Memes are Bad

But why do I care?

I started an unfortunate scrap online with my brother last week over a meme he posted on his Instagram. Against my better judgement I commented that I think memes—specifically political memes—are a simpleminded way to make a point about something. He responded a couple days later, and we went back and forth for a bit. By that time I couldn’t recall the precise contents of the meme he posted, though I could recall it abstractly enough to remember why I’d felt compelled to comment.

That didn’t fly with him. As he saw it, I was tone-policing, nitpicking over the form instead of engaging with the contents of what he posted. He was correct in a sense, but my counter was that my point was about discourse in general rather than the meme specifically, and I do think that form is important to discourse. Memes, I said, always lack important context and nuance, and I remembered thinking that the specific meme he posted was dishonest, intentionally misrepresenting facts.

He called me a snob and some other names. I said I thought it was justified snobbery. Maybe he’s right, and in any case I didn’t make any headway with him, so naturally I’m still thinking about it.

It’s possible I just don’t understand the purpose of political memes. I mean obviously the purpose is to push a point of view, but to whom and to what end? I have reposted political memes before (though not recently). Why did I do it? My brother had already followed a different tangent and didn’t respond when I asked him the same, so I don’t know how he would answer. As for me, I am certain I never persuaded anyone about anything by way of a meme, and if I’m being honest I don’t think I expected to. What does that leave? Did I do it for the likes? Was I hoping to pick a fight? Just venting? Memes are weaponized speech, though a weak one, like drums and a bugle in a firefight, noise without power. Maybe I should have refrained from commenting on the one my brother posted, but again, I wasn’t really thinking about the meme itself.

I was thinking about my brother’s mindset and trying to imagine his rationale for posting all these memes. I was feeling in that moment the fractured state of my family, and what it reflects about the state of America. We are starkly divided, not just along political and ideological lines, but in terms of basic reality. We look at… Trump, Biden, COVID, whatever—and we don’t just disagree, but rather we see two entirely different realities. We seem to operate in separate dimensions from each other, and for some reason this split vibrates in my bones as a constant humming discomfort, a kind of psychic itch.

I think it bothers a lot of us, which is part of why we have been engaged in an ideological war for some time, each side wanting to assert its own reality and erase the other. We’ve been fighting this war for decades probably, though it has heated up quite a bit in recent years, the two halves of reality splitting further and further apart, and I am tired of living in this war zone. I have been thinking more and more about the endgame and what victory is supposed to look like.

On the left, there seems to be a widespread belief—unspoken or sometimes quietly-spoken—that demographics will eventually overwhelm the opposing forces. The boomers are dying, the country is becoming more diverse, white supremacists are facing a different kind of extinction, etc. Victory therefore involves a waiting game that can be sped up by getting out the vote.

The right, already outnumbered and reliant on things like gerrymandering and the Electoral College to compete at all politically, has ideas involving opportunistic seizures of state power and perhaps even violent insurgency. Each side imagines a future where their opponents have been annihilated. For all but the most unhinged folks, “annihilation” means the death of opposing ideologies, not actual human beings. And therein lies the rub.

There are two ways to kill an opposing ideology. The first way is to convert a critical mass of your opponents over to your side. The other way is to constrain their political and social power to such a degree that they eventually give up and go away, though not really away, just underground. The latter appeals to people because the battle tactics (including memes) operate at scale against enemies who are faceless archetypes, whereas converting people over to your side generally requires sustained 1:1 interactions with real life human beings. Nonetheless, most people probably understand that converting people is a better outcome, even when both parties wind up semi-converted instead (more likely), or even if nobody converts anybody but the interaction achieves some level of mutual understanding and compassion. Otherwise, even after a hypothetical victory that suitably constrains the others’ power, those people nonetheless remain—at your dinner table, or in your zoom meeting at work, or sitting two rows down on the bleachers at your kids’ soccer game. Seething probably.

My brother is my brother and will remain my brother, despite our ideological differences and any imbalances in political or social power by affiliation. Ditto my neighbors and fellow countrypersons. I don’t like this cold war where we don’t really talk, and we quietly work to defeat each other using only mediated channels. We need to drop our weapons and communicate like human beings instead of bots.

The first of The Four Agreements is to be impeccable with your word, to speak with integrity, honesty, and truthfulness. To me this means to communicate authentically and in our own words, to maintain reasonable uncertainty about any claims we’re tempted to make, and to represent the others’ perspective in our minds as reasonably and completely and charitably as possible. I don’t think, however, that it means we always need to be civil to each other. I think it’s okay to communicate forcefully, maybe even be crude sometimes. That said, referring to memes as “simpleminded” in my opening foray to my brother was perhaps not a great way to build a bridge to his mind (even if the second of The Four Agreements is don’t take anything personally).