Geese, get your heads out of the gutter. Sort of reminds me of when I updated my status on FB to say the stripper burnt holes in my arm. Clumsy wording, pun not intended... I meant the chemical stripper I was using to get the polyurethane or acrylic lacquer coat off of my mom’s beautiful wooden eaves so I could refinish them, of course. But funny mental image my friend Meg pointed out. Yes, the stripper burnt holes in my arm. Indeed.
Not that kind of dike people…
Besides, that kind is spelled dyke. And, by definition, I am male, so that just would not happen regardless because this stereotyped pejorative label is reserved for a particularly militant and masculine or “butch” lesbian. And by opening this blog with a little bit of off-color humor, I should emphatically state that I’m no enemy of dyke-dom or LGBT folks.
I love rainbows!
This kind… Perhaps it would be better if we referred to it as a levy. Given Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans, it might be a reference not lost upon so many Americans.
And, yes, my blog title is a very deliberate allusion to a meme popularized by Mary Maples Dodge in her 1865 novel Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates: A Story of Life in Holland, and, more specifically, the story most of us were exposed to in our grade school experiences or in American popular culture known as the legend of the Dutch boy and the dike. In the novel, Dodge titles the vignette “The Hero of Haarlem (you can read it here)”.
It’s said that 99% of Americans are familiar with this story and many American tourists to Holland (the Netherlands) left in disappointment because none of the Dutch could point out the dike to them or retell this supposedly authentic Dutch folktale. In response, the Dutch in 1950 responded by manufacturing memorials to a story that was American in origin, not Dutch (see the above image and the image of the statue at the end of this segment).
To refresh your memory, the meme is about the Dutch boy who discovers a leak in the dike after dark and spends the entire freezing night alone with his finger in the dike and thereby saves the entire city and its inhabitants from being swallowed by the ocean until the adults discover him in the morning and can make repairs. Phoebe Cary’s poem published posthumously in 1873 is probably the vehicle for popularization of this meme in being published widely in anthologies of children’s poetry and was the likely inspiration of the many children’s books that carried this story into the minds of both you and I. Dodge leaves little room for interpreting the moral of the story after its conclusion through the words of another character in the novel:
“True! Of course it is! [...] I have given you the story just as Mother told it to me, years ago. Why, there is not a child in Holland who does not know it. And [...] you may not think so, but that little boy represents the spirit of the whole country. Not a leak can show itself anywhere either in its politics, honor, or public safety, that a million fingers are not ready to stop it, at any cost.”
This is a story about courage and bravery—about initiative and agency—in the face of personal peril and danger. In two words, it’s about self sacrifice. It makes one think of what one might do if one came upon a woman being raped, a homeless person on the street begging for help, the scene of a bad accident, or someone screaming to be rescued from a burning building. Sadly, I think using Dodge’s explication of the story for us through the visage of this character and their words, the spirit of the American nation can tragically be characterized by cowardice, wanton hedonism, and selfishness these days. Don’t you? What nobility, virtue, or goodness can you note daily in your countrypersons?
A study in memetics: These women are proud to buy into their own sexual objectification and think that’s “sexy”???
I honestly think most Americans would just keep on without intervening. It’s simply not their problem. Someone else will take care of it. Besides, risking their lives and giving of their time to face a grave threat would interfere with their otherwise vapid materialistic and hedonistic pursuits.
Encyclopedia Mythica expounds on the narrative and its moral for American school children:
“This story is told to children to teach them that if they act quickly and in time, even they with their limited strength and resources can avert disasters. The fact that the Little Dutch Boy used his finger to stop the flow of water, is used as an illustration of self-sacrifice. The physical lesson is also taught: a small trickle of water soon becomes a stream and the stream a torrent and the torrent a flood sweeping all before it, Dyke material, roadways and cars, and even railway tracks and bridges and whole trains.”
I chose this metaphor to introduce this blog first because it is an apropos mental image of the execution of my duty to citizenship in the ephemeral electronic ether. It is an apt metaphor in three regards:
- Night. First, I often wage war against asinine memes at night after my son goes to sleep.
- Saving the world alone. Second, I feel like I’m alone in the still of the night sticking my finger in the dike (because I very rarely spy others doing the same because of pervasive apathy, ignorance, and idiocy [the private, individual person preoccupied with one’s own life and concerns] and because to so many not afflicted by those maladies, it seems like a lost cause and impossible to persuade others who are entrenched in their opinions) while, quite literally, everyone else slumbers. I feel like Chicken Little (another meme), except the sky really is falling, and I feel like one of the only ones who really see it.
