>>11336260There was a story passed down to me about an old medicine man in a European village during the time of the bubonic plague. The man retreated into the woods to commune with the “spirit of the plague” and said to it: “Oh spirit, I know you are on path to come into our village, and it is in your nature to feed off of humanity. All I ask of you, is that you only take one in a hundred people.” So, the spirit said “That seems like a fair deal. I will only enter into one out of every hundred people.” So, the man performed his rituals of proper sacrifice and worship to round out his retreat.
The following week, the man returned to the village to find that everybody had died.
The man goes back to commune with nature and the spirit of the plague, and asks “Spirit, why did you break your word? Everybody has died!” The spirit then replied “I did just as we agreed upon, taking only one in a hundred. The other ninety nine died of fright.”
That’s about the gist of it. If the meme of the virus can make you neurotic to the point that you die, then it will have the same effect as the outcome of a biological infection.
Semantically speaking, obviously not, but in a way yes.
