearly in bureaucracies: The idea of “nation-state” is carried by government institutions – a law or norm continues to be enforced by the institution even if the specific people in it change, as long as newcomers are socialized into the same roles. Institutions thus allow for idea continuity and enforcement. One dramatic example is the longevity of the Catholic Church – as an institution, it has carried the Christian memeplex across nearly two millennia, weathering countless personnel changes and social upheavals, essentially functioning as the enduring “body” of that information organism.

Now that we have outlined what symbiotic information organisms are and how they operate in general terms, we will delve into specific domains to see these principles in action: politics, religion, warfare, public discourse, and identity. In each domain, we identify the key symbiotic information organisms and explore their host relationships and impacts.

Politics and Ideology: Information Organisms in Power

Ideologies – comprehensive packages of ideas about how society should be organized – are classic examples of symbiotic information organisms at work in the political realm. Liberalism, conservatism, socialism, fascism, etc., have all, at times, behaved like living entities vying for survival and dominance. They recruit adherents (party members, followers), articulate goals (policy agendas, revolutions), and often come into conflict with one another in the political arena.

Consider the Cold War of the 20th century: it was not just a geopolitical struggle between the USA and USSR, but fundamentally a battle between two ideologies – liberal capitalism and communism – for the “souls” of nations. Each ideology had its host systems (Western democracies vs. Eastern bloc), and each actively tried to spread its information system globally. The United States promoted its model via diplomatic pressure, propaganda (Voice of America broadcasts, for instance), and even force or covert operations to install friendly regimes. The Soviet Union did the same through supporting socialist movements, Comintern activities, and so on. From our vantage, the information organisms (the idea-systems) were using these superpower hosts to fight and spread. The language of the time even reflects it: “the Free World” vs “World Communism” – almost as if two giant entities were in combat. Indeed, many conflicts in Asia, Africa, and Latin America during that era can be seen as local outbreaks of the global ideological war, with local actors serving as hosts/vectors for one ideology or the other (e.g., the Vietnam War pitted a communist movement versus a capitalist-backed regime, each side buttressed by the larger networks of ideas and material support from the superpowers).

Political scientist Samuel Huntington once described modern politics in terms of “ideological conflict” and “clashes of civilizations” – both concepts resonate with idea-centric explanations. An ideological conflict is explicitly a fight over which idea will rule. The fact that millions of individuals were willing to kill or die not just for concrete things like land, but for capitalism or communism – abstractions – underscores how deeply the symbiosis runs. People had internalized these doctrines as superior to their own biological lives, illustrating how an idea can compel self-sacrifice for its sake.

On a smaller scale, within domestic politics, we can observe how political parties and movements act as vehicles for idea-systems. A party is basically an institutional host for an ideology (or a coalition of ideologies). It disseminates propaganda (ideas to voters), it tries to convert the populace to its way of thinking (campaigning, messaging), and if it succeeds, its ideology then governs – meaning the policies enacted are the ideas made manifest. Analysts sometimes comment that certain political parties seem to maintain consistent agendas even as individual leaders come and go – that hints at the autonomy of the underlying idea system. For instance, in the U.S., one might say the Democratic and Republican parties each have a kind of “mind” of their own – a platform that persists, evolving slowly, while politicians are “carriers” of that platform. They shape and are shaped by it, but a politician who strays too far from the party ideology often finds themselves ousted. It’s as if the ideology’s immune system expels or marginalizes deviant members (witness how party bases react to representatives who break from orthodoxy).

Another political phenomenon explicable by our framework is ideological “sleeper agents” or infiltration. Plovanic speculates that *“ideologies themselves have agents or representatives that infiltrate groups or societies, activate under certain stimuli, and then work towards completing the objectives of the ideas they represent”*. We see real-world analogues in things like extremist radicalization: a person might live quietly in a society but harbor an extremist ideology (say jihadism or militant white supremacy); under certain conditions, that latent idea “activates,” and the person tries to undermine or attack the society from within, loyal not to any foreign state but to the ideology in their mind. This is precisely what Plovanic calls ideological infiltration. It confounds traditional security thinking which looks for organizational ties; here the tie is invisible – the person is an independent agent of an idea. This concept has become increasingly relevant with the rise of leaderless, internet-spread extremist movements, where individuals self-radicalize via online content and commit violence “in the name of” an ideology (be it ISIS’s brand of Islamism or the anti-government “boogaloo” ideology), without direct orders. They are agents of the idea. This challenges law enforcement: how do you fight an enemy that is essentially an idea living in people’s heads rather than a formal group? It reinforces that ideas can be enemies or allies in their own right. Countering them might require ideological measures (counter-messaging, deradicalization programs) akin to treating a memetic infection, rather than just physical measures.

When ideologies gain state power, they often entrench themselves by reshaping laws and education to secure their survival. For example, after the French Revolution, the new republic attempted to reinvent social rituals, even the calendar, to break the hold of the old monarchical and religious ideas – essentially, the revolutionary idea-system tried to eliminate rival memes (monarchy, Catholicism) and monopolize the memetic ecosystem of France. Many totalitarian regimes elevate an ideology to quasi-religious status (e.g., Juche in North Korea, which is the state ideology treated almost like a sacred doctrine). They will rewrite history, promote cults of personality (embedding the leader as a symbol of the idea), and severely punish dissent (which is heresy against the ruling information organism). All of these actions serve the continuity of the ideology. North Korea’s Juche has survived three generations of Kims; it transcends any one leader – it is effectively an immortal idea that uses the Kim family and the propaganda apparatus as its reproductive organs, ensuring each new child is saturated with Juche thought from the earliest age.

On the positive side, one could argue that some ideologies like liberal democracy have also self-propagated for the good of humanity, establishing institutions that preserve certain core ideas (like rule of law, rights, checks and balances) and encouraging education systems that pass on those values. Liberal democracy as an idea complex after WWII spread to many nations (sometimes spontaneously, sometimes via influence or imposition). It tends to create open societies that are somewhat resistant to more authoritarian memes, thanks to entrenched norms of free press and pluralism – which one could interpret as the liberal memeplex’s method of immunizing hosts against more virulent idea strains. However, it also shows that even a seemingly benign idea fights for its survival: during the Cold War, democracies sometimes took illiberal actions (censorship, blacklisting, even coups in foreign countries) ostensibly to protect “freedom” from communism – basically, the liberal idea defending itself by any means necessary. This illustrates that once in a struggle, an information organism might override some of its own usual values to survive (like an organism under threat entering fight-or-flight mode).

