Ban the Meme

 

Of course, there is no practical question of banning the meme currently any more than there is much hope of banning the bomb. Still, as an implement for constructing extremism and ultimately murder no more potent tool has yet been invented. It possibly even surpasses its direct ancestor the propaganda poster. This is because the meme is replicated, over and over, as in the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice. The poor poster, alas, occupies a single point in space and must be plastered physically across town by someone schlepping posters. The meme is under no such restriction but spreads virally doing its thing. What is this thing? The meme manufactures reality and reinforces it by dint of constant repetition. To do this the meme must function like another of its near relatives the talking point. By dint of repetition that becomes simple habit it defines the boundaries of good and bad, real and unreal. This is an especially immersive kind of repetition for interacting with the meme almost instantly inundates you with more memes of the same kind. Plus, the meme is ALWAYS a lie of omission. It reduces the world to a set of bare atomic statements that pit truth against falsity in direct, naked opposition. By doing this the meme and its incessant, hammering repetition define an in group and an out group. The lie of omission that is the bare atomic content of the meme is a gesture of othering. The meme is also, implicitly, a call to action though more on this later. The problem the meme creates lies in the falsity pitted directly against its truth. Who could be so stupid, so reckless, so dishonest as to deny objective reality such as the meme encapsulates it? Whoever this is must be an abstraction, a pure avatar of these noxious traits. They must be symbols or signs of stupidity, dishonesty, deviancy or madness. This is because the repetition of the meme, like a scientific paradigm, transmutes ideational content into observational content (as in certain kinds of paranoia). The truth of the meme is not conceptualized but literally seen such that the out group defined by the meme must be lying or deeply ill. Who looks at an orange and calls it an apple? A liar or a madman does. The other is gas-lighting or themselves crazy!

This begins the process of separating the other from the circle of moral concern. Something is deeply perhaps inherently wrong with THEM. This might make me pity the other I suppose though it does no typically have this effect. This is because the other is also an avatar of threat and danger. This needs some contextualizing. The illusion of social media intimacy is one of omnipresence. One is intimate and proximate not only with your own but others for, of course, one of the functions of the meme is to provoke an angry or hasty response from the ‘other’ which can then be ‘dunked on’. This is a kind of ritual combat where the sun god of reason say, or Jesus or Marx slays the dark dragon of superstition which of course means that the dark dragon of superstition is essential to the ritual as its sacrificial victim. This means the other is always proximate, indeed, all pervasive. The other is a pervasive or comprehensive threat and is thus an existential threat. Existential threats require a different moral outlook than friends and neighbors. They are, again, signs or symbols of abstract evils. The other and his ways are a noxious atmosphere that pervades and corrupts daily life. In this way the user of the meme, any user of the meme, is primed for violence. Firstly he is primed for rhetorical violence that manifests as extreme verbal aggression. Then, when he sees how little effect his arguments and insults and cool mic drops actually have on the mind-set of the other, he comes to a ‘choice point’ as certain social scientists say. He must decide what the next level is after hectoring and verbally assaulting people to no effect. If he passes through enough of these choice points he will arrive, inevitably, at the last remaining option. Something must be DONE about the other NOW before it is too late and this something must involve physical violence. If governments or police refuse to dole out this violence the consumer of memes will then conclude that it falls upon himself to do the right thing as no one else will in this crazy and corrupt world.

I have observed several groups who participate in meme culture. These include People’s Party of Canada supporters, the ‘tankie’ and/or anti-fascist left, American Republicans, Evangelical Christians and their anti-type the secular anti-theist activists. All of these groups push different content in theory but the same thing in practice. The content of meme culture is the process and for this reason these groups BEHAVE indistinguishably.[1] For instance, one thing meme culture cultivates in all these groups is the myth of the empirical. This is what I adverted to above as the melding of ideational and observational content. This is what is elsewhere called theory laden data; theoretical structures so implicit and habitual that we SEE them as facts as when we observe the moon in a car and don’t even consider the possibility that it could be following us though that is our literal visual data. The meme states a simple truth as x or y without any context or aura. Thus, religion is bad or communism stupid. This point is repeated over and over till it becomes reality in the most direct way imaginable. So direct is this identification that it puts the faculties or morality of the other in direct question.

Now ALL of these groups replicate a dynamic that logically issues in violence. This DOES NOT mean, however, that all have an equal potential to actualize that violence. For instance, PPC supporters and Q anon radicals have the tacit or even active approval of public officials. Other groups do not have this kind of external validation of their worst impulses. This is one marker of how imminent a burst of violence might be from a particular grouping. Another is the degree to which it buys into essentializing problems. One thing the meme repeatedly reinforces is the strong connection between group x and problem y as in the endless equation of the word terrorist with the word Islamic. It does this regardless of whether problem y may plausibly be connected with a multiplicity of factors. In the meme-verse all effects are mono-causal and issue from one grand, malign agent. Take child abuse as an example. In the discourse of the anti-theist, say, the fashion, music or porn industries are institutions with a pedophilia problem. Churches, however, ARE  pedophile institutions. One HAS abuse while the other IS abuse personified. What is an accidental failing of Porn Hub or your favorite 70’s rock star is an essential feature of churches. THEY are pedophile communities. In the same way conservatism in America may HAVE a violence problem but Islam IS violence: this distinction between having and being is how an in-group divides up common moral harms between itself and the out group. The Q anon believer, I should note, has the EXACT SAME belief about the Democratic and Liberal parties. They are pedophile/cannibal communities by nature not institutions with faults who may be implicated in abuses. This means a few things. One thing is that all people associated with these institutions are promoters of if not practitioners of pedophilia. This feeling is all the more intense if there is an element of projection at play. If I have downloaded certain questionable content or been a drunken fool with a 17 year old I am all the readier to externalize my guilt and unease about this onto an external agent or power. Just by BEING a Democrat the other is more a pedophile than I will ever be even though, yes, I did that stupid thing once that crossed a line or looked a little too long at an ad with a sexualized teen. This is one of the chief factors at play in the construction of ‘child molestation cults’ for if there is ONE thing that fundamentally pervades all sectors of ANY capitalist society it is the commodification, exploitation and sexualization of minors; political and social economy are also sexual economy. 

