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What Is the “Mind Virus” Of Which Elon Musk Alludes?
Elon Musk and the Mind Virus
Civilizational Threat
Not until very recently did I hear the terminology, “mind virus,” and it came from Elon Musk (the wealthiest man in the world) in various podcast interviews. In a few of those by various individuals, he talks about the “mind virus” as a civilizational threat. When asked why he bought Twitter (now X), even though it was an apparently very bad investment, he explains that he did it to ward away again, “civilizational threat.” He saw a particular mind virus, which took the world in a trajectory that he assessed would result in the destruction of humanity. His purchase of X would push that back for a time, Musk surmised.
Elon Musk could be right, depending on what the real “mind virus” is. The terminology hearkens to a biblical truth that gets at the crux of the real problem in the world. The actual mind virus is not, however, we know, the same one of which he speaks, based on scripture. Yet, mind virus as a concept, I would agree, depending on its definition, is the greatest civilizational threat.
Richard Dawkins and “Viruses of the Mind”
It seems that the words “mind virus” originated with Richard Dawkins with a 1991 article, entitled, “Viruses of the Mind,” originally delivered as a lecture. Others that then used the terminology equated a similar concept. Dawkins saw religious faith as the chief mind virus, but really faith itself, people with which he calls “faith sufferers.” His point, albeit very false, was that faith bypassed evidence, so it mainly blocked or impeded evidence.
In most recent times, maybe the most common usage of “mind virus” refers to the technical terminology, “woke mind virus.” Googling those three exact words brought me 123,000 hits. This seems to be where we’ve settled in the realm of “mind virus.’ “Woke mind virus.” References to “mind virus” now mean “woke mind virus.”
Meaning of Woke Mind Virus
Musk’s Definition
At the top of a google search is an article at Rolling Stone, titled, “Elon Musk and Bill Maher Fear the ‘Woke Mind Virus’.” When asked, Musk defined this virus as “anything anti-meritocratic and that results In the suppression of free speech.” He said the main cause of it is “the amount of indoctrination that’s happening in schools and universities.” One man, I think, accurately described the woke mind virus with the following quote by G. K. Chesterton:
We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which furious party cries will be raised against anybody who says that cows have horns, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening mob with the news that grass is green.
Some of that to which Musk refers is what I also believe is the mind virus, including in his assessment of Netflix. Commenting on the hemorrhaging of Netflix subscriptions, Musk said Netflix was “unwatchable” because of its “woke mind virus.”
The Real Woke Mind Virus
“Woke” became contemporary terminology to describe a state of totally subjective enlightenment, untethered to objective reality. Someone woke is awake to something probably invisible to almost everyone. An apparent woke person can see someone is a racist like a Geiger counter picking up radioactivity. No evidence of racism is necessary. His inner Geiger counter detects racism; therefore, it must be there. A woke practitioner also sees more than two sexes and even fluidity in gender identity, where someone can label himself a woman, when he is a man, even depending on the day of the week.
A Reprobate Mind
What Musk called the “woke mind virus” is what Romans 1:28 calls “a reprobate mind,” that does not “like to retain God in [its] knowledge.” Concerning the same, 2 Timothy 3:8 says, “these also resist the truth: men of corrupt minds, reprobate concerning the faith.” It’s what 2 Thessalonians 2:11 calls a “strong delusion.” In modern vernacular, someone infected with the woke mind virus is delusional. 2 Corinthians 3:14 and 4:4 say these people’s minds are blinded, so that they cannot see the light of God’s truth.
Musk himself rejects the light of the gospel. He considers the earth billions of years old and that man emerged from naturalistic evolutionary processes. Musk also contends that an extinction event for earth is inevitable. He says, “An extinction event is inevitable and we’re increasingly doing ourselves in.”
Public schools keep teaching lies of the most fundamental and foundational nature. These lies are the root that poison every fruit on the entire tree. They are what Paul calls, “imaginations that exalt themselves against the knowledge of God” (2 Corinthians 10:5). These ways that seem right unto man, Solomon says are the ways of death (Proverbs 14:12).
