I admit I enjoy the term “Woke Mind Virus.” It’s meant to be offensive, but I mostly find it funny. It has an air of accuracy too—even as a left-leaning person who celebrates diversity, I can be exasperated by the zealotry of some people’s “wokeness.” I’ve written about this before. The lens of equity and inclusion is useful, but problems arise when it becomes the only lens through which people see.
For some reason, since Trump’s return as President, I’ve been thinking a lot about “mind viruses.” Maybe it’s all the talk of DEI and Trump’s crusade against it: once he took office, it occurred to me that he had something that might be called Anti-Woke Mind Virus. When an Army helicopter collided with a commercial airliner in January, tragically killing 67 people, and Trump blamed the crash on DEI with no evidence, it appeared that his Anti-Woke Mind Virus was on full display.
This thought sent me down a path. Soon, like some nineteenth-century explorer enthusiastically naming new species of flora, I began discovering and naming other mind viruses in our midst. After all, if Woke Mind Virus gets a name, it seems only fair that the others should too.
And now, after months of thoughtful inquiry, I am ready to present my initial findings to the world. So allow me to put on some tweed, pick up my magnifying glass, and lead you, my fellow questers after knowledge, on a rambling tour of the mind viruses this humble explorer has so far identified.
The first was the aforementioned Anti-Woke Mind Virus, but in my investigations I quickly determined that it falls under a broader category I have christened Outrage Mind Virus. This is the affliction caused by too much Fox, NewsMax, Rumble, and other far-right media. The unfortunate sufferers of OMV believe that basically all of society’s problems can be blamed on the libs. That everything—everything—is the fault of “socialism,” or Biden (or, before Biden, Hillary), or wokeism and DEI.
Just as people with Woke Mind Virus struggle to see beyond their lens of equity and inclusion, people with Outrage Mind Virus struggle to see beyond their own narrow, outraged lens. And I have observed both afflictions to have a curiously similar effect: frequent self-righteous indignation.
I have also found it useful to adopt a name for all those far-right media outlets. I call them the Right-Wing Outrage Machine, or RWOM. I’m not sure whether I coined this term; I may have read it somewhere. Regardless, RWOM is admittedly not a good acronym, so I’m open to suggestions.
But we chroniclers of social afflictions do need a name for this one. The RWOM poisons viewers’ minds, feeding them lies and exaggerations and vilifying huge swaths of the population. Regular consumers of such media cannot help but contract Outrage Mind Virus. Over the fifteen years since I began engaging in politics, I have come to believe that the RWOM is one of our greatest social ills, responsible in no small way for the polarization tearing our country apart.
Here is a twist my fellow left-leaning adventurers will find surprising, though. Although there is no equivalent of the RWOM on the left—no commonly watched, well-oiled Left-Wing Outrage Machine—I have come to feel that Late Night performs a similar function.
The RWOM is far worse, and it deserves all the scorn it gets. But Late Night, which produces so much of that scorn, is itself the RWOM’s closest analogue, an insight that finally fully seized me in the leadup to the 2024 election. I began perceiving that my own mind was being poisoned: by Late Night’s culture of sarcasm, its constant snarky vilification of the right, and its normalization of mean-spiritedness.
I humbly beseech you, my trusty companions, to consider this point closely. Think of the knowing, wry tone of Fox News hosts and tell me it doesn’t resemble the knowing, wry tone of Late Night pundits. The audience is always in on the joke, and the joke is usually the same: the other side is stupid and ignorant and essentially evil.
The final provocation for me was a November 1st piece by Jimmy Kimmel, in which Kimmel mocked Trump’s garbage-truck stunt and his rally for Hispanic voters. Kimmel’s jokes made my heart sink, and not for the first time. Even though the newsclips were cherry-picked, the way they always are in the RWOM and on Late Night, they still inadvertently showed Trump’s genuine connection with the working class and many Hispanics. Kimmel seemed oblivious to his own smug elitism.
I must confess that I stopped watching Late Night after that. It’s easy to find humor that’s better for the soul, not to mention the country. I also could not help observing that the Late Night pundits had been part of the media culture that distorted the left’s reality in 2024, causing many people to once again misjudge the Trumpian movement. And how can we build bridges when our media are constantly selling the idea that “the other side” is stupid and/or evil?
Just because the far right watches toxic shows doesn’t mean it’s good for the left to do so. The shows are humorous, and sometimes I do still gravitate back toward them…but I cannot unsee their destructive elements. So far, my interest has always quickly waned again.
But I’ve digressed, although it has been a useful digression. Now let’s return to mind viruses.
Stepping back from Outrage Mind Virus, I have determined it to be a subvariety of an even broader malady: Tribal Mind Virus, or TMV. This pathogen infects people of all political stripes. The most susceptible are the partisans—the people who steep themselves in political news (I am myself thus vulnerable), and who often watch RWOM outlets or Late Night. TMV sufferers see the political “other side” in black and white and blame all our problems on “Them.”
After discovering Tribal Mind Virus, for a while I began wondering whether all our common mind viruses are not, in fact, subvarieties of this one single mind virus, TMV.
Take Trump Derangement Syndrome, another mind virus astutely identified by observers on the right. To Trump loyalists, TDS is the madness that often overcomes left-leaning people when talking about Trump. Indeed, I wholeheartedly agree that such madness occurs. My own definition of TDS sounds somewhat different, though. Mine is something like, “the madness that results from pointing out Trump’s lies and destructiveness, but realizing that no matter what you say, his loyalists won’t listen and seem hellbent on destroying the country.” It’s hard not to experience at least a little TDS these days!