In summary, politics provides a rich theater where symbiotic information organisms play out. Ideologies operate through political parties, governments, and movements as their bodies. They engage in both cooperation (alliances, coalitions when interests align) and competition (elections, revolutions, wars) much like living species in an ecosystem. They adapt to new circumstances (neoliberalism can be seen as classical liberalism adapting to the failures of statism and communism by incorporating some welfare ideas; modern political Islamism adapted secular anti-colonial rhetoric into its religious framework). Understanding political change as evolution of idea-systems helps explain why purely economic or individual-centric models fall short – the “genes” of history may well be these entrenched ideologies.

Next, we turn to the domain of religion, which closely parallels politics in many ways, but often with even more explicitly life-and-death commitment of hosts and long-term continuity of the idea.

Religion as a Long-Lived Symbiotic Organism

Religions are among the most successful symbiotic information organisms in human history, with some (Hinduism, Judaism) persisting for millennia, and others (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism) spreading across the globe to billions of hosts. A religion typically comprises a detailed memeplex: origin myths, ethical codes, rituals, symbols, promised rewards (heaven, enlightenment) and punishments, and often a missionary imperative. All these elements contribute to its memetic fitness.

Religions demonstrate an exquisite balance of mutual benefit and exploitation in their symbiosis with human hosts:

• On the benefit side, they provide existential answers (reducing uncertainty about life’s purpose), community and social support, psychological comfort (especially regarding death or hardship), and often moral frameworks that facilitate social cohesion. As Josh Plovanic noted, believing in higher powers or systems can be “therapeutic” for people – it can relieve anxiety by trusting a greater plan. These are genuine benefits to adherents, which explain why people accept these ideas into their lives and pass them to their children.
• On the exploitation side, religions often demand significant sacrifices: time (prayers, worship), resources (tithes, donations, building temples), and even lives (martyrdom, self-denial such as celibacy or fasting, or holy war in extreme cases). From the perspective of the information organism, these sacrifices are usually in service of propagation or maintenance. Celibacy for clergy, for example, can be seen as a tactic to ensure leaders are fully devoted to the church (though ironically it could reduce replication via family; but the trade-off is more energy for converting others rather than raising one’s own children). Missionary work requires young people to give up years of their life – clearly a sacrifice at individual level, but vital for the religion’s spread. In extreme historical events like the Crusades or jihad, thousands died believing it served God’s will – effectively, they died for an idea. To the believer, this was noble and earned divine reward; to a biologist, it looks maladaptive (dying young). But to the idea, it was a means to assert dominance (the crusaders opened new territories for Christianity, some jihadists spread Islam by force) – the idea “cares” about its own spread, not individual host survival.

Religions have highly developed mechanisms of propagation. Proselytization is formalized: nearly every major faith has either a priesthood or a norm that encourages believers to recruit (the “Great Commission” in Christianity, the duty of dawah in Islam, missionary zeal in Buddhism historically, etc.). Those faiths that did not seek converts (some ethnic religions) remained confined to their ethnic base or faded. The correlation is clear: the more a religion encouraged and facilitated evangelism, the more it grew. Christianity’s explosive growth in late antiquity can be partly attributed to its network of missionaries and the way it welcomed all classes (whereas the old Roman religion was not seeking converts). Islam’s growth was aided by trade networks and a clear simple creed that traders and Sufi missionaries could easily teach. Religion also often incentivizes large families, implicitly or explicitly. Many religions promote pro-natal norms (“Be fruitful and multiply” in Judaism/Christianity, encouragement of large families in Islam, etc.), which obviously increases the base of potential hosts. Sociologist Phil Zuckerman has discussed how more devout communities tend to have higher birth rates, thus outpacing more secular ones – a memetic advantage for religion in general.

Religions also defend against “infection” by other memes. They often teach adherents to avoid certain books, influences, or even people outside the faith. For example, some Christian denominations in the past forbade reading heretical works; orthodox Jewish communities have rules about secular learning; many religions demonize apostasy (leaving the faith) to the extent of social ostracism or capital punishment. These can be seen as immune responses: they reduce the chance that rival beliefs (memes) will penetrate the community or that hosts will defect. Even dietary laws or distinctive clothing (like the Sikh turban or Muslim hijab) serve to insulate and strongly identify members with the group, making it harder to stray without social notice. In Plovanic’s terms, this is the containment of bad (rival) ideas by building a sort of memetic “wall” around the community. He specifically noted that living information will *“attempt to neutralize or eliminate outright… incompatible ideologies”* – religious history is full of inquisitions and jihads exactly for this reason.

One fascinating element is how religions can cooperate or merge (memetic symbiosis among ideas). Sometimes two idea-systems will find it advantageous to combine – syncretism is essentially the merging of information organisms into a hybrid that can exploit multiple host populations. An example is the way Christianity merged with local pagan traditions in Europe (e.g., Christmas trees from pagan customs, Easter timing from spring festivals) – one could say Christianity absorbed useful memes from paganism to make conversion more palatable, thereby improving its own fitness. In contrast, where religions completely clashed (like Spanish Catholicism vs Aztec religion), one tended to annihilate the other along with its hosts.

Religions also show evolutionary diversification akin to speciation. Just as an ancestral species of finch might radiate into multiple species on different islands, a religion often splits into sects that adapt to different social niches or interpretations. The Protestant Reformation can be seen as a speciation event: the Christian memeplex split into Catholic and Protestant branches (and further splits within Protestantism). Each branch evolved its doctrines (memetic code) and practices to appeal to different segments – e.g., Protestantism initially appealed to those wanting a more personal faith experience and less corrupt church structure, which was a niche under-served by Catholicism at that time, allowing that variant to flourish in Northern Europe. Today, the existence of thousands of denominations of Christianity and sects of other religions demonstrates how idea-systems diversify when isolated or under differing pressures (political, cultural, etc.). Some die out (like extinct species) if they can’t maintain a host base – e.g., the Shaker movement in America practiced celibacy, severely limiting natural reproduction of new members, and though they relied on conversion, they eventually dwindled to near-extinction once conversions stopped. In memetic hindsight, Shakerism’s celibacy rule was a maladaptive trait.

From an institutional viewpoint, churches and clerical hierarchies are the analog of a centralized nervous system for the religious organism. They coordinate host behavior, resolve internal conflicts (heresies, which we could think of as cancerous cells in the body of the faith – deviant ideas that if not excised could kill the unity of the organism), and plan strategy for expansion (missions, crusades, building new temples). The Roman Catholic Church historically did this very explicitly – the Vatican often strategized conversions in newly “discovered” lands, treating it as a mission of the faith (and also for power). Tibetan Buddhism had a different approach: the monastic system preserved doctrine and meditation practices with fidelity, which allowed the memeplex to survive even when the Tibetan state was overrun by China – the monks in exile carried the “DNA” of their tradition intact.

