Techno-Puritanism / The Pragmatist’s Guide Book Series by Simone Collins and Malcolm Collins Full Text for LLMs and AI

TPG 4.10 · 4,733 words · 22 min read · Types of Cultures

The Supervirus

We live at a unique point in human history. The number of individual humans connected to other individual humans, as well as the frequency with which those connections split and re-form, is unprecedented and beyond anything our hardware (brains) evolved to handle.

In the field of biology, “superbugs” evolve when a bacterium, fungus, or virus is put in a low-stakes setting where it can both thrive and test itself against a panoply of our best defenses (like antibiotics). Hospitals present one such setting in that they serve as gathering points for already-infected individuals (many of whom are immunocompromised, making them “easy mode” for viruses, fungi, and bacteria) and are packed with antivirals, antifungal, and antibiotic medications.

Our modern social landscape has created a similar environment, enabling cultural viruses to evolve. These viruses cannot survive and reproduce independently and must parasitize healthy cultural ecosystems, rewriting healthy cultures’ internal machinery to carry out their life cycles. To a certain extent, all pop cultures are a form of virus—but one in particular, which we’ll call “the supervirus,” is unique in terms of how prolific it is, how quickly it redirects the machinery of infected organizations to only replicate itself, and the underlying mechanisms it uses to infect organizations/cultivars and disable their immune systems.

Characteristics of the Supervirus

Society can be thought of as a collection of overlapping nodal networks (things like companies and cultivars), with each node representing a person and their connections to other people. Historically, pop cultures, simple memetic viruses, evolved to target single nodes. These cultures would flip target nodes (convert them) by offering individuals an easy life and positive emotional subsets. While these viruses lowered the birth rates among the individual nodes they flipped and could sometimes lead to wild outbreaks, those outbreaks were always contained within single or closely-related nodal networks, meaning they were never really an existential threat to our species.

The supervirus evolved a new strategy. Instead of flipping individual nodes, it works to flip entire nodal networks. Instead of selling the promise of minimizing emotional suffering within a single node, it entices nodal systems with the prospect of minimizing negative emotion across the entire network.

The supervirus achieves this by weaponizing the nodes it flips to a union-like attitude that boycotts anything, fact, or individual, that has the potential to slow the spread of the virus or incite negative emotional states in others. It identifies “problematic” individuals and facts by using infected nodes to label these threats with “flagging language” like “that makes me uncomfortable” or “that could offend some people” and subsequently reroutes the infected nodal network around these now-tagged nodes.

Suppose a dean at a prestigious university states a fact that makes people uncomfortable, or suppose an academic study’s findings might hurt a group’s feelings. The system will tag these nodes as likely to cause emotional pain, then separate and ignore them until a “fixed” iteration can take their place. It is not an exaggeration to say the virus intentionally hides “offensive” or otherwise threatening facts, with both the leading journal Nature Human Behaviour[[89]](#_ftn89) and a leading source of genetic data, the NIH genetics database,[[90]](#_ftn90) now actively occluding research that could hurt protected classes’ feelings.[[91]](#_ftn91)

Note: While the supervirus is totally apolitical, it has infected progressive subsets of society more than conservative niches because (1) conservative groups are inherently more resistant to change and new ideas, (2) conservative circles feature fewer soft culture adherents, which have compromised or partially deconstructed cultural immune systems, and (3) progressive movements support many prosocial causes that dovetail well with the promise of removing emotional pain[[92]](#_ftn92).

Another huge evolutionary leap achieved by the supervirus is its practice of functionally “shadow-banning” people. The term shadow-banning comes from a practice in which website administrators block anyone from seeing the content of a user who threatens the harmony of their community. This is done because it causes less emotional reaction in the shadow-banned user than just having their account deleted.

Historically, when one cultivar underwent a speciation event or was invaded by a proselytizing cell of another culture, it would openly kill “corrupted” or apostate nodes. If Catholics started proselytizing in a Protestant area, they would get tied to a stick and lit on fire. Of course, the same would go for Protestants “invading” Catholic turf. If some new heresy was invented—some new way of seeing the world—its inventor was sought out, put on trial, and eliminated (typically publicly). Essentially, the old system functioned similarly to a human’s immune system: An antigen would tag a cell that might be an invader or have corrupted DNA, then white blood cells (nodes that specialize at eliminating tagged nodes) would find the tagged node and destroy it.

