A Meme By Any Other Name*
*A post inspired by The Pain You Seek
A few thoughts about memes. Before social media, before those images with pithy sayings that have nothing to do with the context of the original picture (usually), memes were known as ideas. Notions. Get enough memes together and you might get something called a memeplex. Memeplexes you might know: belief systems, religion, paradigms, dogma, ideologies. When people discuss memes, they talk about them in evolutionary terms (see Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene). Memes survive or they go extinct. Memes that are particularly popular are called viral memes.
What is interesting is the memes that survive and go viral are not always the ones that we want to define the upward growth of humanity even if they point to a particularly pervasive characteristic of it. For example, the opening scene of the movie Idiocracy portrays two couples. One is a highly professional, highly educated couple who wants a have a baby. On the surface, this couple is responsible, careful, the kind of people that have something positive to contribute to the human condition. The other couple lives in a trailer park and is the antithesis of responsible: they party too much, have illicit affairs with their neighbors, and it is doubtful that any of them are employed.
The responsible couple can’t get pregnant. Try as they might, they cannot conceive, finally determining that the husband has a low sperm count. The irresponsible couple begets a dozen or more children into their family tree, who then go on through more adulterous and indiscriminate procreation to beget more children and so on. The moral of the story [as far as the movie is concerned] might be this: the best people are not the ones populating the planet. Now, Idiocracy is a broad comedy about an observation at the time: the human race seems to be getting more stupid. Look at the movie Wall-E: humanity is reduced to floating obesity. The trend in pop culture and social commentary is not new.
So what determines the memes that survive or go viral. I think a lot of it has to do with what people want, what they are seeking. That is often fed by memes of their own, which then bring the memes that meet those expectations to the foreground. We make decisions based on our desires and those ideas out there that contribute to our worldview. Again, this is nothing new. But the next time you wonder why a seemingly irrational belief, or even a government policy, seems to prevail against common sense, it might be beneficial to look at what it supplies to the people who want it. Then, of course, there is the question about why they want it in the first place….