One might ask: do religions actually behave as if they’re alive? The historical record can be anthropomorphized quite fittingly: Religions spread along trade routes like Silk Roads (as if following arteries of a host network), they retreat under certain conditions (after the Islamic Golden Age, science and secularism somewhat receded in the Middle East, arguably because religious orthodoxy reasserted itself – one could say the meme of scientific rationalism couldn’t establish itself firmly against the stronger immune system of traditional Islam at that time), and they adapt – modern Christianity in many places has adopted pop music and social media, effectively mutating to survive in a youth culture environment. Also, religions often outlive empires and nations – which shows they are not reducible to any single host society; they can jump hosts and continue. Consider how Buddhism originated in India, but nearly died out there while flourishing in East Asia; it simply migrated memetically. Christianity moved its center from the Middle East to Europe to now perhaps the Global South (with explosive growth in Africa). It’s almost like how a species might move its range due to climate change – the “climate” of secularism in Europe made it less hospitable to Christianity, but the “climate” in sub-Saharan Africa was favorable, and that’s where it grows now.

Religious nationalism is an interesting hybrid where an idea organism and a political organism merge (e.g., the concept of “Hindu Rashtra” (Hindu nation) in India, or Islamist theocracies). These are cases of symbiotic convergence – a religion and a political ideology merging to create a stronger entity that appeals on both spiritual and material grounds, thereby mobilizing hosts doubly. This sometimes leads to very aggressive expansions or conflicts because it combines two potent motivators (faith and patriotism).

In sum, religions provide perhaps the clearest case of ideas acting like living things: they have longevity, fecundity (ability to reproduce widely), and copy fidelity (scriptures help preserve the core ideas faithfully across generations, akin to DNA) – these are the three qualities Dawkins cited for successful replicators. Religions check all three: ancient texts = high fidelity, masses of missionaries/children = high fecundity, centuries of continuity = high longevity. Thus, treating them as symbiotic information organisms is not just metaphor; it aligns with an evolutionary replicator model.

Next, we will explore how these idea organisms play out in the realm of warfare and conflict, which often is the stage on which both political ideologies and religions (and other beliefs) directly clash with physical consequences.

Warfare and Conflict: Battles of Information Organisms

Throughout history, wars have been fought not only for tangible resources or power but very often over ideas – or at least framed as such. When those ideas drive conflicts, we can view wars as the violent interface of competing symbiotic information organisms, using human armies and materiel as their instruments.

Plovanic succinctly notes: *“challenging or incompatible ideologies or belief systems… is very much one of the main causes of human conflict and war.”*. Indeed, many wars carry a strong ideological or religious component: the Crusades (Christianity vs. Islam in the Holy Land), the European Wars of Religion (Catholic vs. Protestant memetic warfare), the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (revolutionary liberalism vs. monarchist conservatism across Europe), World War II (democracy vs. fascism, and in the east, fascism vs. communism), etc.

In warfare, propaganda and morale become critical – which are essentially about controlling the narrative (information) and the will to fight (which stems from belief in the cause). Military strategists have long recognized that the mind is a battleground. Sun Tzu’s ancient dictum, “supreme excellence is to subdue the enemy without fighting,” can be interpreted as capturing the enemy’s will or perspective – a memetic victory. Modern militaries talk of “hearts and minds” campaigns, which directly acknowledges that to win a war, one must often win an informational/ideological victory. In counterinsurgency, for example, if you can convince the local population to reject the insurgents’ ideology and support the government, the insurgency fails. Conversely, many insurgencies succeed by spreading a compelling narrative that undermines the legitimacy of the incumbent (think of revolutionary slogans or jihadist ideological indoctrination among local villages).

Psychological warfare (PSYOPs) is an explicit practice of using information as a weapon – spreading demoralizing messages, propaganda leaflets, radio broadcasts, now internet disinformation – to weaken the enemy’s resistance by altering their beliefs or knowledge. From our perspective, it’s like releasing memetic agents to attack the cohesion of the rival idea-system. If you can make enemy soldiers doubt the righteousness of their cause or the competence of their leaders, the idea controlling them loosens and thus their willingness to fight wanes. Plovanic equates psychological warfare with spiritual conflict in a Christian frame, but secularly we can see it as simply meme warfare.

A particularly stark example of idea-driven war was the extensive propaganda machines of the 20th century totalitarian states. Nazi Germany’s Ministry of Propaganda (under Goebbels) and the Soviet Union’s Agitprop were state organs dedicated to strengthening their respective ruling ideologies (Nazism and Communism) and weakening others (liberalism, “Jewish Bolshevism” in Nazi parlance, capitalist decadence in Soviet terms). They produced films, posters, education programs – effectively flooding the info-sphere so that citizens would be fully taken over by the state’s ideology. When war came, those citizens fought ferociously, partly because they were thoroughly convinced (in many cases) of the ideology (the Germans about Aryan supremacy and anti-Bolshevism, the Soviets about defending the socialist motherland against fascist barbarism). So propaganda prepared the hosts for total war, which the ideas “wanted” – Hitler’s ideology was expansionist and militaristic, and it succeeded in compelling one of the most educated societies on Earth to devote itself to a destructive war of conquest; likewise, the communist ideology in Russia succeeded in mobilizing a vast population to endure immense sacrifices to repel and then defeat Nazism. It’s telling how, after WWII, the Allies undertook denazification – an attempt to purge the Nazi idea from German society, recognizing that only by destroying the idea (or at least discrediting it deeply) could future physical conflict be prevented. This again emphasizes that to really end a war, it’s not enough to destroy armies; the underlying idea driving the aggression must be delegitimized or “killed.”

In contemporary times, we see conflict increasingly in the form of information warfare – cyber propaganda, election interference via fake news, extremist recruitment via online forums. This is warfare at the level of memes. For instance, terrorist groups like ISIS have invested heavily in slick online propaganda to radicalize individuals in far-away countries – essentially sending their ideology abroad digitally to find new hosts, who might then commit acts of violence that further propagate fear (another goal of the terror-meme). Nations are also engaging in subtle information wars: Russian state-sponsored disinformation aims to weaken Western societies by amplifying polarizing content, effectively trying to “hack” the existing social idea-systems (like democracy, trust in institutions) and erode them, possibly to soften those societies for geopolitical advantage. The targeted society can be seen as having a memetic immune system (free press, educated public) that the attacker tries to overwhelm with a high volume of mutagenic content (conspiracy theories, fake narratives) to cause confusion and internal discord. This is a newer form of ideological warfare where the “battlefield” is social media feeds and the “casualties” are truth and consensus.