- An overwhelming threat. Third, it is an appropriate metaphor because being inundated by the sea is an ominously overwhelming threat and the expanse of ocean itself so vast and overwhelming. Similarly, the threats to our common future, the public interest, and all life in general as we know it are likewise overwhelming in both magnitude and number. But more importantly, inundation by the vast ocean represents the overwhelming magnitude and ubiquitous nature of the asinine memes that proliferate exponentially on the internet. Like an ocean ready to bear down and destroy a society, dangerous memes proliferate unchecked on the internet that truly threaten all of us in a very similar manner.
The secondary reason I chose this tale to introduce this blog is as a case study for this blog’s topic which is namely memes (and temes, in particular). In short, it superbly illustrates the mechanisms of proliferation and propagation of a meme that originated shortly after the American Civil War some 144 years ago and still pervades our collective psyche today.
What is all this business about memes? Just what the hell is a meme in the first place?
It might just be too simple for comprehension. Sometimes, the simplest things are most profound. First, for those unfamiliar with what a meme is, I’ll say shortly that a meme is, in its most denotative, etymological sense from the Greek mimema, as Susan Blackmore shares, simply something imitated. It’s something copied. We copy each other all the time. Think of the “I’m kind of a big deal” or “That’s how I roll” memes that have proliferated popular American culture that came from Will Farrell’s Anchorman.
The term was coined by brilliant but smug evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his seminal work, The Selfish Gene. In short, it’s something transmitted from one mind to another. Think fashion fads and rumors.
I like how Blackmore illustrates for the audience what a meme is by looking into the audience trying to find examples of memes such as an ear piercing or fashion. She asks the audience member if they came up with the idea of piercing their ear. What a silly idea, of course. Obligatorily, the audience member replies, “Of course not.” And therein we have an excellent illustration of what, precisely, a meme is. The bits of information that translate into learned behavior are likewise examples. Memes spread by replication or repetition. We can learn a meme by watching someone do something or by hearing something from a friend or loved one on the internet.
But I think Blackmore does an excellent job of describing for the uninitiated what a meme is and what memetics is as a science. More particularly, I like her distinction in coining the term teme for an internet meme.
First, a little background from TED talks on memeticist Susan Blackmore:
Susan Blackmore studies memes: ideas that replicate themselves from brain to brain like a virus. She makes a bold new argument: Humanity has spawned a new kind of meme, the teme, which spreads itself via technology -- and invents ways to keep itself alive. Susan Blackmore studies memes -- those self-replicating "life forms" that spread themselves via human consciousness. We're now headed, she believes, toward a new form of meme, spread by the technology we’ve created. Full bio and more links
I love how she frames memes in terms of “human cultural evolution” and it being “a dangerous child for any child to let loose on this planet:”
“By the time you realize what’s happening, the child is a toddler up and causing havoc and it’s too late to put it back. We humans are earth’s Pandoran species. We’re the ones who let the second replicator out of it’s box and we can’t push it back in. We’re seeing the consequences all around us. Now. That, I suggest is the view that comes out of taking memetics seriously. And it gives us a new way of thinking not only about what’s going on on our planet but what might be going on elsewhere in the cosmos.”
We can’t put the lid back on the box, and dangerous, viral memes continue to proliferate. Or, as Bill Maher puts it, errant bullshit or “no ideas so patently absurd they can’t catch on.”
Before I proceed to make my point, I wanted to lay out a little more background with Diane Benscoter’s talk contextualizing and framing extremist thought and mentalities as little more than particularly viral and dangerous memes.
From TED:
Diane Benscoter spent five years as a "Moonie." She shares an insider's perspective on the mind of a cult member, and proposes a new way to think about today's most troubling conflicts and extremist movements. Diane Benscoter, an ex-Moonie, is now invested in finding ways to battle extremist mentalities and their potentially deadly consequences. Full bio and more links
How refreshing to hear someone talking about the elephant in the closet! A former Moonie cult member correctly identifies cults and extremist mentalities as perfect studies in memology. I’ve long maintained (and even when I was a religious fanatic and believer in biblical inerrancy and hyperliteralism, I acknowledged the same) that mainstream religions sects are essentially little more than popular cults.
