Memetics – How Ideas Spread

Ideas infect your brain – with or without your consent.  The only way to combat invading ideas is with other ideas.  I absorbed these guiding principles from Richard Brodie’s Virus of the Mind; however, I was primed to be receptive due to the major political events of the past five years.

My introduction to the concept of infectious ideas came from Scott Adams, the creator of the comic Dilbert.  Throughout 2015 and 2016, Adams blogged many times about the Trump campaign and predicted that Trump would win the election if no one challenged Trump’s ability to control the narrative.  One method Scott explained was candidate Donald Trump’s mastery of the “fake ‘because’” in which connecting two ideas creates a link in our brains – even if the link is not really logical or true.  The example used was Trump’s declaration: “don’t vote for Ted Cruz because he’s Canadian.”  Legally, any person born to US citizens outside of the USA is still a citizen of the USA.  However, for people who chose not to consider the facts, Ted Cruz became a Canadian.  Trump used repetition to continue to deliver messages like these and he was aided and abetted by the press- even those who tried to counter the technique!  Unfortunately for the ideal of the truth, most people don’t listen very well to the news.  We are sitting on our phones, talking to family, eating, scrolling through the headlines.  So when the news headline read “Trump claims Cruz is Canadian” not everyone paid attention long enough to receive the full picture or the counter. 

Using this and other techniques Trump diminished Ted Cruz by saying he was “Lyin’ Ted” and “straight out of the hills of Canada.”  Trump even found ways to diminish rivals without words.  When he loomed over Hillary Clinton during the debates to emphasize their physical difference, for some people he implanted the impression that she was frail and for others that Trump was a bully.  Whether you love or hate Donald Trump, he ultimately won the election, so it appears his methods worked on enough voters to get him elected.  If you want to read more on how Scott Adams analyzed persuasion during the 2016 election, you should check out Scott Adam’s book Win Bigly.

The election left me thinking about how ideas spread and how to counter bad ones.  Every day, people try to counter false ideas such as “inoculations cause autism” or “the moon landings were faked;” however, those bad ideas are not extinguished by simply presenting facts or evidence.  They continue to linger because the false ideas seem to be anchored to deep seated beliefs that are so intertwined with a person’s identity it will prevent that person from accepting facts that challenge those beliefs.  It is as if accepting countering evidence would destroy the person’s self identity.

For example, a significant portion of the anti-vax movement appears to be linked to religious fundamentalists who hold the bible to be a deeper truth than science.  Their fears blend with their faith and they can’t believe doctors; after all most doctors believe in science and evolution and therefore are perceived as agents against faith. I also observe another portion of the anti-vax movement that fears that big pharmaceutical companies create vaccines simply to make money and that the vaccines are neither needed nor helpful.  For people who hold this belief, facts presented by drug researchers are simply marketing and don’t hold weight.  The fact that most people can’t understand the statistics and pharmacological findings only compounds the issue. This fundamental lack of trust in authority also forms the basis for the moon-landing-deniers who don’t trust the government.  To them, the moon landings were simply propaganda meant to manipulate the population. Despite the many people who try to explain away the conspiracies and point out the many logical flaws there are plenty of people willing to make movies and videos that capitalize upon the paranoia and further spread the bad idea.

While I like to think of ideas and good and bad, the fact is that they are simply ideas.  They are only good or bad depending upon if they agree with my views on the world or counter my views of the world.  Fortunately, I believe in science which provides a framework to test ideas and hold them to a rigorous standard. Yet, I must also admit that my belief in science depends upon my faith.  If I don’t test the ideas myself, then I am faithfully believing that those who tested the idea proved it with scientific rigor. This faith in science is the exact same faith of the person who reads the Torah, Bible, or Quran and then takes their contents to be facts. 

Inside our heads, ideas fight each other for survival and dominance and either reinforce or erode our world views.  Once again, Donald Trump provides us with a very public example.  Early on, Trump found that the idea of ‘building a wall’ resonated with those afraid of terrorism and those afraid of how immigrants might undermine their definition of America. ‘Build a wall’ became a critical campaign message and the Republican party eventually adopted it as a rallying cause.  The Democratic party naturally had to oppose the idea and condemn it.  Yet it is not a new idea.  As covered by many existing sources such Wikipedia, the first George Bush built the initial 14 miles of border wall along the San Diego/Tijuana border and Bill Clinton’s presidency oversaw the construction of three larger sections.  Every president since 1994 has constructed additional sections of the border wall.  In other words, Trump promised to do what was already being done, but now ‘the wall’ is now good or bad depending upon how Trump fits into your world view!