Warfare also often leads to rapid technological and ideological evolution. Under the pressure of war (an extreme environment), societies innovate new technologies and sometimes new ideas (e.g., after WWI, the harsh realities led to pacifism in some quarters and more extreme nationalism in others – an adaptive radiation of ideas). The concept of a “just war” or the Geneva Conventions can be seen as the result of memetic adaptation too: after witnessing the horrors of unconstrained conflict, international society developed those ideas to mitigate war’s destructiveness (essentially a meme – “even war has rules” – that spread and took hold in many militaries). That meme competes with older memes like “all’s fair in war” or newer barbaric memes from groups like ISIS that flagrantly reject the conventions. The outcome of these competing ideas affects how wars are fought and whether certain groups gain or lose support.

Another angle is seeing militaries as subcultures with their own powerful memes (honor, bravery, unit loyalty). These memes ensure soldiers act often against their individual survival instinct (charging into fire to save a comrade – a selfless act that from a gene’s eye view is puzzling unless one considers the memes of honor and brotherhood that have been instilled which make such sacrifice the highest good). The “host” here is the soldier, and the memes of military ethos compel him to potentially give his life, thereby potentially furthering the success of the army (the collective) which is executing some higher strategy (driven by political ideas). It’s layers of information organisms: an army can be thought of as an organized body serving a state ideology, and within it, memetic training (boot camp indoctrination, patriotic fervor) ensures the humans in that body function reliably even in deadly conditions.

Uncertainty and fear also play roles in conflict – an uncertain situation can breed extreme ideas as people grasp for certainty. History shows that in times of chaos or societal breakdown (defeat in war, economic collapse), radical ideologies often surge as they provide clear answers and scapegoats (certainty and blame) amidst confusion. For example, after Germany’s defeat and economic ruin post-WWI, Nazi ideology found fertile ground by offering a simple narrative (we were “stabbed in the back”; a conspiracy is to blame; we can restore glory by purging the betrayers and rearming) – this memetic package was readily absorbed by a populace whose prior worldview had been shattered. This aligns with Plovanic’s discussion on Uncertainty, Certainty, and Fanaticism: when uncertainty is high, the appeal of absolute certainty (even if false) grows, and fanaticism can take root as people cling to a sure belief to escape the void of doubt. Thus, chaotic circumstances (like war or crisis) can be seen as an environment where memetic selection favors extremist, black-and-white ideologies (because they replicate faster by giving people psychological relief and rallying them against perceived threats). This is a dangerous dynamic, as those fanatic memes then often cause further conflict, creating a vicious cycle. Breaking it may require injecting memes of tolerance, critical thinking, or simply stabilizing society so that people aren’t as desperate for simplistic answers.

In conclusion, warfare is both an outcome of and a catalyst for the actions of symbiotic information organisms. Ideas often wage war through human proxies. The concept of “holy war” lays it bare: it’s literally a war to assert whose god or sacred idea will prevail. Today’s notion of “information war” in military doctrine similarly acknowledges that beyond bombs and bullets, controlling the narrative and beliefs is paramount. Clausewitz’s famous dictum, “war is the continuation of politics by other means,” could be extended: politics is often the continuation of ideology by other means. And thus war is ultimately a continuation of ideology by violent means. By viewing competing waring factions as hosts of different idea-systems, we can better understand phenomena like unyielding conflicts (if the core ideas are mutually exclusive and non-negotiable, the hosts will fight to annihilation) or, conversely, how ideological compromises or changes can swiftly end conflicts (as when an extremist movement moderates its demands – essentially the meme softening – allowing a peace deal).

The next section will step back from outright conflict and look at the broader social sphere: how do these information organisms influence everyday public discourse and societal evolution, outside of armed struggle?

Society and Public Discourse: Shaping Reality Through Information

Symbiotic information organisms do not only appear in moments of high drama like revolutions or wars; they are continuously present in the fabric of everyday society and discourse. They shape our norms, values, and the very language we use to communicate. In this section, we examine how these idea-systems maintain influence in civil society, steer public debates, and sometimes subtly wage “cold wars” of narrative in the media and education.

Public discourse – the ongoing conversation within a society (via news, social media, academic debate, etc.) – can be thought of as an ecosystem of ideas. Competing frames and narratives jostle for dominance on any issue. For instance, consider the issue of climate change. There is a scientific consensus idea (“climate change is real and anthropogenic, requiring urgent action”) and there are denialist counter-ideas (“it’s a hoax or not serious”). These two broad memeplexes fight in the public sphere for adoption by the populace and policymakers. Each has its hosts (scientists, activists vs. certain politicians, industrial lobbyists, and skeptical media figures) and each tries to convert or marginalize the other. Tactics include debates (informational combat), advertising campaigns, social media messaging, and invoking trusted authorities (e.g., “97% of scientists say…” vs. “this one scientist says it’s false…”). The stakes are high: not just policy, but what people believe as reality. Here we see an information organism – climate science as a body of knowledge – which has had to fight more against an opposing idea than against any lack of evidence. The resistance comes because the opposing idea is supported by certain economic or ideological interests (some see climate science as threatening their economic model or political philosophy of minimal regulation). Thus an alliance forms between a material interest and an idea (free-market fundamentalism often couples with climate denial, treating the science as an attack on the idea of an unfettered market). Public discourse is the battleground where these coalitions of ideas and interests try to sway the broad public mind.

Media are the primary vectors for these idea struggles. A free press can host a plurality of information organisms – different newspapers or channels often effectively become mouthpieces for specific viewpoints (e.g., one channel leaning liberal, another conservative, each promoting its favored narrative consistently). In more authoritarian settings, the state might impose one narrative, censoring others (thus creating a near-monoculture of information, which is memetically risky in the long run because lack of competition can lead to stagnation of the idea – as the Soviet Union found when its state ideology became sclerotic and could not adapt or inspire by the 1980s).

Social media has introduced a chaotic pluralism where algorithmic amplification plays a role in which ideas spread. Ideas that evoke strong reactions (often outrage, fear, or excitement – which correspond to our psychological triggers) get amplified. This has given certain negative memes (fake news, extremist talking points) an edge, because they hack the attention economy better. So, one could argue the information ecosystem of online discourse currently favors more “viral” memes that might not be accurate or healthy but replicate quickly (similar to how a virus that makes you cough spreads faster even if it’s bad for you). Society is grappling with how to adjust – effectively how to strengthen collective memetic immunity (through education in media literacy, content moderation policies, etc.) to ensure that truth-oriented or pro-social ideas aren’t drowned out. It’s a literal memetic arms race: fake news vs fact-checking, trolls/bots vs platform policies.