In all dictionaries, the denotative definitions come first. As words and language evolve over time, additional, more connotative meanings are added over time. Dictionary.com’s definitions (adapted from the Random House Dictionary) follow. Notice how definitions 1-5 would apply to every sect or denomination of any religion. In this sense, all religions are cults. Also, notice related words: craze, fad, furor, furore, rage.
cult –noun
1. a particular system of religious worship, esp. with reference to its rites and ceremonies.
2. an instance of great veneration of a person, ideal, or thing, esp. as manifested by a body of admirers: the physical fitness cult.
3. the object of such devotion.
4. a group or sect bound together by veneration of the same thing, person, ideal, etc.
5. Sociology. a group having a sacred ideology and a set of rites centering around their sacred symbols.
6. a religion or sect considered to be false, unorthodox, or extremist, with members often living outside of conventional society under the direction of a charismatic leader.
7. the members of such a religion or sect.
8. any system for treating human sickness that originated by a person usually claiming to have sole insight into the nature of disease, and that employs methods regarded as unorthodox or unscientific.–adjective 9. of or pertaining to a cult.
10. of, for, or attracting a small group of devotees: a cult movie.Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.
Indeed, religions are little more than popular memes that have achieved their popularity through meme transmission by repetition. Religions are simply large cults.
Finally, to contextualize this idea of temes and memology, I’d hoped to link video to Bill Maher’s hilarious “birthers rant.” I very well might have been at least one of the origins (or at least a replicator) of this teme when I was the first in my network of friends on Facebook to share the video (and they in turn, began doing the same). Unfortunately, it became such a viral teme itself that Youtube and others hosting the video threatened its posters with copyright violations and it has been removed from every location it had been hosted. I could not locate the video clip to share with you although I shared it just earlier this week (see YouTomb’s entry). In this rant, Bill Maher is reacting to the tiny fraction of right wing extremists who’ve challenged the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency on a legal technicality questioning his American citizenship (a requirement under the U.S. Constitution to hold the highest office in the land) and his birth certificate. The transcript can be found here.
But the section I found particularly spot on follows:
"...if you don't immediately kill errant bulls**t—no matter how ridiculous—it can grow and thrive like crabgrass or Cirque du Soleil. This birther stuff might be a deluded right-wing obsession, but so was Whitewater and look where that ended up…I'm telling you that in America there is no idea so patently absurd that it can't catch on. For example, have you ever met a Mormon? Or, more recently, we had the Swift Boat allegations against John Kerry, making him, a genuine war hero, a coward in a race against the guy who never left Texas. It was so stupid Kerry refused to even discuss it and we all know how well that worked out. Well, you may ask, how something as inane as Whitewater or Swift Boats or the birther-thing gains traction? Well I'll tell you how, the same way that the story of Elton John almost dying from ingesting too much of Rod Stewart's sperm gained traction in my high school, dummies talking to other dummies. It's just easier now because of the internet. And because our mainstream media does such a lousy job of talking truth to stupid. Lou Dobbs said recently, "People are asking a lot of questions about the birth certificate." Yes, the same people who want to know where the Sun goes at night and where to put the stamp on their e-mail. And Lou, you're their new king. Which is why it is so important that we, the few, the proud, the reality based, attack this stuff before it has a chance to fester and spread. This is not a case of Democrats versus Republicans. It's sentient beings versus the lizard people."
It’s strange that what Maher is talking about here is memetics, and he correctly identifies the mechanism at work here at play without referring to it by its formal name. Particularly, I find these statements not only hilarious but enlightening:
- “…if you don't immediately kill errant bulls**t—no matter how ridiculous—it can grow and thrive like crabgrass…”
- “I'm telling you that in America there is no idea so patently absurd that it can't catch on"
- “Well, you may ask, how something as inane as Whitewater or Swift Boats or the birther-thing gains traction? Well I'll tell you how, the same way that the story of Elton John almost dying from ingesting too much of Rod Stewart's sperm gained traction in my high school, dummies talking to other dummies. It's just easier now because of the internet. And because our mainstream media does such a lousy job of talking truth to stupid…This is not a case of Democrats versus Republicans. It's sentient beings versus the lizard people.”
Yes, Bill. Exactly. How does this errant bullshit end up being believed by people? Well, dummies talking to dummies. Is this a war of memes? Absolutely. It’s a war between sentient beings and the lizard people.
