Etiology of Social Dementia - 7

In past posts regular readers have read about symbiotic microbes, which are microbes that live in us and are us, which do good things for us (see The Human Microbiome Congress and The New Meaning of "Human").

This post will focus on the import and/or implications of two other Dredd Blog System posts.

The first being On The Origin of Propaganda, and the other Hypothesis: Microbes Generate Toxins of Power - 6, which both point out a realm of sinister, parasitic microbes.

But more than that, I want to show that some of our national institutions are interested in doing, and most likely are doing, exactly what those very dangerous parasites do.

In the process, readers just may see that Aldous Huxley was on to a reasonable suspicion or expectation, not a wild-eyed rant, when he said:

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”

(Sickology vs. Penology, quoting Huxley). There are several ways to look at that statement, which was done in a metaphorical sense in that Dredd Blog post, pointing out that the "pharmacological method" was addiction to oil.

But today I focus on a more literal version of that statement with a quote from a professor at Stanford University:

You want to know something utterly terrifying? Here's something terrifying and not surprising. Folks who know about Toxo and its affect on behavior are in the U.S. military. They're interested in Toxo. They're officially intrigued. And I would think they would be intrigued, studying a parasite that makes mammals perhaps do things that everything in their fiber normally tells them not to because it's dangerous and ridiculous and stupid and don't do it. But suddenly with this parasite on board, the mammal is a little bit more likely you go and do it. Who knows? But they are aware of Toxo.

(Sapolsky, see also this). The use of propaganda practising microbes to develop a "pharmacological method" of controlling behavior is the subject of many horror movies no doubt, but it is also a reality in today's world.

The reports of developing and using LSD on people in experiments, developing germ warfare weapons of mass destruction and the like, is common knowledge.

No doubt Huxley was prescient in his contemplation of these matters.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

---

---