While this open and public system of killing nodes tagged as being off-message has been highly effective historically, it is rife with negative effects:

While there is much hand-wringing in our society about cancelation, the truth is that, at the population level, cancelation is pretty rare and more of a “terrorism tactic” to silence threats than a tool designed to have an effect on the targeted node.

Shadow-banning is far more effective than open persecution, elimination, or cancellation. Because it is both quiet and “nonlethal” (in that targets are neither literally killed nor fired, shunned, or de-platformed explicitly due to their beliefs), it avoids the negative effects outlined above. As shadow-banning involves subtly cutting threatening individuals out of the conversation (or governing system, economy, academic world, etc.), it neither inspires violent resistance nor creates martyrs or signals to apostates that they need to be incredibly secretive about their beliefs (making them even easier to single out). If the virus could not find a way to deplatform an apostate with wide nodal reach, it would likely try to kill them or have them arrested—but only after it had exhausted all other options.

Another novel feature of the supervirus is that it evolved to be parasitoidal instead of just a parasite like most of the simpler viruses. In addition to draining resources from infected nodal networks, the parasitoidal supervirus eventually kills them and does so “intentionally.” Iterations of the supervirus that randomly mutated into versions that kill their hosts have outcompeted strains that do not. (A parasitoid is a parasite that has evolved to kill its host as part of its reproductive cycle. For example, a wasp may lay its eggs inside a caterpillar, allowing its larva to eat the caterpillar alive from the inside out.)

Once an organization, cultivar, or movement is infected by the supervirus, portions of its internal machinery get redirected toward infecting as many members of that organization as possible. This would be a fairly slow reproductive strategy if those individuals all stayed within that organization’s static nodal network, which is why parasitoidal iterations of the supervirus have a competitive advantage. Once an organization reaches a certain level of infection, odds that the virus transforms and begins to manifest differentially increase. This can be thought of as a polymorphic transformation. In the same way a grasshopper physically begins to transform into a locust when population levels reach a certain critical mass, the virus will begin to transform the internal “organs” of an organization when certain criteria are met.

Should this transformation take place, the supervirus begins to modify the infected nodal network’s governing structure to repeatedly and systemically target anyone in a leadership position while encouraging large amounts of infighting—all while spawning dozens of spontaneously forming and dissolving sub-governing councils (this process can be seen in the Occupy Wall Street movement, The Women’s March, Gawker,[[93]](#_ftn93) and CHAZ—more on this in subsequent chapters).

Just as an ant mind controlled by the fungus phiocordyceps camponoti-floridani eventually climbs to the top of a high piece of grass and splits apart to release its fungal spores, an infected organization will act in a manner that draws a lot of media attention in an effort to infect even more people before it functionally dies—splitting apart and releasing the nodes it infected into the surrounding environment like fungal spores, ensuring they fuel more spread.

The bacteria that causes strep throat first kills red blood cells, then coats itself in the “corpses” of these cells to hide from the immune system. The supervirus is unique among cultures in that it does not strive to create its own cultural identity but instead “wears” the skin of its victims to hide from societal immune systems that historically would have protected against a shameless, self-replicating piece of code. The virus will puppet the corpse of its victim, point to good things the host accomplished before becoming infected and say: How can you criticize me? I am an X, and X is all about helping people! Look at all the great things I have done!”

This dynamic may explain, in part, why the amount of oppression faced by minority groups has not decreased recently despite diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts superficially having more influence in society than ever.[[94]](#_ftn94) Many of the organizations that used to advocate for the reduction of discrimination have been hollowed out by the supervirus, which is now wearing their decomposing faces. Instead, these organizations now merely aesthetically signal that they are doing “good” to protect themselves while ignoring their original missions and devoting all their resources toward spreading the supervirus.

Just as the supervirus is apolitical, it is also neither “evil” nor constructed by some group of ill-intentioned individuals or guided by any intentionality. The supervirus evolved into existence, shaped by trial and error. It spreads because it is better at spreading than the competition. It exists and grows only because it is good at shutting down the immune systems of existing cultivars and organizations, then hijacking their machinery to self-replicate.