With these ideas rattling around in my head, my daughter Sora brought home her books from college – including Brodie’s book on memetics.  Normally, I don’t read textbooks for personal enjoyment, but what a title: The Virus of the Mind. Fortunately, the contents of the book lived up to the title and after only a few pages, I was hooked. I realized Brodie’s book formalized a framework to understand how ideas go to war in our heads and spread to other people.  Over 12 chapters, Richard Brodie provides practical and easily understood examples and defines a scientific way to think about how the brain process information similar to the model in which viruses propagate in nature.  The book starts with two important definitions:

Memetics: the study of the workings of memes: how they interact, replicate and evolve.

Meme:

• Biology definition: the basic unit of cultural transmission, or imitation
• Psychology definition: a unit of cultural heredity analogous to the gene…  the internal representation of knowledge
• Cognitive definition: an idea, the kind of complex idea that forms itself into a distinct memorable unit.  It is spread by vehicles that are physical manifestations of the meme (EX: the car not only carries people, it also carries around the idea of what a car is by being a car.)
• Memetics definition (more general): a unit of information in a mind whose existence influences events such that more copies of itself get created in other minds.

That’s right, the internet ‘memes’ that popularly refer to dancing babies and piano playing cats are the same meme concept used in memetics!  Memes are clever ideas that not only affect the person hearing/seeing/experiencing the idea, but also make that person want to spread the idea.  Every person talking, writing, or even taking a selfie is creating a meme to spread into the world.  Most do so without any purpose and the meme doesn’t go very far.  Others back their memes with purpose and financing so huge numbers of people instantly have a full idea pop up in their head when they hear “Make America Great Again” or “I’m with Her.”  Advertisers consciously and unconsciously use memes to make people buy coffee with green logos instead of brown and orange logos, eat chicken instead of beef, or to believe that zero-calorie soda is a healthy option.  They try to force memes by buying their way into your attention span.  With the rise of youtube, twitter and Instagram, not only is it easier for ideas to spread, but now people from other countries can infect us with ease.  Will future ideas be used to help people, harm people or just waste our time? 

Perhaps you are not as nerdy as I am and this blog already more than satisfies your need to know about memetics.  Or perhaps you are having uncomfortable flashbacks to school and the dry textbooks that were so painful to get through because while reading them you kept falling unconscious and smashing your forehead into a desk.  Or was that just me?  I didn’t have that problem with Brodie’s book.  Instead, I found it an easy enough read, but I kept having to stop because I had to process what I just read.  The concepts are not difficult, but Brodie lays out interesting and different way of thinking about ideas.  I would begin to sense the implications of Brodie’s concepts and I would be unable to concentrate on the book because my brain would be buzzing!

Richard Brodie’s book rarely passes judgement on specific memes, but it fascinatingly illustrates how memes play a role in evolution, how memes program us, and rudimentary steps to disinfect ourselves from being slaves to memes. The disinfection is a bit tricky, because it requires people to 1) actively recognize memes, 2) understand themselves enough to judge how those memes affect them, and 3) see enough context to recognize when those memes help our lives and which were placed in our heads by others for their advantage. No easy task! There is no reasonable way for me to encapsulate the conclusion without the perspective provided by reading the body of the book, so I highly recommend that anyone interested in memetics, or even just a better life, should pick up The Virus of the Mind. Brodie’s book clearly and succinctly (only 230 pages, quite short for a text book) lays out the basics of memetics and has an index devoted to suggesting additional reading for further exploration.

As I go forward in blogging, I’ll try to be explicit about my memes and how I am trying to use them.  Hopefully, you’ll pass the good ones along and we’ll slowly improve our lives one thought at a time.  Here’s my first meme: memetics represents the next stage in evolution.  We know that the world can support a limited population and more educated people have begun to have less children per family.  Meanwhile, we are creating artificial intelligence that may join us in creating and spreading ideas- to humans and to each other.  Our century will see a world in which we will take our ideas, make them memes and then anyone that adopts our memes as their own will become our intellectual children.  Did I just impregnate your mind with the idea?  Will you have my thought children and put this idea in someone else?  Yeah, not the most attractive image…  Still, it should do the job to make my point. 

Here is another point that I believe is critical to make a meme for everyone:

Ignorance of memetics will leave people vulnerable to manipulation.  We need to teach memetics awareness with the same seriousness we teach basic hygiene.  Wash your hands after going to the bathroom and think twice about those ‘facts’ on Facebook.

(especially before voting)