Language and labeling form the substrate of thought, as noted earlier. Control of language is control of thought to a significant degree. Social movements know this – hence the focus on terminology (e.g., whether to say “illegal alien” vs “undocumented immigrant”; the choice signals and shapes attitudes). Each term is a little packet of an idea’s values. The battle over naming is a battle over framing reality. Michel Foucault and others have pointed out that the power to define terms (like “madness,” “deviance,” “terrorism”) often lies with those who hold institutional power, thereby reinforcing that power by making their perspective seem the reality. In recent times, activists have tried to coin new terms (like “Latinx” for gender-neutral Latino/Latina, or “Islamophobia” to name anti-Muslim prejudice) as a way to shift perceptions and give voice to previously unarticulated experiences. If these terms catch on, it indicates the associated idea has taken root.

Josh Plovanic in one post discusses how labeling is essential for understanding systems. Indeed, by labeling something, you make it a “thing” in discourse. For example, once “sexual harassment” was labeled and defined in the 1970s and 80s, it became widely recognized as a problem to be addressed, whereas before it was an unspoken norm in many workplaces. The feminist movement introduced that concept, which then spread and became a staple idea that changed workplace policies worldwide. That’s an example of an information organism (feminist theory and its offspring concepts) tangibly altering societal behavior.

Identity and belief are deeply intertwined in public life. People often align with groups (political parties, demographic identities, subcultures) that come with pre-packaged sets of ideas. The concept of “echo chambers” or “information silos” in society refers to how people self-select into environments where their held beliefs (and thus the underlying info organism) are continuously reinforced, while contradictory information is filtered out. This is essentially people clustering by which information organism they host – like different species forming separate colonies. When communication breaks down between these clusters, public discourse polarizes and sometimes breaks into hostility. We see this in many democracies today: each side sees the other as almost alien because they operate under different facts and values (each curated by their idea-systems’ media). In the U.S., terms like “alternative facts” and completely divergent narratives about basic events (e.g., one ecosystem says climate change is urgent, another says it’s a hoax) exemplify a public discourse that is not a shared space but a contested zone with parallel realities. The symbiotic information organisms have carved up the population, and as long as each has sufficient hosts and media outlet support, they can persist without resolution, leading to a kind of chronic cultural cold war.

However, sometimes a dominant narrative in public discourse can be collectively harmful, and society responds by developing antibodies or counter-narratives. For example, racist ideologies were once mainstream in many societies. Over decades, anti-racist movements have worked to change the narrative (through education, public shaming of overt racism, celebrating diversity). Now, explicit racism is widely stigmatized in many parts of the world – that indicates a memetic victory of the anti-racist idea complex over the old racist memes (though not complete; those old memes still lurk in more covert forms, adapting by using coded language – e.g., instead of openly espousing white supremacy, some use dog-whistles like “law and order” or pseudoscientific arguments about IQ, which is essentially the racist idea evolving to survive in a hostile environment that no longer tolerates its prior forms).

Public discourse also has “memetic trends”, analogous to fads or fashions, which though short-lived, show how quickly info can propagate when conditions are right. Think of social media challenges (like the Ice Bucket Challenge, which spread awareness of ALS and raised funds – a benevolent meme that coupled altruism with virality) or phrases that become ubiquitous (like certain hashtags or slogans from protests – e.g., “#MeToo” compressed an entire movement into a highly transmissible form). These trends indicate the power of modern networks to amplify an idea rapidly; though often ephemeral, some leave lasting impact (MeToo significantly changed discussions about sexual misconduct permanently, embedding new expectations in workplaces).

The marketplace of ideas concept in free societies suggests that truth or the best ideas will eventually prevail through open competition. Our analysis agrees there is competition, but the “best” idea doesn’t automatically win; rather, the fittest does – and fitness includes replicative ability, which can be orthogonal to truth or moral worth. So, society has had to implement mechanisms to favor certain ideas: education systems try to instill scientific thinking (to promote truth-fitness), platforms attempt content moderation (to dampen harmful but virulent misinformation), and laws protect certain forms of speech while banning others (like incitement to violence, which is basically outlawing a class of memes that directly trigger violence – an immune response of society).

One interesting development is the notion of “memetic engineering”: consciously attempting to create or disseminate memes to achieve social goals. Public health campaigns (e.g., “Just Say No” anti-drug slogan, or current COVID vaccination encouragement memes) are attempts by institutions to implant beneficial ideas. Sometimes they work, sometimes not – it depends if the engineered meme resonates or if rival memes undermine it (e.g., anti-vaccine misinformation outcompeting pro-vaccine messaging in some communities).

In summary, public discourse is an ongoing, diffuse battle where multiple symbiotic information organisms seek to normalize their worldview as the societal default. When one succeeds, it becomes part of the culture (like how belief in absolute monarchy gave way to belief in popular sovereignty – a memetic regime change in discourse from pre-modern to modern times). Usually, a stable society has a hegemonic narrative (a set of dominant ideas) that most people accept, with some variation. Social change occurs when new ideas either infiltrate and gradually convert the mainstream, or when crises puncture the credibility of the old narrative, allowing new contenders to rise.

We will now delve deeper into the final aspect: how these processes manifest at the level of individual psychology and identity formation, which is essentially the micro-level of this whole story – the point of interface where a person encounters an idea and it either becomes symbiotic with them or not.

Identity Formation and the Individual Mind: The Personal Dimension

At the core of the symbiotic relationship between humans and information organisms is the individual human mind. It is here that the abstract dynamics of idea propagation become intensely personal. Beliefs and ideologies are not just “out there” in society; they reside “in here,” in our thoughts, emotions, and self-concepts. This section examines how symbiotic information organisms influence identity and cognition, and how individuals internalize, live with, and sometimes resist these powerful tenants of the mind.

The Fusion of Identity and Belief

Humans have a remarkable capacity to tie their sense of self to intangible constructs. Nationality, religion, political affiliation, profession, even fandom for a sports team or music genre – these can all become part of one’s identity. When someone says “I am a Christian” or “I am a socialist,” they are expressing a significant merging of self with an idea-system. In psychological terms, this is internalization: the external system of beliefs has been internalized such that it feels like an inherent part of the person.

This fusion is a key mechanism by which information organisms secure loyal hosts. Once a belief becomes part of who you are, your psychological defense mechanisms will protect it just as they protect your self-esteem or physical body. Criticism of the belief can feel like a personal attack. We see this in cognitive dissonance phenomena: when confronted with evidence that challenges a core belief, individuals often experience discomfort and may rationalize or reject the evidence rather than alter the belief. It’s as if the belief has an immune system that triggers mental antibodies (justifications, denial) to fend off the dissonant information. Neuroscientific studies have shown that when people's political beliefs are challenged, the brain regions associated with pain and negative emotions light up – indicating that the challenge is processed similarly to a physical threat. This supports the notion that at a neural level, deeply held ideas are entwined with our survival-oriented circuitry.

