(this is fiction. but may nonetheless be helpful.)

I thought this part of the introductory lecture to a course I did this term - "Memetics and Thoughtforms", from Cambridge University's magic courses - was quite interesting. I'm pretty sure we're not allowed to share course materials, so the following is just my transcript:

My part of the course is all about harmful memes and thoughtforms. Now, you might be thinking of internet memes here, but the definition we use in this course is a lot broader: a meme is just an idea that spreads from person to person. Keep in mind, this course has been around well before the internet. A thoughtform is any sort of thought or idea or magical creature that lives in your memories.

And just to start off on the deep end with an example, I'm going to deliberately expose you to a potentially harmful meme. By a show of hands, who here has heard of The Game?

[many hands go up at this. there is some murmuring in the lecture hall]

Brilliant, I'm not putting most of you in any more danger. For those of you who might not be aware, The Game is a sort of mind game. The rules are as follows: One, if you know about the game, you are always playing the game. Two, if you think about the game, you have lost. Three, if you lose, you must announce this fact to someone else.

[some more murmuring at this]

Okay, just so we can get through this lecture, I'm officially instituting a temporary one hour cooldown period on losses. As your prefessor, I have the authority to do this.

Thank you. I'll let you think about the Game - in silence, please - while I do a quick history lesson. If you do know about the game, you may have heard that it likely originated at this university. As the story goes, there was once a game called Finchley Central, where you would take turns with another player to name stations on the London Underground. The first player to name "Finchely Central" would win. There are no restrictions on which stations you could name, but it was of course considered unsporting to name Finchley Central on your first turn, or too early in the game. At some point the Cambridge University Science Fiction Society developed a variant where naming Finchley Central would make you lose, which then became that thinking about it would make you lose, which somehow evolved into The Game's current rules.

This story is almost entirely rubbish. The Game did start here, but the connection to Finchley Central was made up by members of staff. In fact, The Game started with this very course - it was intended as an educational example of a harmful thoughtform that could spread from person to person. In its original form, the first rule read that you were playing the game only if you were taking this class, and instead of being explained in the first lecture, it was told to a few random students before the start of the course. Two weeks later when it was brought up in a lecture, almost all of the students would inevitably know about the game and be playing it.

This version of the Game lasted all of two years before some enterprising student (who will not be named) had the bright idea of changing the first rule and sharing the game with their friends. It turned out to be a much more powerful meme than anyone expected, and now everyone knows about it; that it was one of the non-magical memes that snuck out, and one with a fairly benign downside, was considered a lucky break, it was quite an embarrassing incident for everyone involved, and course staff had to come up with a fake backstory to save face. The CUSFS volunteered to take the fall; officially, because they found it funny, but if you ask me, it might have had something to do with the student who leaked The Game being a prominent member.

In the modern era, all the thoughtforms brought up in this course have much stronger wards on them, so I am proud to say we have not had another leak since.

So, what was The Game originally meant to teach? The most obvious lesson is about how even non-magical memes can spread.

The Game spreads by leveraging its rules to incur a penalty for not spreading it; if you say "I just lost the game" to people who don't know what that is, you need to tell them or incur a social cost. However, this is not the full story. There is no magical property that induces you to follow the rules of the game and announce that you lost, but people do it anyway. Now, the complete explanation for this is actually quite complicated and we will be covering it in more detail later in the course; for now, I'll just say that many people find The Game fun and follow its rules on purpose, and many people tend to follow instructions in memes even without good reasons to.

The second, and I believe much more important lesson, is what The Game can teach us about defending against harmful thoughtforms. The Game is an example of a thoughtform that causes harm when it is recalled. Now, losing a game is pretty tame as far as harm goes, and there are plenty of examples, both magical and mundane, which cause more serious harm - part of the reason The Game was devised was so we had an example for the course that was safe to talk about!

In the first two years of this course, many students took the Game quite seriously and attempted to come up with strategies for not losing it. When asked, it was those students who claimed to have lost the game the most often. This should not be a surprise; of course the students who took the game seriously and tried to come up with strategies for it thought about it more often than others. This leads us to the first important lesson: you cannot defeat a thoughtform of this type by force. It is directly counterproductive to attempt.

So what can you do? In the case of the Game, you can just... ignore the rules. This is the second important lesson: just because a thoughtform says you have to do something, doesn't mean you actually have to. Or alternatively, just because a thoughtform says something happens, that does not mean that it must. Most broadly: claims made by thoughtforms are not necessarily true or even meaningful. Things that sound serious or authorative, like rules, are often entirely rubbish not worth a second thought. Knowing this, you may safely think about the Game and not lose; the rules need not apply to you if you don't want them to. This can be phrased as a meme itself:

"Rule 0: if you know this rule, you may ignore all other rules."

And now you're exempt from not only the Game, but all other malicious thoughtforms that phrase ther effects as rules. Now, a lot of harmful thoughtforms in this category of course don't use rules and bring about their harm more directly. It is not usually possible to exempt yourself from those entirely, but a more subtle version of the same strategy can be employed. The core principles are the same: recognise that ideas proposed in any thoughtform do not need to be seriously considered, and ignore them rather than attacking directly. We'll expand on this later in the course, but if you've already checked out the optional readings, you will know that this is similar to advice given, in the nonmagical world, for management of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder or intrusive thoughts. It's only a brief part of this course, but if this interests you, I invite you to check the external works we make reference to.¹ You might be surprised by how effective it can be, both within this course and without. Even many of the magical thoughtforms we cover, which you've surely never encountered, can be tackled with this method.

Speaking of, I'm sure you're all interested in hearing about magical thoughtforms rather than this mundane stuff, so our next example, another one that originated with this course, is a bit more exciting. We call it "Gary". Don't worry, it's not actually able to spread from person to person...

1. This seems to be talking about Overcoming Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts by Sally M. Winston and Martin N. Seif; we can get it from the university library, but it is available from the standard places you get books online.