The Foreign Thought Test
Are you sure those thoughts are yours?
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Want to get your ideas organized? Permission to Think can help.
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I was working on something the other day when this thought appeared: “You’re not scaling. You’re leaving money on the table. You should be building funnels.”
It didn’t feel like my thought. It had this pushy, external quality. Like someone else’s voice in my head.
Because it wasn’t mine.
It was memetic programming I’d installed from years of consuming creator economy content. And that meme was activating to protect itself, because I was doing something that didn’t serve its replication.
Most of what you think isn’t actually you thinking.
It’s memes, self-replicating information structures, using your brain to ensure their own survival.
Your political opinions? Probably installed by your tribe. Your business goals? Likely borrowed from gurus. Your identity? Mostly inherited beliefs you never examined.
The thoughts feel like yours because they’ve been there so long. But if you pay attention, some of them have that quality of otherness. They generate guilt when you don’t serve them. They activate defensiveness when challenged. They compel you to spread them.
Those are parasitic memes. And you’re hosting them right now.
How do I know? Well, that’s easy. I used to build them.
When I was an occultist, specially a chaos magician, this was one of my specialties, and I was really, really good at it.
I spent the last year documenting how this works. The science, the applications, the defense protocols.
Everything from corporate branding to political movements to ancient spiritual warfare. All operating on the same mechanism: ideas that spread by exploiting your cognitive vulnerabilities.
You’re Already Infected: A Survival Guide for the Memetic Warzone comes out next Monday.
It won’t make you comfortable. But it’ll teach you to spot the parasites. It’ll also make you question every idea you’ve ever had. This is one of those doors, once opened, cannot be closed.
Quick tip: notice which thoughts feel foreign. That’s your memetic immune system trying to warn you.
Listen to it.