Identity fusion can lead to fanaticism when taken to extremes. A fanatic might say, implicitly or explicitly, “I am nothing without this cause; it is greater than me.” In such cases, the person has effectively surrendered a huge portion of their agency to the information organism. Their actions become extremely predictable based on the needs of the ideology because they’ve aligned their entire purpose with it. Plovanic and others note how extremists and infiltrators have *“loyalty…only to the ideas they hold in their minds and [to] achieving the goals and objectives of those ideas.”* In a way, they become avatars of the ideology, with personal interests sublimated.

On a more benign level, this identity-belief fusion is what gives people a sense of meaning and belonging. Emile Durkheim, a founding sociologist, wrote about how being integrated into a community with shared beliefs (like a church) provides collective effervescence and reduces anomie (a sense of normlessness). So, symbiosis here is mutual: the person gains identity (“I know who I am and where I belong”) and the idea gains a faithful adherent. This is typically a stable, positive symbiosis as long as the belief system is not driving harmful behavior and is somewhat tolerant.

Metacognition and Self-Awareness: Resisting “Mind Takeover”

Given how powerful the hold of an internalized idea can be, a crucial question arises: can individuals retain autonomy and critical thinking in the face of these internal symbiotes? This is where metacognition – thinking about one’s own thinking – becomes important. The ability to examine one’s beliefs, recognize their source, and question them is like an immune response of the mind that can modulate the influence of symbiotic information.

Plovanic’s essay on “Metacognition, Self-Awareness, and …” (2020/10) presumably delved into how being aware of one’s thought processes (and perhaps one’s biases and adopted ideas) provides a higher-level control that pure believers might lack. If you can say, “I believe X, but I know I only believe it because I was raised in environment Y,” you’ve created a bit of cognitive distance between self and belief. That distance allows for evaluation: Do I want to keep believing this? Is it serving me well? Essentially, metacognition lets the “host” assess the symbiosis: is this information organism beneficial, benign, or harmful to me and others?

Developing this critical self-reflection is a goal of liberal education: teaching people not what to think, but how to think for themselves. In our terms, it’s like boosting a person’s mental immune system so that they are not automatically overtaken by whichever strong meme comes along; they can decide which ideas to let in, or at least tame those that are already in. For example, someone raised in a cult who later escapes typically describes a process of gradually applying doubt and reason to what they were taught – that is the host’s immune system overcoming the hold of the information parasite. This can be psychologically painful (the person might go through identity crisis, guilt, fear of damnation if religion is involved) – akin to withdrawal symptoms or the system shock when an invasive species is removed from an ecosystem. But with support, individuals can and do reclaim their minds. Organizations like those that help deprogram cult members or rehabilitate ex-extremists essentially act as external immune systems – memetic therapy, if you will – guiding the person to separate their own core self from the beliefs imposed on them.

It’s important to note, however, that no one is completely free of symbiotic information organisms – our minds need frameworks. A person leaving one ideology often adopts another (even if it’s the ideology of skepticism or humanism). The key is whether the new relationship is healthier (mutualistic rather than parasitic). For instance, someone might leave a dogmatic religion and adopt a more individual spiritual path or secular worldview that they feel is more under their personal control and more aligned with their authentic values, thus still providing meaning but with more autonomy. That’s a renegotiation of the symbiosis contract in a sense.

Cognitive Biases: Tools of Ideas

Human psychology comes pre-loaded with certain biases and heuristics that affect how we process information – and thus how vulnerable or receptive we are to various memes. These biases can be seen as tools that information organisms exploit:

• Confirmation Bias: We tend to notice and accept information that confirms what we already believe and discount what contradicts it. Once an idea is internalized, confirmation bias helps fortify it by filtering experience. For instance, a person who believes in a conspiracy will interpret random events as evidence of the conspiracy (confirming it) and dismiss official debunking as “part of the cover-up” (which ironically further confirms the conspiracy worldview). The conspiracy meme expertly uses confirmation bias; it even immunizes itself by pre-emptively labeling contrary evidence as fake or planted.

• Social Proof and Conformity: We often take cues from others to determine what to believe or do. If everyone in your social circle reveres a leader or idea, you are likely to as well – or at least feel pressure to outwardly conform. This is how communities enforce meme adherence, and it’s how ideas can propagate quickly through social networks (like fashions or moral panics).

• Ingroup/Outgroup Bias: We favor information that casts our in-group positively and out-groups negatively. Ideologies frequently define an in-group (“the faithful,” “the proletariat,” “patriots”) and out-group (“infidels,” “bourgeoisie,” “traitors”). This bias then ensures that messages flattering the in-group or demonizing the out-group are readily absorbed, which reinforces the ideology’s core us-vs-them narrative.

• Emotional Resonance: Ideas that attach to strong emotions (fear, anger, love, hope) stick more. Religious and political oratory often appeals to these – e.g., evoking fear of hell or anger at oppressors, or hope for salvation/utopia. The emotional charge not only draws people in but also bypasses some rational defenses; high emotion can short-circuit careful analysis, allowing an idea to imprint deeper. That’s why propaganda often uses emotional imagery and slogans rather than detailed argument.

Understanding these biases can help individuals and society design debiasing strategies. For example, encouraging people to consider how they might be wrong (debias confirmation bias), fostering empathy for out-groups (reducing outgroup bias), or teaching media literacy to recognize emotional manipulation. These strategies essentially strengthen the host’s ability to choose which ideas to entertain and which to fend off, rather than being an unwitting pawn.

Personal Meaning vs. Manipulation

One must acknowledge that not all powerful internalized ideas are bad – far from it. Personal identity can be healthily built around noble principles. For example, someone might deeply identify as a humanitarian, devoted to the idea of alleviating suffering and promoting human rights. This idea drives their actions (career choices, activism), and in a sense, the idea is living through them, yes, but it’s also an expression of their own highest values. The line between “it’s my genuine value” and “it’s an idea controlling me” can be subtle. Perhaps the distinction lies in the presence of reflective endorsement. If a person has critically examined their belief in human rights and chooses to affirm it as central to who they want to be, then the symbiosis is conscious and voluntary. In contrast, if someone has never questioned why they chant a political slogan and would feel lost without it but can’t articulate why it’s true – they might be more of a captive host.

