real memetic power
In late 2014 I made the mistake of writing, in Slate, that GxmerGxte had “real memetic power,” and the people who were at that point involved in G.G. lost their everloving minds, beyond gleeful. I hadn’t considered that it totally sounded like the title of a David Rees comic strip, so that’s on me.
But it did have memetic power, in the Richard Dawkins sense. We are all, constantly, engaged in a battle of ideas. And the thing is, ideas—or even stories, narratives—want to stay alive.
It’s as if ideas have their own biological imperative—‘survival’, the most obvious ulterior motive—just like any other organism or corpus. This sounds too magical a concept to’ve been articulated and proposed by Cap’n Atheism, but here we are.
But an idea must have cells and limbs in order to enact itself; once you have obtained membership in the organism, you are now living in service of an idea. (Cult experts make a crucial distinction here: There is probably no such thing as “brainwashing,” but ex-members do need deprogramming.) Sometimes this organism becomes a sort of ideological juggernaut, sweeping up others whether they want to come along or not.
Most of us do live in service of ideas, because they imbue our lives with meaning, sense, purpose, value. But we are also constantly being misled, all of us, by various entities and corporations. In the history of human communication, has ‘informed consent’ ever really existed? Perhaps things changed as soon as we realized we could deny, erase, obfuscate, blot out a series of words, shift punctuation.