I recently watched Mission Impossible – Fallout and certain lines prevented me from fully enjoying the film. Don’t get me wrong, the movie is really fun and action packed! But it is also promoting a dangerous point of view and I can’t tell if that was intentional. The lines that triggered me created a theme that Tom Cruise’s character, Ethan Hunt, was the only person who could save the world. On the one hand, this is trying to celebrate the importance of Ethan Hunt as a character and his heroism. On the other hand, this is a strategic meme that can be quite dangerous.
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First, let’s discuss strategic memes. Richard Brodie, author of The Virus of the Mind, defines a strategic meme as “a floating rule of thumb that tells you what to do when you come across an applicable situation that tells you what to do to achieve some desired result.” He then goes on to illustrate some examples such as “when you see a cop, slow down.” In this example, seeing the cop immediately triggers a response designed to prevent receiving a speeding ticket.
Strategic memes can also be considered a type of programming we might associate with Pavlov’s dog and classic conditioning. We use these responses to cut down on the number of decisions we need to make in a day so that we can focus on other things.
Strategic memes are not always noticed until we come into a situation where the meme suddenly becomes ineffective or dangerous. For example, many people in the world live in a country where people drive on the right side of the road, so as a pedestrian about to cross the street, we look left first and then right to check for the oncoming traffic. This allows us to normally examine the traffic of greatest urgency (about to hit us) and then least urgency (won’t hit us until we get halfway across the street). However, if the right-hand-drive pedestrian finds themselves in a left-hand-drive country they often look left which is away from the closest traffic (coming from their right), and then step directly in front of on-coming traffic before they look right! This is a particularly lethal example of failure for a strategic meme.
We often are intentionally taught memes by our teachers and our parents, but we also absorb memes from entertainment. With this in mind, I wonder how many people are being programmed by superhero movies and Mission Impossible movies to passively let other people solve their problems.
The main quote that inspired this blog comes from a speech from Ethan Hunt’s team member Luther Stickell (played by Ving Rhames) when he is trying to convince Ethan’s love interest, Ilsa Faust (played by Rebecca Fergueson) to disappear and let Ethan concentrate on his latest impossible mission.
But every time something
–Mission Impossible Fallout
bad happened in the world
Ethan would think:
I should have been there.
And she would wonder: Who’s watching
the world while Ethan is watching me?
This strongly implies that if something happens to Ethan Hunt, no one can or will step up to prevent the world from falling into ruin. Doesn’t this also imply that no one else can try? No one else will take responsibility?
We also see many real world situations where people rely upon others to fix their problems. When two neighbors cannot act like reasonable people, they often must rely upon a judge to resolve their difference. When a basketball team is playing for a national championship, the media and the fans will focus on a spectacularly talented player and root for that single player to carry the team to victory.
This strategic meme can be good and bad.
When this meme is good, it promotes fairness and prevents might equals right. If we are fighting with our neighbor, we don’t want them to take the law into their hands and attack us with an axe over a tree dropping fruit into their pool. Instead, we rely upon a judge to fairly and impartially resolve the problem. If the Toronto Raptors basketball team is playing in the playoffs against the 76ers, they can let their super-star Kawhi Leonard take the risky final shot and send them to victory.
When this meme turns out bad, it promotes passivity and leads to might equals right. If your neighbor is cousins with the judge or bribes the judge, then the neighborly conflict leads to your neighbor winning all battles – no matter how unfair. If the basketball team relies too much on their stars, then we can see a couple of players missing shot after shot while the rest of the team stands around unsure of what to do.
In any activity involving more than one person, the best scenario is for each person to help perform the task, to communicate with each other and coordinate their efforts. Leaders are important to help the team members prioritize the tasks for the greater goal, but cannot be so overbearing that people stop thinking and start providing only the minimal amount of effort needed to be seen to be doing their job. If you don’t have a healthy balance, you may wind up with a dysfunctional company (or country) in which people sit around and complain as the company (or planet) slowly dies because no one takes sufficient corrective action.
In the world of Mission Impossible – Fallout, it is fun to concentrate on Tom Cruise’s character as he tries to save the world. The movie’s final scene also shows the other members on Ethan Hunt’s team playing critical roles. However, the movie reinforces the ‘only one hero matters’ theme by making all of the efforts of all of the other members pointless if Ethan fails at his role. Exciting? Definitely. Disturbing? To me, yes. I want to take an active role in my fate and don’t want to rely upon others. I don’t want to be programmed to sit on my butt and wait for others to save me. I don’t want to be programmed. I wonder who else noticed?