Memes

Memes

Every person, without
realising it, carries hundreds if not thousands of viruses — viruses that are not
biological but of another kind. The kind related to computer viruses. What
matters is that computer viruses and physical viruses alike meet the minimum
requirements set for a living organism: they are mortal, they reproduce,
they evolve.

 Yes, a virus cannot
live apart from its host. Yes, to reproduce a virus needs someone else’s
replication machinery, which it forces to work for it. A cell infected by a virus
starts producing viruses instead of the proteins it is supposed to stamp out under the programme
written in its DNA.  That is why malicious computer programs are
called viruses and not bacteria. A computer virus cannot reproduce
without a computer. But it can make the computer produce copies of itself.

Now imagine
some idea. It could be a thought, a picture, a document, a joke or even a whole
religious teaching. If this idea happens to push the person carrying it to
pass it on to those around him, and if among those around him there happen to be enough
people receptive to that idea, we get another kind of virus.
A purely informational virus. Or, as scientists put it, a meme  — a unit of cultural
information. A meme can be any idea, symbol, manner or way of acting,
passed from person to person consciously or unconsciously through speech,
writing, video, rituals, gestures and so on. The concept of the meme and the term itself were
proposed by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 in the book “The Selfish
Gene”. Dawkins put forward the idea that all cultural information consists of
basic units — memes — exactly as biological information consists of
genes; and like genes, memes are subject to natural selection, mutation and
artificial selection.

The human brain
is fertile ground for cultural viruses to breed in. Five very interesting
phenomena help them along: rationalisation, sunk-cost stickiness,
public opinion, self-persuasion and mutual infection.

Rationalisation

People act on
instinct first and only afterwards consciously “supply” a logical justification for what
they did. Aggression, for instance, is a perfectly positive instinct: it lets a
species spread across a larger territory so that individuals do not get in each other’s way
when living and breeding. In a city aggression is suppressed, but the instinct still
needs an outlet. That is what stadiums, computer games and action films are for.  And
when there is a reason for “righteous anger”, a person gladly releases
his instinctive urge, and then finds a thousand justifications for what he did.
A rationalising revolutionary does not even try to stop and see that
throwing Molotov cocktails at the police does nothing to solve his personal problems, which
come, yes, first of all from the corruption of power as such, not from
the presence of particular figures in that power. A rationalising revolutionary
will let a glaring fact pass him by: the “opposition” has no need at all for a
revolution or a change of the way things are run. They want the same trough and the same structure,
only with themselves on the top perch of the henhouse rather than Yanukovych and Azarov.

 Exactly the same
rationalisation makes people revel in entirely instinctive things, such
as the hierarchy and self-organisation that appeared on the Maidan. Meanwhile the
rationalising revolutionary, drunk on the
inspiring narcotic of mass action, will let stories like
“the abduction of Bulatov” or “the political reprisal against Chornovil” pass him by. And the
press will help him with that, serving up, specially for washed brains, the
information those brains will be most receptive to. Bulatov — tortured, of
course. Chornovil — hounded by the SBU, the FSB and the devil knows who else, of course.
The rationalising revolutionary will passionately want to keep spreading
virus-memes about “snipers on the roofs firing hunting-rifle cartridges”,
about “the Maidan will be stormed tomorrow”, about “fifteen years for hauling tyres”.

 Getting Stuck

A cognitive bias natural to people,
which makes them treat unrecoverable costs already paid
as an argument for decisions about the future.  Complicated? Fine, I’ll put it more simply:
girls are often ready to say “yes” to a young man’s proposal only because
“I’ve been going out with him for so long already”. They feel sorry about the time spent and they
want to make it “useful”, and in doing so they make a thoroughly illogical move.
The same goes for the Panama Canal, which they decided to keep building even after
a Nicaragua canal project was proposed that could have been completed faster,
would have been far cheaper than the remaining part of the Panama
Canal, would have required fewer resources and engineering works, and would have been wider and more
convenient for shipping. How could that be! We have already dug so much. Throw it away and
forget it? Yes, that is the logical thing — forget it and build the canal in Nicaragua.

Now look at a
revolutionary on the Maidan or a “DNR militiaman”. Has everyone worked it
out? So he stood out in the cold for nothing? So he risked his health and
clashes with law enforcement for nothing? He fought all that time for nothing? No,
the fight has to go on. Fight to the victorious end!  We did not burn all that
effort and time for nothing, did we? But the truth is that it makes no difference whether the
effort and resources were burned for nothing or not. You cannot take into account what you will
not get back anyway.