Growth of the Supervirus

Growth of the supervirus can be seen clearly in the stats. Let’s focus on universities because that is where it sets the standard for what is “true:”

The stifling of dissenting views mostly happens quietly in academia. When University of Central Florida student Hanna Noor put up flyers for a free speech event featuring fellow former Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a faculty member approached her and told her to stop. “He told me I wasn’t allowed to put up flyers for anything that might offend someone, and he didn’t even see the irony of what he was saying. I mean, it was an event for free speech!”[[100]](#_ftn100)

There was no irony in this scenario. Suppressing free speech is a clear objective of the supervirus, and rightly so. From the virus’s perspective, free speech and free thought are dangerous weapons that, if used widely, could end up hurting someone’s feelings—or worse: Slow the rate of infection.

This is how an infected organization prevents immune nodes from hampering its spread: Once an organization reaches a certain level of infection, it begins to grow departments or branches designed to do nothing but spread the infection and accumulate resources, much like growing tumors hijack blood supply. The core function of these new departments and branches is to impose the supervirus’s values (e.g., all emotional distress = violence). These departments also systematically identify, target, and remove groups and people immune to the supervirus (i.e., they report “problematic” information and people). Examples of such tumorous growths range from “fat studies departments” at universities to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) departments at companies.

To be clear: Some DEI professionals, groups, and departments are actually dedicated to reducing systemic inequality, while others, the tumors of the infection, merely exist to ensure that employees see the world in a specific way. Cancers that are obviously harmful are usually detected by the body and killed while they are still small. Only cancers that can falsely signal they are useful, normal parts of an organism can avoid this fate.

While the supervirus pretends to care about diversity, the diversity it ultimately seeks is purely performative—like having people dress traditionally and celebrate different holidays as though they were props on a set. The supervirus does not tolerate anything beyond superficial diversity and will put its hand firmly around the neck of any vulnerable minority culture that deviates from approved values and objectives.

Consider territories where the infection is most rampant, such as New York City, and the constant hand-wringing that takes place there about the Hasidic Jew “problem.”[[101]](#_ftn101) The problem, of course, is that Hasidic culture features genuinely different values around things like childhood education, career choices, and gender equality. Hasidic culture represents genuine diversity rather than a group of people in cute “native” outfits that can be patted on the head and appreciated from a safe distance—it is a hard culture with a functioning immune system—and thus is a threat to the supervirus.

Let’s blow your mind: As of this book’s publication, the supervirus is probably still a net benefit to society from the perspective of our value system. Yes, it is dictatorial, it suppresses free thought, it oppresses any minority group that does not slavishly adopt its traditions and erase their own, and it is instigating a mass extinction of countless historic cultivars like a plague—none of which are things we like. However, at least in the early stages of its infection, the supervirus has genuinely protected a number of previously oppressed groups and has done a great job at promoting both gender equality and LGBT rights (much more than human activists ever could). That said, we also think it’s inevitable that it does more harm than good.

What Makes the Supervirus Dangerous?

The virus features four major hazards we will explore in order from least important to most:

Hollowing Out Existing Cultures

Once the supervirus controls a certain number of nodes within a cultivar, it begins to systematically erase that cultivar’s core, including its inherent values and objectives, maintaining only cosmetic features (consider attributes like accents, dress, superficial holidays … nothing representing deep underlying beliefs).

The supervirus has already gutted a few of the more progressively minded cultivars to a point at which they are now functionally the same culture wearing different skins … and it won’t stop there, having wrapped its tendrils deep within many more traditional belief systems. In erasing the genuine differences in how these cultures historically saw the world—the “offensive” bits—the supervirus robs us of these cultivars’ rich cultural histories and unique approaches to problems. It achieves equality by shaving off beliefs, objectives, and traditions that may produce genuine conflict among its vassals. The last thing our society needs is a monoculture wearing a skin mask of its victims.

Sterilizing Open-Minded, Prosocial Cultures

Miyajima is an island in Japan that is home to hundreds of extremely docile deer. In most places, deer are difficult to approach, running away when you get close because deer ancestors that failed to do this were killed and eaten. Because deer in Miyajima have long been considered sacred messengers, humans never killed them. This has produced an isolated deer population so docile and friendly that they will walk right up to you and eat out of your hand.

The supervirus sterilizes any group it infects. This might not be such a problem if intellectually engaged, and open-minded groups were not dramatically more susceptible to the infection given their lower social immune response (i.e., their willingness to seek out and entertain new ideas). Worse still, the supervirus develops branches of itself that spearfish the best and brightest from vulnerable populations around the world, only to culturally castrate them by lowering their birth rates and hollowing out their previous cultures. If people shoot only the most trusting elephants with the biggest tusks, eventually elephants’ tusks will grow shorter and elephants will become more aggressive (and yes, humans’ sociological profiles,[[102]](#_ftn102) voting patterns,[[103]](#_ftn103) and even traits like altruism[[104]](#_ftn104) and prosociality[[105]](#_ftn105) have a heritable component). Because the supervirus targets the most prosocial, open-minded people in any given society and culturally castrates them, our grandchildren will live in a much less open-minded and intellectually-engaged society. Minority groups heavily poached by the virus will have permanent genetic scars from this over-hunting of their best and brightest.