The other element, of course, is the fact that anything one could justifiably do to protect THIS child would be justified to protect ANY child. This is the reasoning of anti-abortion activists. It is now the reasoning of Q anon believers and could at some point become the reasoning of anti-theists as well. On this point let me say that in the first two communities this process is mature while in the latter it is still in a chrysalis phase except in the specific instance of anti-Muslim violence which is justified by the marriage of the pedophile Mohammed to his fourth wife. This latter rage, though, can mostly vent itself through calls for state violence against ‘Islamism’. At any rate, anytime we construct the other as an inherent, existential threat to children (drag queens anyone?) we have implicitly justified any extreme measure up to and including physical violence.

Care for children can be the last refuge of the scoundrel as we see in prison cultures. The worst of us can claim the moral high ground by claiming it’s all about protecting the kids. Extremist groups that form around real or imagined threats to children already have a potent incentive to act out. If these threats are constructed as existential and all pervasive and beyond the scope of ordinary law enforcement the danger is still greater. We might, then, have cause to worry about any in-group that constructs some out group as an existential threat to children. We see many examples of this on the far right but there is no inherent reason that dynamic should be confined there. Indeed, life-long labor voter Dawkins informs us that ‘religion’ is child abuse. Eventually, after enough memes, someone will take this literally. Not to worry, however, for it is not well dressed, lovely Church of England children who need to be rescued from their parents. However THIS attitude plays out in life the objects of it will be suitably tawny. Thus, when we construct an out group who are an imminent threat to our children OR whose children need rescuing by us (like girls in Afghanistan!) we have a significant risk of ‘actions’ that express that concern. What would we not do to protect children?

The other markers of discourse prepping people for ‘action’ are well known. They include, as a well-known Rubicon, the medicalization of discourse about the other. People cease to be problems and become cancers which of course must be ‘cut out’. ‘Public sanitation’ requires that we ‘do something’ about x or why. Another is attributing animality to the other who become dogs, rats, roaches or other threats to public hygiene. The next level, I suppose, are ‘jokes’ (mere jokes!) about rape or other violence. There is also an odd thing I have observed   which I call ‘a-political fantasy’. A- political fantasy proposes that we simply ‘discuss’ or ‘think out loud about’ something which cannot legally happen. Thus we see calls for banning people from public office for holding certain kinds of religious doctrines. Not even the creators of these memes think we can rip up constitutions or bills of rights (do they?) in the name of owning the other guy. A-political fantasy, though, primes the mind for thinking ‘politics as usual’ has failed and ‘something else needs to be tried’. At any rate, the danger in all these uses of the meme is that their effect is cumulative. Each one by itself has plausible deniability. Each one by itself is a little joke or goes a bit too far as we all do sometimes. They must be challenged as a totality but, and this is part of their malign strength, they never appear as a totality. Each individually has its excuse and its justification.  Cumulatively though, the meme conveys one overwhelming message about the other who denies its simple self-evident truth. The other is the mentally ill, imbecile, and diabolically dishonest bad actor who is ‘unfit’ and a danger to any healthy population. Since truth is the immediate there is something deeply WRONG either morally or cognitively or physically with those who can’t see it. What exactly is wrong with the other guy that he can’t see what is before his own eyes is a question for another essay however.      

                                                          

 

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[1] Part of the reason is the current inability of procedural liberalism to do anything but paper over deep social conflicts. In a liberal society a minority is tolerated. Its attitudes and values are ‘special’ while the attitudes and values of the hegemon are enshrined as ‘neutrality’ and grounded in ‘public reason’. No one, however, really wants to be tolerated. We can now see that people want to be publicaly recognized and affirmed. This is an impossible demand to meet for universal recognition is a formal impossibility. Thus, there will always be hegemons and ‘internal proletariats’. Then the battle becomes who occupies which space. Whoever occupies the subordinate position faces the same problem. They have to live in an environment defined by the civic rites and narratives of the other. ESPECIALLY their children are educated in schools whose curriculum and pedagogy reflects the will of the hegemon. Now under certain conditions minorities can find ways to live with this limitation and even thrive. A ‘liberal’ society CAN be successful. Our current problem is that certain people who USED to be part of the pyramid of power foresee the day when they will lose this status. OTHERS traditionally outside now see the possibility of elbowing their way in. This is a recipe for resentment, reaction and revenge on the part of both groups. Also, the obvious limitation of official ‘neutrality’ is the education of the young which cannot be neutral but engages of necessity with the symbolic and its values. Thus, we see some of the bitterest conflicts over what it taught in schools with both liberals and conservatives claiming the other wants to brainwash their kids.