Memetics explained in sociological and psychological terms
It’s important to note that not all memes are errant bullshit spread by dummies talking to dummies although many are precisely just that (hold on, I’ll get to that). In fact, this blog, the talks contained in it, and the ideas contained in it are also examples of temes. That said, how do memes explain paranoid conspiracy theories, proliferation of strategically-framed canards (a canard is a deliberately false story; e.g. The Welfare Queen, The Death Tax) and falsehoods introduced deliberately by politicos who are intellectually bankrupt, and both cults and religions then?
I think here it’s important to understand Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. After our physical needs are met, humans have a deep need for security and safety which often dovetails with the next level of needs of love and belonging, both of which are met through our social relationships with others.
Humans are social animals. Our safety/security needs and love/belonging needs are met by our social relationships with other people. Developmental psychologist Erik Erickson reflected the importance of these relationships in adolescence in his developmental stage of Identity versus Role Confusion in which we define ourselves in relationship to our peers. One need only visit any school to observe a teacher give complex instructions and subsequently watch all of the students conspicuously (once you’re paying attention to see it) watching their neighbors to make sure they understood the instructions and comparing/contrasting their own actions to their neighbors. Adolescents are constantly doing this which is why adolescence is a time to be cool, to fit in, and follow fashion fads and trends.
Sociologists and social psychologists often refer to normative social influence or social comparison theory or false consensus effect as explanations for shifting mores and human behavior. Psychologists have long studied what is otherwise known as the “herding instinct” or “mob mentality” or “groupthink.” All of these labels describe the basic phenomenon through which we seek validation in our thoughts, feelings, and actions through comparison to others.
It explains why your tween daugther wants to wear a thong and simultaneously explains why you want an iPhone and cult members are brainwashed. Seriously! It also explains why persons who were kind to you when others were not looking conformed to the social expectations of others and victimized you in grade school when everyone else was (what some call the pecking order).
Think of the mass suicide in the Heaven’s Gate Cult, the mass homicide/suicide of Jim Jones’s Peoples’ Temple in Guyana (South America), or Charlie Manson’s Family and their commitment of the Tate-LaBianca homicides. Or in terms of the Ku Klux Klan or Army of God (abortion clinic bombers; domestic terrorists) or even Al Qaeda or Catholicism or Mormonism. Think of any extremist vantage, and you’ll find lonely people longing to be accepted and belong. Or in terms of political parties even… Do you not see the same phenomenon involved in people wanting to belong so badly that they’ll adopt fanatical religious devotion and fervor to the point of irrationality and needing to be de-programmed?
How many times have you, upon confronting someone with a bit of misinformation or correcting them in their misinformation, heard the vehement and defensive reply that, “Well, that’s what I heard?’ Case in point. Memes, man, memes.
It also explains the proliferation of viral temes and memes in general. When I was in the sixth grade, a rumor went around that a certain girl whom we will call Suzy was having sex with the school bully, and it wasn’t a good thing. The emotive disapproval expressed nonverbally by my peers and repeated with each new person who repeated the rumor carried with it a loud and implicit message. During an observation in Denver at a middle school, my mentor teacher showed me a note he caught sixth grade girls having passed to each other about having had group sex the prior weekend (that was later verified as actually having had happened). The times, they are a changing… And memetics explain how we go from a point that a woman who was promiscuous was a slut to a point to where women internalize sexually objectifying views of themselves and other women and see the adoption of traditionally harmful masculine views of sexuality as empowering and see prudishness as a worse thing than being perceived as a slut. It explains why thousands of college-aged women across this country clamor to show their breasts or be recorded on video in various sexual acts drunkenly as the Girls Gone Wild bus visits college campuses across the country. In a word, it’s become the norm. It’s harmful and risky behavior that has become normalized and popularized through social comparison theory and proliferation by repetition in a hypersexualized popular culture. This brings me to my next point.
Memes spread by repetition
A quote apocryphally attributed to Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, reads, “A lie oft-repeated becomes truth.” Nowhere did Goebbels actually utter these words. His fuehrer, Adolph Hitler, did equivocate this idea repetitively in Mein Kampf:
- “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands...” p. 180-181
- “But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.” p. 184
Simple slogans harped on until the masses understand and a few points repeated over and over about sum up Nazi theory on propaganda save “the big lie” theory of propaganda, and both ideas originate with Hitler, not Goebbels.
Hitler elucidates his idea that if one tells a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously” it will be easily be believed in chapter ten of Mein Kampf:
“All this was inspired by the principle--which is quite true in itself--that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.”