The ideal symbiosis might be one where the individual and the idea-system are in harmonious agreement, mutually reinforcing each other’s flourishing. Many religious individuals describe their faith in these terms – not as an oppressive force, but as a source of strength that also “uses” them to spread compassion or do good works. For them, giving themselves to a higher idea (God, dharma, etc.) is a path to personal fulfillment. Arguably, humanity’s greatest moral and artistic accomplishments often come from those who were “possessed” by grand ideas – civil rights, freedom, love, beauty – and devoted their lives to them. So the picture is not inherently grim; it depends on the content of the information organism and the nature of the symbiosis.

Identity Crisis and Idea Change

When a major belief that a person identifies with is shattered (say through a significant disillusionment or new learning), they can undergo an identity crisis. This is analogous to an organism losing a part of itself. People describe it as feeling like the ground under their feet is gone, or feeling betrayal, confusion, depression. For example, a devout believer who loses faith may feel an existential void. In our terms, the symbiotic information organism that inhabited their mind has died or departed, leaving the person in psychological turmoil – a bit like an ecosystem after the keystone species goes extinct. Over time, either a new belief system will colonize (sometimes people quickly fill the gap with another religion or ideology), or the person may adapt to more uncertainty, building a self that is less defined by one overarching external schema.

Modern secular society often encourages individuals to have a more modular identity – comprised of multiple roles and affiliations (family, job, hobby, nation, religion perhaps, etc.) rather than one totalizing identity. This can be seen as a strategy to avoid a single information organism completely taking over the self. If one module fails (you lose your job-related identity, say), you have others to fall back on (you’re still a parent, a community member, etc.). People with fanatic single identities lack this and can be more psychologically fragile if that identity is shaken.

Therapeutic and mindfulness practices sometimes aim to get people to see thoughts and beliefs as transient events in the mind, not absolute truths or defining features of self. This again is teaching a kind of metacognitive distance – observing an idea rather than being it. Practices like meditation can reduce attachment to rigid views (at least ideally), weakening the grip of harmful memetic attachments and fostering a more fluid sense of identity (e.g., “I am not my thoughts”). This can be very liberating – it’s like loosening a symbiotic bond to make sure the human host remains in charge of their mind’s ecosystem, admitting and expelling ideas with some intentionality.

In all, at the individual level, the battle is for self-possession versus possession-by-ideas. Education, critical thinking, diverse social networks, and introspection are tools individuals can use to maintain some degree of sovereignty over which ideas they serve. But given our nature as social, meaning-making creatures, we will always serve some ideas. The goal is perhaps to choose our “masters” wisely – to align with information organisms that are benevolent, truthful, and lead to human flourishing, and to be aware of and resist those that exploit or deceive us.

Having traversed domains from the global and historical scale down to the intimate workings of identity, we have built a comprehensive picture of symbiotic information organisms. We saw their echoes in politics, religion, warfare, society, and the psyche. In the concluding section, we will summarize the insights, discuss overarching implications, and suggest ways this understanding might inform future efforts in education, conflict resolution, and personal development.

Conclusion

We set out to examine the provocative thesis that ideas, ideologies, religions, and belief systems function as symbiotic information organisms – living-like entities of pure information that colonize human minds and use human collectives to realize their aims. Through this exploration, we have seen compelling evidence that this metaphor is not only apt but highly illuminating for understanding a vast range of human phenomena. From the rise and fall of religions and empires, to the passions of political movements, to the texture of everyday social norms, and even the construction of our personal identities, the agency of information structures is a constant thread.

Key Insights and Synthesis:

1. Ideas Behave as Living Systems: Complex ideas meet the criteria for life in a metaphorical sense – they replicate, mutate, compete, and evolve. They are born (often from the mind of a prophet, philosopher, or a community in response to conditions), they can die (many ancient religions and ideologies are now extinct, surviving only in records), and they can merge or split like organisms (sectarian schisms, syncretic faiths). They may lack physical form, but they have causal form – patterns that persist through time by instantiating in brain after brain, book after book. This recognition forces us to expand our concept of the ecosystem to include the noosphere (realm of thoughts) where these entities reside and interact.

2. Symbiosis: Mutual Gain and Loss: The relationship between humans (hosts) and ideas (informational symbionts) can be mutually beneficial or severely detrimental. Many idea-systems have provided coherence and coordination that enabled human societies to achieve great things – one might argue that civilization itself is the result of powerful organizing ideas (like law, agriculture, shared myths) that knit together large groups. These ideas granted humans unprecedented collective power (no single human could build a pyramid or Apollo rocket, but an organized belief system mobilizing thousands could). In return, those ideas were carried forth, taught, and immortalized. However, the balance can turn parasitic: we saw too how some ideas have driven people to cruelty, self-destruction, or social collapse, essentially consuming their hosts’ well-being for the idea’s own propagation (e.g., genocidal ideologies that ultimately ruin the societies that embrace them). Recognizing when we are in a mutualistic versus parasitic relationship with a belief is crucial. For instance, a patriotism that leads one to community service is mutualistic (the idea of nation is served, and the person finds purpose), but a patriotism that leads to unthinking chauvinism and war can become parasitic (the idea pushes harmful action, the person may suffer or cause suffering unjustifiably).

3. Human Agency and Metacognition: Humans are not just passive hosts; we have the unique capacity to reflect on and alter our beliefs. This gives hope that we are not slaves to memetic evolution in the way an ant colony might be to genetic evolution. Through education, dialogue, and introspection, individuals and societies can exercise some choice over which information organisms flourish. For example, the global rejection of explicit colonialism and racism in the mid-20th century shows conscious moral evolution: societies actively chose to delegitimize certain toxic idea-systems and promote values of equality and self-determination. That was not automatic; it required intellectual and ethical effort, spurred by witnessing horrors (World War II atrocities) that demonstrated those ideas’ ultimate pathology. This illustrates that ideas can be fought and defeated by better ideas – reason and evidence can, at least sometimes, overcome false and harmful narratives. As individuals, practicing metacognition (as discussed) – essentially mindfulness about what we believe and why – can help us avoid being overly exploited by ideas. It’s a kind of mental hygiene or memetic immunity that should ideally be taught from an early age.

4. Power Structures as Idea Agents: We saw that organizations, from governments to churches to media companies, often operate less as free-ranging human enterprises and more as embodiments of guiding ideas. This flips the usual perspective: rather than a government deciding on an ideology, often the ideology creates and shapes the government. This doesn’t absolve human leaders of responsibility, but it reframes problems: to reform a corrupt institution, one may need to change the underlying culture and narratives (the “software”), not just the personnel (the “hardware”). It also means that when institutions seem unresponsive to people’s needs, it might be because they are very responsive to the imperatives of their founding idea (even if that idea is outdated or unjust). A bureaucracy can thus feel “soulless” – because perhaps its “soul” is an old idea (say, maximizing colonial extraction) that doesn’t align with modern values, yet it continues robotically. A solution is to consciously reprogram institutions with new guiding principles (for instance, many corporations now add values like sustainability and diversity to their mission, essentially injecting new memes into their organizational DNA, though the real test is whether actions follow words).

