Contagious and infectious trust

Trust is like a laughter. It’s infectious.

No, it really is, it spreads like a virus.

Which means the opposite is true: that fear and loathing is also inherently viral. We are, after all, hyper-social primates who survive by sharing and copying others. That’s how we learn, by spreading viruses, both literal and metaphorical.

We are virus-spreading machines.

But knowing this, knowing that culture is something that can be weaponized for good or ill, is what makes us so damn powerful a species.

And so there we are.