Prevenient Grace
How do Musk and other’s like him, themselves deluded, correctly identify the woke mind virus? In a default manner, God gives every human “the law written in their hearts” (Romans 2:15). The same verse says, “the conscience also bearing witness.” In the previous chapter, the Apostle Paul writes in Romans 1:19: “Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.” C. H. Spurgeon said in a sermon entitled, Prevenient Grace, preached:
PREVENIENT GRACE, or the grace which comes before regeneration and conversion. I think we sometimes overlook it. We do not attach enough importance to the grace of God in its dealings with men before He actually brings them to Himself. Paul says that God had designs of love towards him even before he had called him out of the dead world into spiritual life.
That grace doesn’t end in salvation for everyone, as seen in Romans 1:18. Even though they know God through many general means, men still suppress the truth in their unrighteousness. As a result, they become “vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened” (Romans 1:21). This is another description of the “woke mind virus.”
The virus also creeps into churches. Churches accommodate the world system. They subjugate themselves to conventional wisdom, what James 3:15 calls “wisdom [that] descendeth not from above, earthly, sensual, devilish.” These are what the Apostle Paul calls in 1 Corinthians 2:13, “the words which man’s wisdom teacheth.” He also calls it “the carnal mind [that] is enmity against God” (Romans 8:7).
The True Woke Mind Virus
Musk doesn’t know or understand the true woke mind virus. Yes, the god of this world deludes most men, including Musk, and God turns them over to a reprobate mind. They are bewitched like the Galatians, “that they should not obey the truth” (Galatians 3:1).
The only escape from the woke mind virus is what Paul calls ‘the law of the mind’ (Romans 7:23). This is akin to replacing the “heart of stone” with a “heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 11:19, 36:26). With this change of nature, man can and will think characteristically how God wants him to think. This is the only true and real cure for the woke mind virus. God can and will deliver through the Lord Jesus Christ. Paul writes (Romans 7:25):
I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God.
Not Knowing What You With Certainty Can Know Is True and Knowing What You Can’t Know Is True
What you can know with certainty is anything that God says. You know the Bible is true. God said it. It’s true and you can know it with certainty. More than ever, what God says, people don’t know. They treat what God said like they can’t know it.
Scripture talks about treating what you can know like you can’t know it. It’s not about knowing. It’s about wanting. Someone doesn’t want to do it, so he eliminates it by not knowing it. He can know it and he does know it. He says he doesn’t know it.
What I’m writing about is like a little child who “forgets.” A parent asks if the child knows. The child nods, “No,” shaking his head back and forth, when the child knows. Not knowing is an excuse for not doing. He does know. With a very large sample size, I can say that children know more than what they act like they do.
Very often, for what people can know, they stay ignorant. They could know, but they don’t want to know. They like what they’re doing. If they don’t try to find out, then they won’t know. If they don’t know, they won’t have to do.
Knowing what you can know with certainty very often isn’t popular. It’s easier just to say that you don’t know.
On the other hand, people treat the Bible like it can’t be known. It’s just opinion. It is a story book of preferences. If it makes you feel good, sure, go ahead with it, but don’t treat it like something you can know.
An example of not knowing what you can know occurred recently in the Senate hearings for confirming the Supreme Court justice, when a Senator asked her to define a woman. She said she didn’t know that. She could know, but wasn’t willing to know.
Very often what the world knows is that it can’t know. It knows with certainty that it can’t know. The unknowability provides freedom. You’re not to judge what you can’t know, so you must not know. That way no one can judge. Then you get to live like you want.
Unwillingness to know becomes a basis of toleration. You’re in trouble if you judge something wrong, because you’re saying you can know, when you can’t. You’re left with tolerating wrong things. It’s required. The judgment itself becomes what’s wrong. An irony is that you can know when someone else can’t know.
I’m not saying, however, that people don’t say they know things. They know what’s wrong with their meal at a restaurant. These people write a bad review with complete conviction of their own knowledge. They know if they got bad service from someone. They know when someone offends them because it’s what they feel.
People know evolution is true. Evolution is still a theory. That status hasn’t changed, but men now know men evolved. This theory promotes naturalism. Knowing it frees men from their accountability to God, when they don’t know it. It’s a theory. It’s a theory that we actually know is not true.
Critical theory poses as knowledge. People know your motives. They know you’re racist. Climate science says it knows the world will end by global warming. Man causes the end of the world through natural means. God tells man how the world will end. That we know.