Public Opinion

The overwhelming part,
95–98%, of the population are conformists. People who look at those around them in order to
form their own opinion — or rather, their supposedly own opinion. In the 1970s, when
these effects were discovered, many psychological experiments were run in
which a person under group pressure began to believe an obvious falsehood himself and to
argue for the same thing as everyone else.

Students were once

shown pairs of faces in photographs and asked whether the same person
was in both. The “planted” students in the room were asked one by one, and they stood up and argued
that the two people in the photographs were
in fact the same man in different makeup. The “subject”
student was asked last, and he… yes, he too started inventing his own
arguments for why two completely different people in the photos were one and the
same face. Scientists also “tormented” children in a kindergarten: every child was
asked whether the porridge was sweet, and every child answered yes, sweet.
The last one asked was a child who had been slipped salted porridge, and he answered that… the porridge was
sweet.

Religious preachers make use of this
property of human behaviour. As a rule, 10% of
the people sitting in the hall are the “theatre company” touring with the
preacher. They are the first to shout “Hallelujah”, the first to bring donations, the first
to start the hymns. The rest simply behave like herring in a shoal —
they follow the leaders.

A person who lands in an
environment where everyone says the same thing catches these ideas himself in 99% of
cases and starts transmitting them further. Revolutionary memes get
fertile soil, exactly as fertile as the “soil” in the brains of members of
totalitarian sects.

Self-Persuasion

The Chinese made very
productive use of this property of the human brain when they re-educated
American prisoners of war who fell into Chinese hands during the Korean War.
First the prisoner was asked whether he considered the system in the USA ideal. The man
answered: not entirely. Then they asked him to write a short essay on the subject:
what he would like to improve in the USA and what good he saw in communism that would be worth
introducing in America. Well, why not. He wrote it. Then the piece is read out
over the loudspeakers to the whole camp. Here, they say, is John Smith’s opinion on unemployment in
the USA and how that question was solved in China. John’s fellow soldiers start attacking him with
accusations of being a traitor. And John… John starts defending himself, and in doing so
believes what he wrote even more. So, after two or three such rounds, John
becomes a communist. American psychologists and sociologists ran into this problem later,
when they began observing the soldiers coming back from enemy captivity,
who had turned into fierce supporters of China and communism and into
opponents of the “rotten West”.  The more you ask a person why he
is standing on the barricades, the more he switches on his self-persuasion and
defends the rightness of his point of view. A conversation with such a person comes down to
him admitting that: yes, the Maidan/DNR
is a dead end and a sewer for protest; yes, it is not the thief that needs replacing but the system that needs rebuilding;
yes, the West/Russia will not help; yes, if the Maidan/DNR
wins, the Shvonders will come to power; yes, I am being manipulated, yes, yes…  But
the Maidan/DNR is better than nothing. Pass me another tyre!

Mutual Infection

In the summer of 2005 a group
of researchers selected 63 residents of Colorado to discuss three contested
questions: same-sex marriage, policy aimed at undoing the consequences of
discrimination, and global warming. About half the participants were
conservatives from the city of Colorado Springs, while the other half
were liberals living in the city of Boulder. After the participants
had filled in questionnaires about their personal views on the three topics, they were
divided into ten groups: five conservative and five liberal. Each
group then discussed the questions for a time, with the aim of reaching
consensus on each of them. After the discussion the participants filled in the
questionnaires again.

 The results of the study
were striking. In every case, discussion among like-minded people led to what the
researchers called “ideological amplification”. People’s views sharpened and
hardened:

 “First, the groups from
Boulder came to hold even more liberal views on all three
questions; the groups from Colorado Springs, even more conservative ones. So the
discussion promoted greater extremism. Second, every group showed
an increase in consensus and a decrease in the diversity of participants’ views…
Third, the discussions sharply widened the differences between the views of the liberal
residents of Boulder and the conservative residents of Colorado Springs. Before
the discussion began there was significant overlap between the views of people from the two
different cities. After the discussion the amount of that overlap had substantially
shrunk.”

 The study revealed a
feature of human nature and group dynamics that psychologists have long
noted: the more people exchange information with other people
who hold a similar worldview, the more extreme their
own views become. One of the organisers of the Colorado experiment, professor
Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago, explains in his book “Infotopia”:
“When like-minded people come together, it often leads to the strengthening of their
prejudices and the spread of false ideas.” They “end up
taking a more extreme position than before the discussion began”. This phenomenon, which
Sunstein reports as recorded “in hundreds of studies conducted
in more than ten countries”, can in the worst case “lay the groundwork for extremism
and even fanaticism and terrorism”