The idea of mimetic viruses (or memes) comes from French anthropologist Marcel Mauss, who coined the term in his essay The Gift. It refers to how some ideas are so contagious that they spread throughout entire cultures and cause systemic problems like nationalism, racism and sexism. Mauss believed that these dangerous ideas could infect people's minds like a computer virus; we're not aware of them because they're invisible, but their effects are real nonetheless.
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