Churches are more and more worldly because of more and more preference, a lack of knowledge about scriptural things that were once known. They are still known, but treated like they are not. What distinguishes the roles of men and women, what were once known, now not known. The psychology behind overturning scripture, creating victims, who are not victims, this is now known. People are sure of this.
What I’m describing is leaning on man’s understanding and not on God’s. God is always right. Man is rarely to never. Living by faith, which pleases God, is living by what man can and should know, not by what he knows, but that he really cannot.
How should someone treat willful not knowing or rebellious knowing? He should tell the truth. He should embrace knowing what he can and should know. As the psalmist wrote in Psalm 118:6, “The LORD is on my side; I will not fear: what can man do unto me?” He should also stand against what he knows men cannot know.
The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Postmodernism, and Critical Theory
People in general don’t want to be told what to do. This arises from the sin nature of mankind, a cursed rebellion passed down from Adam. So people won’t have to do what an authority tells them, they disparage the credibility of it. They especially attack God in diverse manners so He won’t hinder or impede what they want.
Premodernism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Critical Theory, and Epistemology
The premoderns, even if some did not view themselves or the world correctly, related everything to God. Truth was objective. They knew truth either by natural or special revelation of God. If God said it, it was true, no matter what their opinion. Many invented various means to deal with their own contradictions, but God remained God.
Modernism then arose and said revelation wasn’t suitable for knowledge. Modernists could point to distinctions between religions and denominations and the wars fought over them. Knowledge instead came through scientific testing, man’s observations, consequently elevating man above God. Man could now do what he wanted because he changed the standard for knowledge. Faith for sure wasn’t good enough. With modernism, faith might make you feel good, but you proved something in naturalistic fashion to say you know it. Modernism then trampled the twentieth century, producing devastation, unsuccessful with its so-called knowledge.
Premoderns had an objective basis for knowledge, revelation from God. Moderns too, even if it wasn’t valid, had human reasoning, what they called “empirical proof.” Postmoderns neither believed or liked scripture or empiricism. This related to authority, whether God or government or parents, or whatever. No one should be able to tell somebody else what to do, which is to conform them to your truth or your reality. No one has proof. Institutions use language to construct power.
Postmodernism judged modernism a failure, pointing to wars, the American Indians and institutional bias, bigotry, and injustice. Since modernism constructed itself by power and language, a postmodernist possesses his own knowledge of good and evil, his own truth, by which to construct his own reality. No one will any more control him with power and language.
Critical theory proceeds from postmodernism, but is ironically constructed to sound like modernism. It’s not a theory. Theory is by definition supposed to be rational and associated with observations backed by data. Critical theory criticizes, but it isn’t a theory, rather a desire. People desire to do what they want and don’t want someone telling them what to do, so they deconstruct the language to serve their desires and change the outcome. In the United States especially, theorists criticize white males, those who constructed language and power for their own advantage. According to their theories, white men kept down women, all the other races, and sexual preferences.
The postmodernism behind critical theory procures its knowledge with total subjectivity. Those proficient in theory based on their own divination know what’s good and evil, making them woke to this secret knowledge. They have eaten of the tree. White men are evil. The patriarchy is evil. Anyone contesting gender fluidity and trangenderism is evil.
Epistemology is a field of study that explores and judges how we know what we know and whether we really know it, that it is in fact knowledge. What is a sufficient source of knowledge? You can say you know, but do you really know? The Bible uses the term “know” and “knowledge” a lot. Biblical knowledge is certain, because God reveals it. You receive knowledge when you learn what God says. You can’t say the same thing about what you experience or feel.
The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil
In Genesis 2 (vv. 9, 17), what was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? In the same context, Genesis 3:5-7 say:
5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods,, knowing good and evil. 6 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. 7 And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.
If Adam and Eve depended on what God knew, they would not have eaten of the forbidden tree. Instead they trusted their own knowledge. The tree wasn’t the tree of the knowledge of good. God provided that knowledge. Just listen to Him. Eating of the tree brought the knowledge of evil. The knowledge of evil, what someone might call, carnal knowledge, reminds me of three verses in the New Testament.
1 Corinthians 5:1, It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles, that one should have his father’s wife.
Ephesians 5:3, But fornication, and all uncleanness, or covetousness, let it not be once named among you, as becometh saints.
Romans 16:19, For your obedience is come abroad unto all men. I am glad therefore on your behalf: but yet I would have you wise unto that which is good, and simple concerning evil.
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