Hypothesis: Microbes Generate Toxins of Power - 3

by Leonhard Kern

In this series we have been discussing the source, or the origin, of the toxins of power.

If such toxins do in fact exist, where do they originate, how then do they make their way into the thinking, whether conscious or subconscious, of a person in power, and how do they then affect the thinking of that person in power?

We began this current series at the level of microbes, specifically human - microbe symbiosis (microbes within humans).

Then we zeroed in on phages and prions, to get a bit closer, because microbes are much larger than those viruses that impact them.

So we looked closer and deeper, down all the way to prions and phages in the Toxins of Power Blog post Are Toxins of Power Machines or Organisms?

Those prions and phages may be tinier than microbes, but still they pack quite a punch.

In the case of prions, they can and do cause major damage; for example they cause what we call "mad cow disease".

It would be tempting to stop there to remark that "mad cow disease" and dysfunctional politicians in power are very similar, so prions must be the source of toxins of power.

Yet, we can dispense with that populism and focus on actual data, because we have an example to work with, an example of a specific dementia in humans caused by prions.

That human dementia is called "kuru":

Kuru is an extremely rare form of dementia ... like ... mad cow disease ... [it] was the first transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (prion disease) discovered in humans ... involved eating the brain of the dead to show respect in mourning.

(Health Central, Kuru). We can conclude (since prions cause that dementia, and since those prions get into a person by that person's eating of the brain of their human ancestor) as follows:

1) prions are inside human brains,

2) prions survive some adverse conditions (cooking),

3) prions survive the human digestive system (acids),

4) prions somehow become reactivated thereafter,

5) prions morph then affect the new host human brain,

6) in a seriously damaging way,

7) causing a specific dementia.

The first question that came to my mind was "why didn't those prions cause dementia in the ancestor" before the ancestor died, and a descendant ate the brain?

That question was answered by further review of the research into kuru:

A common coding polymorphism at codon 129 of the prion protein gene (PRNP), where either methionine (M) or valine (V) may be encoded, is a strong susceptibility factor for human prion diseases.

(New England Journal of Medicine, emphasis added). The answer, then, is that the prions must go through a morph, a change, that is, polymorphism, before they induce dementia.

Thus, let's modify the hypothesis of this series, at least for this post, to say that "Prions Generate Toxins of Power", and use the dynamics of kuru dementia to lay the foundation.

We see by the kuru example that the morph can take place with physical ingestion.

We have seen with other examples, prior to this series, when we looked at the morph of memes taking place within the brain, that memetic morph can take place without physical ingestion (see A Structure RE: Corruption of Memes - 3).

For example, if we say that Stockholm Syndrome is a form of dementia, then we know that some dementia can be caused without alien prion incursion into the brain.

That is, a person can contract Stockholm Syndrome without external, physical influence in the form of ingesting foreign prions, because that syndrome manifests internally by way of psychological shock to human cognition.

Let's conclude by considering the hypothesis that the influence of power causes some prions to go through polymorphism, which negatively impacts the human cells or symbiont microbes that those prions thereafter invade, causing a domino effect beginning with brain cells or microbe symbionts, which thereafter affects the thinking of the person in power.

This is not a stretch, because even as we blog, damage to prions, phages, or microbes themselves is resulting in a change in behavior to certain fungi microbes that are, as a result, destroying amphibians worldwide:

The crisis of global amphibian extinctions is profound, it is changing ecological systems in ways that we barely understand, and it is teaching us painful lessons about research and conservation. Amid all of the horrible environmental insults we inflict upon the planet’s biodiversity, Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog did not disappear in the wild because of overharvest for food, pets, or science, and we cannot lay the blame on familiar threats such as deforestation, climate change or environmental pollution. The culprit was emerging infectious disease. Amphibian chytridiomycosis is capable of directly eradicating otherwise large and stable populations and directly causing extinction of species that are otherwise unthreatened.

Amphibian chytridiomycosis is a disease caused by the recently discovered chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis.

(Lessons of The Lost, emphasis added). Amphibians have co-existed with fungi microbes for millions of years, so this all-of-a-sudden change in those microbes has very recent polymorphism of a bad sort as its source or origin.

If this were to happen to a symbiont microbe species in humans, then we could expect an adverse impact on human cognition.

If a future post we will look at ways that could take place, using the Lakoff model.

That model includes the embodied thinking metaphor, which ties nicely into the recent microbiology discoveries that some microbes within us are symbiont to us.

Noting the power microbes have to do significant chemistry, and impose on the "constantly changing brain", we can easily develop this part of the hypothesis into a working dynamic model.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.