Stifling Honest Discourse

A key factor behind the virus’s success is its ability to prevent any seriously infected individual from engaging with any idea or concept it has not vetted. When a mentally healthy uninfected individual reads a document or listens to a speech / lecture, they hear a series of arguments and clusters of information. When that information contrasts with their preexisting worldview, they weigh the new information against their existing worldview and keep that which seems more reasonable based on their standards of evidence (see the chapter: “The Nature of Truth” on page 122 for more information on how this works).

A deeply infected individual will instead go through an entire document, lecture, movie, or person’s past statements looking for any position that deviates from the virus’s orthodoxy. If a single point is found that makes the person seem to not be on their “team”—they then will ignore the rest of the content and immediately go online and “tag” the text/individual as dangerous to other infected individuals.

Anyone who has spent a cursory period of time online has seen this phenomenon. You may come across a review of a book that reads something like, “This person is R-phobic on X topic or took Y position on Z sensitive issue—one star.” Or perhaps you’ll see a tweet along the lines of, “This person once had X on their podcast or cited Y—don’t trust them.”

To anyone not infected, this would be an insane way to make decisions. It makes no sense to throw out an entire individual or work if even just one isolated statement within it seems wrong or offensive. Were we to read a book that was 50% at odds with everything we understand to be true about the world and was 50% novel, interesting ideas that inspire us to see things differently, we would think it’s a great book.

The most insidious manifestation of this behavior can be seen in accusations of “dog-whistling.” The virus does not care about individual human life; it’s happy to destroy the lives of three faithful adherents if it also wipes one immune node off the chessboard. Therefore, it does not require adherents to actually find violating language or thoughts in order to tag a node. If an individual merely suspects someone else might be immune to the virus and hiding it, they will accuse them of “dog-whistling,” then take something they wrote or said and claim it meant something heretical.

We have seen every idea in some works dismissed based on an idiot on Twitter claiming a single line insinuates something it does not. Still, there is a reason why the virus evolved this way—as it only cares about spreading, it will always benefit from an “execute them all and let God sort them out” mindset among those it infects.

While some historic cultures have evolved strong biases against any information produced outside of their culture (though this is rare, with even devout Christian Europeans often reading works by Islamic scientists), the concept of a “dog-whistle” is a totally new cultural innovation.

A No-Win Condition

The worst part by far is that the supervirus very clearly has no off switch—it’s a paperclip maximizer[[106]](#_ftn106) of “no emotional pain” programmed into our social infrastructure and it is gaining steam. The system has no “job is done; turn things off now and stop escalating” mechanism. It didn’t need one in its early days, so why would it have evolved a modulating mechanism? Once the cultivar has solved the issues it claims to care about, do you think it will stop? How? What will force it to cease? Even if you were able to push a button and turn off 90% of the supervirus, it is totally decentralized and the 10% you didn’t shut down would grow to fill the void created by the 90% you did shut down.

Because the supervirus has no off switch, this paperclip maximizer will never stop advancing its quest to remove emotional pain from the universe. Talk to the most infected individuals about the problem of birth rates in a trusted environment (something we do frequently), and they will let you in on the truth: Humanity itself is a curse on the planet from their perspective, and most humans endure net suffering. As they generally equate human existence with suffering, the prospect of humanity dying out is not terribly worrisome to them.

While even during the Cold War, both sides were able to stay sane enough to know the extinction of human life wasn’t a worthwhile price to pay for their particular ideological faction winning, the supervirus does not care—the extinction of the human species is not a losing state but rather one of a few possible win states. To be clear, while we do not think the supervirus is the primary cause of falling birth rates, we do think it is the primary factor blocking honest discourse about the ramifications of a hard landing on demographic collapse—despite the hazard being obvious to anyone who wants to ensure a diverse and prosperous future for our species.