Goebbels later echoed Hitler’s words when he wrote in an article in 1941 titled “From Churchill’s Lie Factory”:
“That is of course rather painful for those involved. One should not as a rule reveal one's secrets, since one does not know if and when one may need them again. The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.”
Goebell’s words about “…when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it,” has become indelibly associated with the “Big Lie” technique of propaganda.
I might argue that a number of politicos trained in the strategic framing of issues and manipulation through language are students of Hitler’s.
Think about some of the things you’ve heard over this last year.
- Barack “Hussein” Obama won’t wear an American flag lapel pin
- Barack “Hussein” Obama won’t put his hand over his heart for the Star Spangled Banner (there is a photo on the primary trail where he did not, but there is plenty of evidence that he has regularly in other venues and locations)
- Barack “Hussein” Obama was educated at an extremist madrassah in Indonesia (thanks Fox News)
- Barack “Hussein” Obama is a Muslim (he’s a Christian)
- Barack “Hussein” Obama will swear into office on the Quran (he took his oath of office on Abraham Lincoln’s Holy Bible)
- Barack “Hussein” Obama’s healthcare plan will socialize medicine (of course most of us know it only includes a private option which some ultraconservatives claim will lead gradually and incrementally to socialized medicine; of course we have many socialized things already like Medicare)
- Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ
It’s rather sickening if you ask me. And I don’t even love Obama and have been a critic of Obama-mania for some time now. But, be honest people…
Like Maher says, it’s dummies talking to dummies. And his cautionary tale is correct. If we don’t stand against this errant bullshit, it will continue to proliferate. John Kerry refused to dignify such errant bullshit in the 2004 election with a comment, and he lost the election because of it. We cannot afford to sit back on our laurels now. The opposition, for all of its moralism, lacks any semblance of sportsmanship or ethics in their demagoguery and they are well-financed, motivated, and organized.
And believe me, as one Dutch boy who puts his finger in the dike—er levy—regularly, man, there is some serious crap that people believe. In the arena of global warming, I regularly hear that we only have a temperature record for the last 150 years in spite of the fact that ice cores and deep sea ocean cores give us an indisputable record of global temperatures and carbon emissions going back a million years (a few times longer than we’ve been on this planet in our present form as a species) and tens of millions of years, respectively. And that’s if you’re talking to someone fairly reasonable who has bought someone else’s errant disinformation sponsored by petro interests…
If you talk to less reasonable persons, you will discover that global warming is a Jewish Communist conspiracy at worst or leftist hoax at best, and these people really believe it too. That’s the scary part.
With the subprime lending crisis, hate crimes against Chicanos and Jews are way up. The internet is aflame with memes that the Jewish banking hegemony caused the subprime lending crisis to cause a complete global economic collapse in order to cause civil unrest and bring about martial law and the unveiling of their much-feared New World Order. Conservative radio commentators have blamed the subprime lending crisis upon legal and illegal Mexican immigrants who defaulted on their home loans.
In addition to hate crimes and hate groups themselves spreading virally through the internet in their temes, millennialism is also spreading rampantly. Aww, come on. Ain’t you heared? The Mayan calendar says the world is going to end December 21, 2012. The planets will align and NASA images and calculations prove it and that had nothing to do with the fact that the Mayan calendar is based upon millennia of celestial observation and the revolutions of planets around our sun and the changes in the positions of the stars caused by the same. It’s because they were right! Never mind that nowhere in Mayan writings do we see this end of the long count represented as a cataclysmic event, but instead simply as a transition from one age or era to another marked by a celestial event. It’s why there is no other possibility on the face of the planet other than Obama as the fulfillment of prophecy as the Anti-Christ!!!
I mean then you’ve got your paranoid conspiracy theories in general about the New World Order (and the Masons, and Jews, and Illuminati, and the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Bilderberg Group, and the Trilateral Commission). I’m telling you that some people who are otherwise honest, hard-working, intelligent people believe some pretty unbelievable stuff.
On that note, I’ll admonish you to read Skeptic’s Society Founder Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things and watch his TED Talk by the same title.
The next time you hear, “I heard that…” or “Someone told me…” or “It is said that…” check your bullshit detector, please… And quit being so damn lazy and take some time to ferret out the truth of something for yourself than accepting anyone’s secondhand opinion…. Think: It’s patriotic.
Until next time, this is your favorite Dutch boy sticking his finger in the dike and admonishing you:
Don’t drink the kool-aid!!!
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