Others who share my anti-Trump sentiments have inverted TDS altogether. To many, Trump Derangement Syndrome accurately describes the blind, cult-like hypocrisy that leads Trump loyalists to rationalize every harmful thing he does, while simultaneously attacking his opponents for supposedly doing similar things—many of which they have not actually done, or not nearly so egregiously. For example, according to this inverted usage, TDS occurs when a person spends years lambasting Trump’s opponents for violations of free speech, then falls silent when Trump assaults free speech far more aggressively through arrests and attacks on the press and the courts. (Note: the link in that previous sentence hails from a conservative think tank.)
Do I sound biased? My apologies. Perhaps it’s my own TDS.
But as I was saying: Isn’t TDS, in either of its forms, just another manifestation of Tribal Mind Virus? I think it may be.
Nevertheless, as I parsed this out further, I determined that Woke Mind Virus, the malaise that first catalyzed my explorations, does not precisely fit within the broader category of Tribal Mind Virus. While sufferers of WMV are overwhelmingly on the political left, the left-right political framework does not define their worldview. Instead, their condition causes them to group people based on race, sex, gender, and other identity categories, considering these to be the most important social groupings, to the exclusion of others—including political party. If I am correct in this assessment, then the existence of WMV demonstrates that not all mind viruses fall under the umbrella of Tribal Mind Virus.
Here is an illustration of my proposed mind-virus taxonomy:
As you can see, I have intentionally left space in my taxonomy for other, as-yet-unidentified mind viruses, perhaps to be filled in by future researchers. For instance, another subvariety of Tribal Mind Virus might relate to how some on the left blame societal problems on “capitalism,” which is approximately as well-defined as the right’s pet villain of “socialism.” Meanwhile, another subvariety of Outrage Mind Virus might be dubbed Lock-Her-Up Syndrome. The possibilities are bountiful! I have found tinkering with this chart to be a most diverting exercise.
But for now, allow me to extract myself from the present weeds and once again move on.
Looking through the lens of mind viruses, a new question next began troubling me. Could anything be labeled a mind virus, depending on a person’s perspective? What if what I call a “mind virus” is actually just a strongly held opinion with which I happen to disagree?
Who’s to say, for example, that Brené Brown’s “whole-hearted” thinking isn’t just another mind virus? Or what about therapy culture, which sends some people into paroxysms of vexation? Or my own earnest desire to depolarize the country? Do I actually have Depolarization Mind Virus (DMV—oh dear), which causes the sufferer to believe that political polarization is the root of all our ills?
This line of inquiry forced me to better define mind viruses. I realized that there is one thing all the mind viruses above have in common, the last paragraph notwithstanding. Mind viruses oversimplify. They create inaccurate, black-and-white maps of the world, turning sufferers toward narrow solutions for problems that are in truth messy and complex.
Even Trump Derangement Syndrome fits this definition. Consider the term’s original usage. I happen to think it’s appropriate to feel somewhat “deranged” about Trump, but that derangement still blinds us if we’re not careful. It makes too many sufferers want to resist every action Trump takes, even actions that potentially have merit.
Many of the issues Trump aims to address in his administration are real issues that do need addressing—things like illegal immigration, the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to other countries, Europeans not contributing enough to their own defense, and the orthodoxy of DEI in some universities. Yes, even government inefficiency. Trump is the wrong person to address these concerns, and many of his “solutions” will cause more problems than they will solve. But it’s worth considering at least some of his ideas.
As Harvard psychology professor Stephen Pinker recently wrote in an outstanding New York Times essay, “[I]f you’re standing in a downpour and Mr. Trump tells you to put up an umbrella, you shouldn’t refuse just to spite him.” Pinker’s essay is entitled “Harvard Derangement Syndrome,” by which he means Trump’s derangement. He nevertheless agrees with Trump that DEI at Harvard has been sorely in need of reform for years.
I believe that our tribalism—that widespread contagion of Tribal Mind Virus—has helped hand us this second Trump presidency, and also that the left’s full-throttle, indiscriminate “resistance” to Trump has played an additional role. I will argue these points in upcoming posts, when I have doffed my tweed jacket and retired from my present investigation of mind viruses. But for now, suffice to say that given the left’s failures thus far, it may be worth trying a new tack and becoming more discerning in what we resist.
The world is messy and ever-changing. Understanding the truth and choosing the right course of action requires constant discernment and readjustment. Mind viruses, as I define them, are thinking patterns that shut down that process.
There are antidotes. In my explorations to date, I have found that the “still, small voice” within us is perhaps most powerful of all. That voice guides us away from black-and-white thinking, toward an embrace of complexity and nuance, and into a wholeness that is better for the soul. It was that voice that made me realize I should stop watching Late Night. To hear it, I had to disconnect from the media long enough to experience my own inner quiet.
Regrettably, I do not yet know how to persuade more people to desist from consuming toxic media and listen to that voice. I also don’t know how to move more people up the “Respectrum”—that is, towards listening and respect despite political disagreement—and away from black-and-white thinking. But I will continue striving to do so myself, in hopes of avoiding the many mind viruses that are plaguing our current era.
Meanwhile, I hope that this tour has been enlightening and entertaining. Taking ourselves a bit less seriously can be good medicine too.