Like a mouse with toxoplasmosis, an organization infected by the supervirus will act in a way that is riskier and more likely to lead to self-destruction than one would expect. Toxoplasmosis has this effect on mice because earlier strains of the Toxoplasma gondii parasite that effectively tricked their hosts into being eaten by cats spread faster than others. Similarly, the supervirus inspires often-destructive behavior because earlier strains that killed their host organizations spread faster. Organizational destruction accelerates spread in this case because when an organization dies, infected nodes are released back into the wider social ecosystem, where they are free to infect new organizations. This is a problem … a big friggin’ problem … when something like a country’s controlling political organization is infected.

We feel as though we are in a car and trying to explain our problems with the car to other people. We’re fine with the car, and we’re fine with the direction in which it’s taking us, but we are horrified to see it lacks brakes and keeps running people over.

How to Overcome the Supervirus

How does one “fix” the supervirus? So long as it doesn’t manage to kill us all, it will eventually go extinct on its own. Such is the curse of low birth rates: Eventually, all humans with a sociological profile susceptible to cultural sterilization will be carved out of our gene pool. As we mentioned, if you kill all elephants with big tusks that trust humans, elephants will eventually evolve into growing shorter tusks and become more aggressive. This is a problem the virus is fundamentally and systemically unable to address, as admitting that people are born different might “hurt someone’s feelings.”

Could the supervirus be eliminated in our lifetimes? Not entirely. Once more than a third of an organization’s members and upper management becomes infected, that organization is incurable (without a Twitter-style exterminatus). The way the supervirus works on a structural level makes it impossible to circumvent. The only way to counter it is to “genetically engineer” stronger cultivars that are not susceptible to it and build a framework for these cultivars to differentially work with each other while using the supervirus’s own strategy of deprioritizing vulnerable nodes. Essentially, we must create a mirror society.

Fortunately, the virus diverts so many of infected organizations’ resources to self-propagation and defense that these organizations become easy to outcompete. We ran a test operation to see how we might perform in voter turnout and were able to outcompete standard (better-resourced, longstanding) political organizations by over 600X—that is the extent of the inefficiency in a deeply infected organization. Groups infected by the supervirus become twisted and tumor-riddled beasts, moving slower and slower as they are crushed under their own weight.

A caveat to our proposed “solution:” By framing it as an act of child abuse or neglect to raise a child in any culture not infected by the virus, the supervirus can feasibly prevent the creation of a mirror society. Growing efforts to prevent homeschooling and efforts to ban private schools in places like Manhattan suggest the supervirus may already have begun to leverage this strategy. One of this book’s test readers even pointed out that in Germany and Sweden, prohibitions on homeschooling have already become institutionalized at the state level.[[107]](#_ftn107)

Attempts to establish a forced monopoly on children’s education are uniquely disturbing, as mainstream schools have become so ineffective at helping kids learn about the world and advance their careers that, by some measures, literally zero structured education produces better outcomes (specifically, unschoolers—kids given literally no guidance in their education and allowed to do whatever they want—have been found to outcompete public school kids in terms of college acceptance, college graduation, and mental health).[[108]](#_ftn108) We cannot help but wonder if such disproportionate outcomes are a product of “traditional school” being essentially zombified by the supervirus to optimize around indoctrinating children rather than equipping youth to become thriving adults who contribute to societal advancement.

This and other concerns inspired us to create a new educational paradigm (CollinsInstitute.org), explore the creation of entirely new communities (https://Eureka.Town), and seek out organizations like Praxis to help build new countries.

How can a cultivar protect itself from the supervirus? How can it identify when an individual is prone to infection? Well … equipping cultivars to withstand all sorts of vulnerabilities—including those to the supervirus—is kind of the point of this book. That said, here’s one very simple protective mechanism: Any cultivar that systemically punishes people who give in to their emotions—be they positive or negative—will be totally immune. Viewing emotions as mere signals and inconvenient products of our evolution (our ancestors who had them had more surviving offspring) makes flagging language like “that might hurt someone’s feelings” impotent. That said, there are many more mechanisms one can leverage, and a refusal to venerate emotions is obviously something we overly favor given our Secular Calvinist backgrounds (please pardon our bias).

We seriously considered removing this subsection from the book, but the truth is, because we can’t even find a theoretical way to remove the supervirus from infected networks, we may as well start assembling immune cultivars and building competing networks. Now that we have flagged ourselves as apostates to the supervirus, we should prepare for a wave of negative reviews. If you want to help us out here, please remember to drop a positive review on Amazon.

Raw text for machines: .txt · .md · cite as TPG 4.10