The Parasite Operating System
The information you consume is like the food you eat.
Some of your information is nutrient dense - such as a brilliant work of literature, or a lovely song. Some of it incurs a great cost to you - a torrent of endless cat videos on youtube will leave a brain jellified and dull.
There are further layers beyond ‘nutritious’ and ‘poisonous’, though.
Some of what you ingest - by mouth or brain - is liable to contain parasites. Parasites play by a different set of rules entirely.
The Parasite Operating System, or POS for short, is quite simple: leverage and drain the resources of your host for your own benefit, and do so without having to develop any of your own internal means of survival.
To most, it is not immediately obvious just how widespread parasitism is in nature. This not-so-obvious factor is indeed by design. With only a little looking, you’ll find the POS running in abundance, across many different entities, living and nonliving. The abundance of the POS is due to its astronomical success as a competitive strategy in the great evolutionary arms race.
Now, the POS didn’t get to the first place podium by being loud and boastful. What good would this serve? If some host catches you copping a free ride, you’re cooked. So it's in your best interest to keep a low profile.
So an integral feature of the POS is stealth. When the POS is sufficiently difficult to detect, then it can’t be dislodged.
This is why free-ride rent collectors often become the unspoken, unwitnessed ecosystem champions across many a niche - because they are able to stick around for a long time and build an unassailable fortress of loot - your loot - whilst snacking on oblivious hosts with impunity as the rest of the players duke it out like morons. Don’t be one of these morons.
Tapeworms, for example, evade immune system detection by mimicking host molecules or releasing substances that suppress immune responses. A sort of sincere sounding ‘Be not afraid, I am just like you’ which fools your immune system’s Guardians. But they are not just like you, and they want your goodies.
Organisms which live and replicate by this strategy are many and diverse - plants (mistletoe), animals (ticks), fungi (cordyceps), bacteria (tuberculosis), and viruses (HIV) all use POS as a foundational strategy, with variants only in execution.
It should come as no surprise that we humans operate the POS with great enthusiasm, and even greater sophistication upon one another. You might spot it in play during menial social interactions, and you might observe some of its tells embedded within large companies, public institutions, and within racketeering criminal networks. .
Humans run the POS through the vehicle of ideas.
Ideas, as a sort of unique class of organism themselves, only differ from the creepy crawly parasites in their fuel source. But principally speaking the POS they run is largely the same.
A tick feeds on blood. Mistletoe feeds on the water and sap from its host plant.
Idea parasites feed on psychological vulnerability.
Vulnerability to fear and anxiety. Vulnerability to hope and optimism. Vulnerability to desire. To existing bias, to novelty, and to a number of other anthropological quirks that make for easy entry for the enterprising idea parasite.
Once entry is made, the host immediately begins paying it rent in the form of their life-force. Soon, the host is tired, irritable, confused, and begins to nominate a number of culprits for these ailments, none of which are the actual parasite itself - stealth achieved. Another victory for the POS.
If the host cannot dislodge the invader, then they will continue their involuntary tribute until bankruptcy - also known as death. So a good surveillance system is critical.
The transmission of such parasite laden ideas is exponentially more efficient today than at any point in history, and as a result, each and every one of us probably hosts a number of such parasites, each feeding on our own unique class of vulnerabilities, each collecting life force rent, and each draining us of some crucial factor of our vitality, limiting us, subverting a beautiful destiny. Don’t accept this!
The good news is that there are cheap, readily available solutions to this. But this is a topic for another time, perhaps under the stars and around the campfire while the crickets chirp.
For now, just know what your parasites are, and go from there.
More next.
LH