When discussing coronavirus, we must ask ourselves whether the recent SARS-CoV-2 virus was a biological or a memetic weapon. Since, as I claim, it was both of them, we are amidst a biological war that was already long ago envisaged as almost inescapable despite the 2013 treaty of 170 countries to avoid developing biowarfare weapons. 

In this post, I intend to prove that:

1. We are amidst a biological war.
2. The agent of this war is not a single human being or a single human institution.
3. The real agent behind this war is a meme; we are primarily talking about a memetic war.

Agents of war

While more and more studies prove Corona to be a human-made artificial virus (this one being only one of them), it is improbable that it would be used in the way that traditional warfare uses artillery or even a nuclear bomb. When we picture ourselves in a war, we, by definition, recognize a distinct human agent behind it, be it a state or a guerrilla minority. As much as there is a distinct agent behind any traditional war, there is a weapon used that, no matter how damaging it is, releases its power on a limited territory and a limited target population. Even gas as a (prohibited) weapon has limitations in its scope. Likewise, poisoning of water has its apparent limitations, not to mention nuclear weapons that could be globally damaging only if a majority of their power were released at once. 

The virus offers us no comparison to any other known weaponry. Why? Because it is an agent in itself. A virus needs no outside agency to be put in action. Viruses have been such agents since the first moments of life on Earth, some 4 billion years ago. Evolutionarily speaking, viruses proved (by the practice itself) to be the most sustainable creatures on Earth since they most probably appeared together with archaea. To put it differently, they need no human to invent them artificially. They did artificially reinvent (mutate) themself quite successfully without the little help of a poor human. 

Viruses do not fall into a managerial trap.

Why are they so much more sustainable than humans? Because they know (in the sense that they live) both complexity and decentralisation. They »know« well what Alasdair MacIntyre explained so nicely in his After Virtue, that human managerial expertise as a part of social sciences is only a masquerade of management if management is understood as a kind of scientific practice that can predict the results of its actions. Unlike experts, in our case, warfare strategists, viruses »know« that since the only »agent« behind their actions is evolution, decentralisation is the only way to be sustainable in such complexity. And this is the reason, for instance, that I was so optimistic about blockchain as the first constructed decentralised human activity. (Markets are fully decentralised, but are not constructed; they have emerged!)

So, even if there was a crazy individual, institution, or state behind the release of Corona, he was already defeated by that same virus at that moment. 

The war against Corona is, therefore, a war that humans have fought forever. Corona is one of many mutations of the primordial virus. What is amusing about viruses is that the majority of them, especially in aquatic environments, are not only harmless to animals and humans but also indispensable for life on Earth. They are at the same time our allies and our enemies.

Co-evolution of memetic and biological Corona

Let me jump from this most interesting story of biology to memology. It should be clear, even to those who object to memetics as a valid theory of human evolution, that it is a memetic war fought around Korona that might be even more damaging in the future than Korona itself. What we clearly see is the co-evolution of gene and meme, a co-evolution of a biological virus and memetic reactions to this virus. 

I hope you noticed a mistake in my last sentence. I put a mistake there for one reason only: to see if you are still following me.

If we are talking about co-evolution, then memes did not react to a virus but co-evolved with it. How? As a prophecy. There were indeed many like Bill Gates and think-tank institutions that decades ago prophesied a virus like COVID-19. To say that they prophesied it means, in memetic language, that they spread the memetic virus of Corona long before the biological virus mutated into the COVID-19 strain. However, from another perspective, if there were no biological virus, the memetic virus of a coronavirus could not emerge and spread either. Memetic virus and biological virus are clearly like the chicken and the egg. They co-evolve in the literal sense of this concept.

Epidemiology of memetic viruses

Let me now address the final question that baffles us all during moments of global lockdown. How come that Corona is so powerful? But then, didn’t I already answer this question? Because the biological virus is not pandemic on a biological level alone, but its pandemic nature is further amplified by the pandemic of the memetic coronavirus. Compared to the famous Spanish flu at the beginning of the 20th century, we now see that barriers that previously prevented the memetic Spanish flu from spreading globally as a real memetic pandemic are now wide open. A hundred years ago, meme viruses could not spread as fast as they do now. The Spanish flu virus was as virologically dangerous as the corona-meme virus. Still, it was epidemiologically much less dangerous since it could not spread as quickly as the corona-meme virus.

I must conclude this post with a precise prediction that the biological spread of COVID-19 will be limited to a manageable size quite soon, whether through a vaccine or any other combination of physical health prevention measures. However, I foresee no vaccine for memetic coronavirus, nor any other memetic inhibitor. Currently, social and psychological boosters for the corona-meme virus are clearly prevailing. Corona is not going to be lethal for human mental health due to loneliness and other adverse effects of lockdowns. It will be lethal as a memetic virus “per se”.. 

What do I mean by »per se«? Answering this question would mean that I know this virus so very well that I think I could manage it. I would behave like Goebbels, who was still able to coordinate the propaganda of the Nazi war centrally. Due to the mentioned barriers to memes, at that time, it was still possible, to a certain degree, to manage the spread of memes and run propaganda. Nowadays, it is no longer. Goebbels played the expert masquerade, according to MacIntyre, meaning that he still had some hope for foreseeable results. With barriers to memes fully down, we can finally see their unrestricted agency, played on the field of memetic evolution, within unrestricted complexity and with no central authority. 

A plea for memetics

Until memetics becomes universally approved »science« with hundreds of researchers, with virologists and epidemiologists working on memetic viruses, so long our future is seriously endangered, for we do not even understand, and even less develop protective shields against the harmful side of memes. I doubt that the many aspects of the positive side of memetic viruses, like the words of a poet, are enough to save us:

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”