Misidentify your own body’s cells as pathogens? It’s autoimmune disease time.

The difference being that I can’t just get it repaired, or replace it, or even stop the same thing from happening in the future, or even predict when it might happen again. Fuck MS.

On the opposite side, the immune system can also be tricked. Your immune system goes after parasites in your blood and tissue, but some parasites can disguise themselves well enough (based on your immune system’s criteria) to be allowed to hang out and mooch off of your body’s resources undisturbed.

To be fair, Steve Buscemi can mooch off of my body’s resources whenever he wants.

Now let’s take a look at the mind.

Your mind’s immune system also helps you survive, but it’s not perfect either.

I should be clear at the point and say that while your body has actual, physical cells that make up its immune system, the thing I’m calling “the mind’s immune system” is just a set of mental attributes and processes. Also, a cursory googling didn’t show anyone else calling it by this name, although I’m sure this idea is not entirely unique or original.

The basic problem is this: you increase your chances of survival by being rational, but not too rational. The energetic cost of thinking through everything is just way too high. Plus there’s the fact that whether you’re a hunter-gatherer or a modern, urban-dwelling insurance claims adjuster, you will always have to operate with incomplete information, and sometimes you have to make snap judgments or miss the opportunity to act at all. A person who has to stop and think (and then think about those thoughts to test them for rationality) before any action is probably not going to survive very long.

Those are the constraints, and a lot of basic human irrationality comes from the need to take shortcuts and make assumptions. It worked for all your ancestors, right? Well, it worked well enough for them to survive at least long enough to reproduce. But their success in that regard doesn’t tell us anything about their quality of life, both physical and mental. Consider the fact that most of your ancestors probably had intestinal worms, too. So before you’re tempted to return to the totally unexamined life, maybe think about how much you enjoy luxuries like medicine, sanitation, and magical pocket rectangles that contain endless information and entertainment.

Your mind can make a lot of the same kinds of mistakes as your body’s immune system does, and the effects can range from risk of death to mild inconvenience. If you’re still with me, and if you agree that quality of life and higher-level functions like ethical thinking are important, let’s take a closer look:

Your mind can misidentify harmless thoughts and ideas as being harmful, similarly to the physical process that results in allergies. You might experience distress and negative feelings about yourself when you have perfectly normal thoughts, even involuntary ones that you didn’t choose to have and definitely won’t act upon.

Your mind might even mistakenly target its own ways of thinking, kind of like the way your body’s immune system attacks your own body in an autoimmune response. Have you ever thought, “I shouldn’t {think/care/feel} {so much/so hard/so [etc.]}”? Like I said above, there is a point at which overthinking (and over-feeling, etc.) can be paralyzing, but some of us have to fight to convince our minds that it’s OK to question, doubt, and have emotions.

But this brings me to the parasites.

A mental parasite might be introduced on purpose by someone else, designed to control your behavior or get something from you.

“Are my teeth white enough? Is my car new enough? Is everyone laughing at me behind my back because I don’t have any transcranial piercings?” And so on.

And as Christopher Nolan teaches in the holy book of Inception, this is most effective when the parasite hides in plain sight as one of the host’s own thoughts or thought processes. A well-designed mental parasite says, “I am a necessary part of you, and you should totally not attack me.” An extra-effective parasite hijacks your own mental and physical responses to make this feel true.

At this point, I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m mainly talking about religion. Specifically, I’m focusing on mormonism, the religion I grew up in. Mormonism in the early-to-mid-1800s was a parasite introduced by Joseph Smith (whether he consciously meant to or was a delusional semi-genius) to get money, power, and sex. That was what the parasite sucked out of its hosts and into his hands, as well as the hands of a high-turnover cast of sub-leaders.

How did it get so many of Joseph’s followers to give up resources and energy, putting themselves at an evolutionary disadvantage? Among many methods, two stand out to me as the most deeply rooted and difficult to overcome. Both are feelings that naturally occur in the human mind.

Good feelings

“Do you feel good? Do you feel the desire to be kind, generous, merciful? Do you feel loved and full of love to share with others?”

The answer for most of us is probably: sometimes, yeah. According to mormonism, these feelings are proof that mormonism is true. Did mormonism give you those feelings? Maybe it did, in some cases; everyday mormons (victims of the parasite, not perpetuating it deliberately) are often great people and do great things.

You felt good feelings. And mormonism said you would feel good feelings! So… But wait! What does feeling good have to do with whether or not ancient Hebrews boated over to the ancient Americas, grew into civilizations with millions of inhabitants, briefly hung out with Jesus, and then went extinct (except for the bad guys who turned into the ancestors of Native Americans except also God changed their DNA or something, and all archaeological traces of everything sunk deep into the earth)? Answer: nothing at all.

One of the most insidious ways the modern mormon church does this is with the old bait and switch. Maybe you’ve seen the commercials on TV or the ads on the internet:

A loving family is spending time together, and showing love for each other and shit like that. Or maybe someone has a problem and someone else helps them out and they hug and cry tears of joy. Something like that. Sometimes it’s a reenactment of Jesus stories.

You may well feel emotions after seeing this, because you are a mammal for whom social bonding and group altruism has evolutionary advantages. No, wait, what am I talking about? You feel emotions after seeing this because it’s a message from the goddamn Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, that’s why.