Memes are Making Us Stupid Part. 2

As the title of this piece suggests, my gripe is not strictly about memes. As I have already laid out in part one, many are witty and harmless. I, too, have pointed out many of the political kind are quite baseless and harmful to public discourse. But it is not about the memes, it is about what they do. How they cause us, ourselves, to become memes in our daily lives and reduce our ever-complex identities to blockhead expressions. 

They speak in general terms in a counter-intuitive way. The more general the conditions of the meme, the more the narrative is seen in greater relief. And it does not end in pictures and captions. Take a look at your social media feed — is it not chock full of advice-driven text that has been meme-ified, reduced to size, reduced to vaguery? 

Is it not full of witty clapbacks, and efficient quips designed to be shared, designed to be ingested instantly, designed to speak to the general consensus of one side, and most of all, perhaps, designed to go viral? Designed to destroy, eviscerate, dunk, on the other side?

Everyone wants to write something that prompts the comment “THIS”. Where we can go wrong is the expectation of going viral. So, if you are vying for internet fame, best make it quick, make it simple, and make it snappy. If it’s too long to fit in the meme box, toss it. The fruit of your labor has gone bad.

What I notice most about a working person’s brain is a natural understanding and a willful engagement in the practice of intellectual honesty. It is a rarity these days, I come to find. 

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When the late John McCain was being asked a question while campaigning for president, an audience member famously referred to his political opponent Barack Obama as being Muslim. John McCain instantly corrected the questioner, “He is not Muslim, ma’am”, McCain said without pause. Where he could have easily let this falsehood go uncorrected (after all, it would only serve to help him if more people thought Obama was Muslim). He chose, instead, to be honest. Intellectually honest. 

That was a political risk McCain took in front of millions because publicly acknowledging the false claims of your supporters is always risky. Intellectual honesty can be loosely defined as “admitting inconvenient truths” or “admitting the falsity of a claim that benefits you, as soon as its falsity has been made clear to you”. It is Integrity over ideology. Forthrightness over favoritism. It is not just being honest; it is being honest inconveniently. 

It is also the promise that anyone who values truth should make to themselves — that is, to spend the shortest possible amount of time being wrong. It seems we often go in the other direction. We will never admit we are wrong, and we will instead dig in our heels for a political point, facts, or truth be damned. In other words, as far as integrity goes, the end justifies the memes.

The makers of memes often know the nuances they leave behind in order to strategically avoid them. All the independent factors vanished, the substantive analysis, the scientific data is removed. They may understand the argumentative soft spots that memes exacerbate. But the objective here is not to inform, but to push a narrative. 

The expression of complex things so simply, so obviously, so black and white, that it hurts, is a problem. More and more we see that nothing in this world is obvious to everyone, and of course, that does hurt the world.

Humans are a pattern-seeking species. We will look for a pattern in anything and we will surely find one. Any pattern, even a bad pattern, is better than no pattern at all. In the political memes we view, we see patterns of meme families. The topics are patterned, the phraseology is patterned, the characters, as well as the font (Impact, by the way), are usually patterned in white, the easiest color to stand out on a colorful picture. 

But the pattern that is harmful to us is none of these, truly. The most damning pattern of all is its insidious, sometimes malicious use of speedy fact-making combined with a total lack of understanding in the areas of logic, the narrative’s relative corollary, or any appreciation for counterarguments or counter-narratives. 

Any point that drives clear that narrative is a good point, however erroneous it may be construed. If the echoing of our bias is indeed a chamber, it is a spiraling one, and surely its walls are decorated with memes framed up in gold, properly lit with the drama appropriate for the paintings of the masters. We have long traded art for cartoons and nonsense. When was the last time a painting went viral? 

Yes, in the 21st century, it is easy to see why the simplification, the meme-ification of our ideas is so attractive. It is not that we don’t have the brains to inspect our lives and the world around us. It is not that we lack the ability to engage in introspection, retrospection, or deep dives into political and social matters. 

Perhaps, it is that some of us lack the time. Many lack the effort. But I won’t blame it so easily on time and effort. The news cycle, some have argued, is at its highest level of toxicity and its widest syndication. If one chooses a life ignorant of the political or social sphere, perhaps they are simply expressing their right to the pursuit of happiness. Perhaps. 

Life is short — we cannot spend forever educating ourselves and we don’t want to face ourselves too often. We don’t want to look in the mirror too long. To get lost smelling all the roses is to eventually catch a thorn of truth. But the goal with memes is never the truth — the goal is the virtue of an efficient narrative. And while expressing or receiving a certain worldview via the meme may seem efficient, in the long term the meme is neither an efficient nor virtuous form of communicating a set of beliefs. 

For anything that drives our dialogue apart, surely drives us backward, and therefore cannot be efficient, and surely anything that drives our understanding of ourselves towards caricature cannot be virtuous. Memes come to explain the world to you like you’re a child. They come to you with a shit-eating grin and a game of “gotcha photography”. The cat is out of the bag, of course, and there is no stopping this form of expression. But no doubt we would be better if we could somehow ween off the memes and leave the nonsense behind us.

2023