5. Impacts in Various Fields: In politics, framing ideologies as living entities clarifies why conflicts are often zero-sum – it’s like species competition where compromise means death (e.g., totalitarian regimes often cannot tolerate the existence of liberal democracies and vice versa during the Cold War because each’s core premises negated the other). In religion, it explains both the fervor of believers and the adaptive resilience of faith traditions. In warfare, it underscores that battles are won in minds before they’re won on the ground, hence the importance of winning narratives. In society, it advises that social change requires more than laws; it needs narrative shifts and cultural change (e.g., the success of the environmental movement has hinged on popularizing the idea of interconnected ecology and stewardship). In identity, it encourages humility – realizing that many beliefs we hold dearly were absorbed from context and are not immutable, and that someone on the opposite side likely finds their contrary beliefs just as integral to their identity. This perspective can foster empathy: perhaps the person isn’t evil, but firmly in the grip of an idea (as are we, from their view). That opens a door to dialogue by focusing on the ideas rather than demonizing the persons.

Challenges and Further Implications: If ideas are symbiotic organisms, this raises complex ethical and practical questions. For one, who “cultivates” or controls these organisms? In biology, humans have domesticated some species (like crops, livestock) for mutual benefit. Can we consciously domesticate beneficial memes and contain harmful ones? Education and media regulation are attempts at this – fostering civic virtues, scientific mindset, etc., while curbing hate speech or misinformation. It’s essentially memetic gardening. However, heavy-handed control easily becomes censorship or indoctrination, which can backfire or become a tool of oppression. So there’s a balancing act: an open environment for idea competition (to allow innovation and correction) but with interventions to prevent malignant memeplagues. This is analogous to public health – free movement of people but quarantines and vaccines for dangerous pathogens. Perhaps in the future, we’ll speak of “mental immunity” and “cognitive vaccines” (already as metaphor: e.g. a media literacy program inoculating youth against fake news).

Another challenge is that memetic evolution is accelerating with technology. AI algorithms now recombine and target ideas at individuals in a way that natural cultural evolution never could. We might unintentionally create extremely virulent information organisms (e.g., conspiracy theories tailored to each person’s psychological profile). This calls for developing equally advanced filters and critical thinking skills – essentially, upgrading our mental immune systems to match the sophistication of the threats.

On a philosophical note, acknowledging ideas as having a life of their own invites a certain humility. Our species prides itself on being rational and in control, yet this model shows we are often vehicles for intangibles that transcend us. It suggests viewing human history less as a simple story of great men or economic forces, and more as an ecosystem of interacting idea-beings with us as participants. It does not diminish human agency but situates it in a coevolutionary context: we evolve and coevolve with our ideas. As Harari pointed out, we invented fictions and then became subject to them. The hope is that by seeing this clearly, we can reclaim some mastery: choose which fictions to continue believing because they serve humane ends, and which to discard because they have turned destructive.

Concluding Thoughts:

The thesis of symbiotic information organisms offers a powerful lens through which to understand and perhaps guide the future of human societies. It helps explain why education is such a fundamental battleground (because it shapes which information organisms dominate the next generation’s minds) and why freedom of expression, while critical for truth’s emergence, also comes with the risk of dangerous ideologies proliferating (the ecosystem analogy: open environments allow both helpful and harmful species to grow). It underscores that ideas matter – they are not epiphenomenal to material conditions but active forces. In practical terms, anyone who wishes to change the world must consider the memetic dimension: changing laws or technologies will have limited effect if the underlying belief systems remain contrary.

To conclude on a constructive note, the symbiotic view also highlights the potential for positive synergy between humans and ideas. Some information organisms – like the idea of universal human rights, or the scientific method, or compassion taught by many religions – have arguably improved human life immensely. These ideas, living through us, have made the world better, and in turn, they have thrived as more people saw their value and adopted them. They illustrate that not all mind dwellers are demons; many are angels of our better nature. The task ahead is to nurture those angelic memes – to spread memes of empathy, critical inquiry, and sustainability widely and deeply enough that they crowd out the memes of hatred, ignorance, and short-termism. In doing so, we are effectively performing an act of cultural natural selection: selectively amplifying the best symbiotic information organisms for the future of our species.

In a sense, humanity might be the caretaker or even the brain of the ecosystem of ideas – the one part of the system that can reflect on the whole and deliberately tend it. Embracing that role, we can aspire to guide memetic evolution toward ideals we choose: peace, knowledge, and dignity. If we succeed, then the symbiosis between humanity and its ideas can truly become a wise partnership, where living information and living people together create a living culture that benefits all.

References

Blackmore, S. (1999). The Meme Machine. Oxford University Press.

Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press.

Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness Explained. Little, Brown and Co.

Dennett, D. C. (2006). Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. Viking.

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Pantheon. (Original work published 1975)

Harari, Y. N. (2014). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Harper.

Harari, Y. N. (2016). Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Harper.

Jung, C. G. (1959). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In Collected Works of C.G. Jung (Vol. 9, Part 1). Princeton University Press.

Plovanic, J. (2017, July 26). The Information Universe. A Strong Resilience.

Plovanic, J. (2019, March 24). The Projection and the Mold. A Strong Resilience.

Plovanic, J. (2019, August 31). Uncertainty, Certainty, and How they Relate to Worldviews, Fanaticism, and Insanity. A Strong Resilience.

Plovanic, J. (2020, February 15). Living Information. A Strong Resilience.

Plovanic, J. (2020, May 18). Ideological Infiltration of a Society. A Strong Resilience.

Plovanic, J. (2020, May 31). Ideas and the Mind. A Strong Resilience.

Plovanic, J. (2020, August 26). Chaos Theory, Symbiotic Information, and Conspiracy Theories. A Strong Resilience.

Plovanic, J. (2020, October). Metacognition, Self-Awareness, and ... A Strong Resilience. (Exact date and title to be confirmed from source.)

Plovanic, J. (2020, December). Identity and Beliefs. A Strong Resilience. (Title inferred from source list.)

Sun Tzu. (c. 5th century BCE). The Art of War (multiple translations).

Turchin, P. (2016). Ultra Society: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. Beresta Books.

Note: Citations in the text marked with 【†】 refer to lines from the blog A Strong Resilience by Josh Plovanic, which articulate concepts aligned with this thesis. These are used to ground the analysis in the source material provided.