21st Century Relationships: The Good & Bad Sides of Memes (not animated gifs)

“What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient… highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it’s almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed — fully understood — that sticks; right in there somewhere.” From movie Inception 🎞️

In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene 📖, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” (note: not just funny internet images) to denote ideas, behaviors or styles that are born, spread and rendered extinct in human culture just like living organisms do under the pressure of evolution. This idea begs the question: are humans creators and spreaders of memes or are we just carriers of memes born and die because of them? Our egoistic self may feel like we come up with the ideas and beliefs that we act upon, but it is just as easy to make the argument that we are predisposed and culturally conditioned to have certain convictions that drive our thoughts and behaviors.

As we discussed in Life Stories, stories we tell ourselves are a very powerful tool in shaping our lives. They help us learn, change our behaviors, and connect us with friends as well as strangers, finds neuroscientist Paul J. Zak. And what is a story? It’s no more than a woven sequence of memes, typically told through human experience.

From this perspective, ideologies and religions can be seen as a structured collection of memes — only in the case of religions, the collections of meme are decreed by higher deities. It’s no coincidence that major religions, such as Christianity, Muslim and Buddhism, all promote their memes in the form of holy texts and mandate believers to internalize them. Similarly, ideologies are consisted of a great deal of memes that are compelling for devotees to follow.

What are memes good for?

So why do we subscribe to any meme, ideology or religion? Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt proposes ▶️ that religion helps us transcend the staircase of consciousness: “When we climb that staircase, self-interest fades away, we become just much less self-interested, and we feel as though we are better, nobler and somehow uplifted.” I’d further suggest that not only religion, in fact any meme, story, art or ideology has the capability of transcending us to become something bigger and better than our limited self. Anyone who had read a good book, discovered a great song, or watched an amazing movie can attest to that.

In Sapiens 📖, historian Yuval Noah Harari ventures even further and writes extensively about how “myths” — memes that are imagined rather than physically existing — propel human civilization. “Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths” [p.30]. These include concepts as varied as God, capitalism, science, human rights, gender norms, nations, legal systems, consumerism, etc.. “We believe in a particular order [of myths] not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society” [p.124]. These myths have three main effects on us, according to Harari: they are embedded in the material world, they shape our desires, and one has to convince a large sum of people in order to change a myth’s impact on society.

What are the dark sides of memes?

As much as we are elevated and empowered by a meme through higher-level consciousness and cooperation, we can also be trapped by it. For example, communications professional Aaron Zamost tells the cautionary tale about how the dark side of a narrative can swallow any person or organization whole like a black hole. “Once a narrative sets in…,” Zamost observes, “it becomes very hard to break.”

Memes can also drive us to want things that ironically hurt us. Entrepreneur Luke Burgis calls this “memetic desires”, which can cause us to model the wrong people, do stupid things, and compete in zero-sum games for no good reasons. Writer Anne Helen Petersen shares a personal example of the trapping of memetic desires: in recent years, universities expand programs and hire PhD students as affordable teaching assistants despite dwindling departmental funds. “Still, thousands of PhD students clung to the idea of a tenure-track professorship.” Why? Because “[w]e didn’t try to break the system, since that’s not how we’d been raised. We tried to win it,” she laments, demonstrating how the wrong mental framework can imprison and hurt individuals. See a related topic in Context Matters &Things Change.

In the age of social media, identity-based memes (again, not limited to funny internet gifs) are hurled by thousands in social media like weapons. We will discuss these trappings in other articles.

Conclusion

What we believe in is a powerful thing that we should be very aware of. For this reason, author Jeremy Adam Smith advises us to understand how our ideas/memes impact other people, and take the responsibility of the stories we tell others, including:

• What intentions do we bring to the stories we tell?
• Are we using our power to lift people up and help them to see solutions to the problems we face as individuals and as groups?
• Or are we using our power to reveal the worst in ourselves, and so pit people against each other?
• Do we communicate things that make us feel good about ourselves — or that make us feel worse?

Read about other relationships in the 21st century:

• Self
• Romance / Sex
• Family
• Friends
• School
• Work
• Communities
• Social status
• Consumer groups / Economies
• Political Systems
• Humanity
• Environment / World
• Universe / Beyond Our Universe

Do you have any suggestions, doubts, hypothesis or experience for this topic? Please comment below 👇!