Collectivism as Prion

Mad Cow Disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) is thought to be a problem with protein folding, caused by an original mis-folded protein called a "prion." (This is still theoretical, by the way.)

Proteins consist of chains of amino acids ranging from a few hundred to 27,000 amino acids long. The protein derives its 3 dimensional shape, which determines its function, from how this chain of amino acids is folded and twisted together. The prion idea is that an original protein becomes "mis-folded" into a specific shape, (often a tightly packed fold called an "amyloid fold" that creates a pattern like a folded fan called a beta sheet), and this shape is not only non-functional, but also acts as both a template and catalyst that causes proteins it comes into contact with to also become mis-folded into this same shape.

Thus the process of a prion disease is to steadily turn individual, differently shaped, functional proteins that are floating around in the cell into an accumulating, expanding, tightly packed mass of identical, non-functional proteins.

Similarly, the idea that we should all tell each other what to do is pathologic. It is not how healthy societies function because it does not fit human nature. Getting us individual humans to surrender our individual freedom to some larger collective in order to make us more free is a seductive idea, but one that folds us into a non-functional shape, creating a mass of non-functional but identical humans that are all tightly bound together. But as this non-functional shape starts to cause problems for society, part of the madness of the idea of centralized government is that the proposed solutions call for even more loss of freedom and even more centralized control in order to fix the problems that they themselves created in the first place.

Few remember this, but Lenin was exiled from Russia in 1907 because of his political activities of trying to spread Marxism. When the Russians entered WWI in 1914, this was bad news for the Germans because they had to fight a 2 front war. When cracks in the Russian society became evident with the February 2017 uprisings, the Germans escorted Lenin and his aides from exile in Western Europe in a sealed railway car across Germany and into Russia and also gave him a large amount of money, and shortly thereafter the government collapsed and Russia, under Lenin's leadership, made peace with Germany. The Germans gave the Russians a prion disease.

Collectivism is an idea prion.