They excrete toxins that damage the cells around them. I have been thinking of corrupt ideas as being senscent, but it's not a great analogy because it's more about processing than the idea itself.
The term I am using "senescent idea," works for brevity, but I think the better analogy would be something like misunderstanding spelling rules.
Example: "I before E except after C." If I use that rule, I end up writing the word 'wierd.' That's not right. Rather than going back and understanding why I've made the mistake I have, I instead add to the rule to make my answer work. 'I before E except after C and W." Liesure. Fuck. "I before E except after C and W and L." Now I've got this new rule to justify my misspelling of the word weird, and because of this rule, I'm not only spelling it as 'wierd' but I'm misspelling a ton of other words as well.
I don't know, I'm grasping to explain the idea. Maybe it's like I see the world one way and then I put on blue tinted glasses. At some point, I don't know what red is anymore. If you ask me what color a thing is, I'm getting it wrong constantly because the way I'm processing colors has become corrupted.
This isn't a fully formed idea so I'm sure it seems like incoherent rambling. I'm thinking about it from multiple angles. I posted the related quote from Gandhi yesterday. I think about it in terms of Romans 12...the verse about the renewing of the mind. In this case, I'm obviously concerned with the idea that if we are justifying any racial divide, that we are capable of justifying it on a much larger scale. Does a minor flaw in our thought process impact our processing of multiple ideas in the long term?
The problem with the PID loop analogy is that humans aren't nearly as predictable as a software process. We see that thoughts can turn into pretty extreme behaviors, which I think we'd like to avoid. And we also see that we are reversing course. Black Americans polled in the late 90s by and large felt race was not an issue in their daily lives. That has drastically shifted over the past few years. It's gotten worse for those people that are polled now.
That analogy also doesnt reduce down to each individual all that well. Societal thinking is just part of the larger question.