Perhaps I shouldn’t have been online at all.
What good can come of it?
But I was, and I stumbled across your meme.
A pair of stacked photos
With words in Calibri
Plastered across them
A political message
A social message
A stand
A stance
A point of view
On display, presented in clarity and simplicity.
But I have a few questions.
What exactly did you hope to accomplish?
Did you hope to get like-minded people to
Agree with you?
They already do.
But I guess that affirmation feels good.
A beautiful feedback loop is fulfilled.
You post.
You get beautiful comments full of jingoistic agreement
And you can feel affirmed in the righteousness of your
cause.
Except when you don’t.
Because there were those negative comments as well.
Which raises again the question –
What exactly did you hope to accomplish?
Because if you were hoping to persuade anybody
To change their thinking,
The negative comments show that you are – perhaps –
A little mistaken.
Because if you were hoping your meme
Would make someone from the enemy side
Suddenly see the light
Understand your truth
Have your insight and understanding
Flutter down from heaven like a dove
And light upon their minds
Like divine revelation,
I think that perhaps the opposite happened.
If the comments are any indication
Your disagreeable friends
(Are they really friends?)
Have become even more disagreeable.
They have dug in,
Made their trenches deeper,
Put up more barbed wire,
And come up with more weapons to defend their position,
Aimed at the sky to shoot your dove of revelation
Into bloody feathery oblivion.
Probably with a meme of their own.
So you aren’t persuading anyone, I suspect.
But I wonder if this was really the point.
Maybe you didn’t want to change anyone’s mind
But to differentiate yours from theirs.
To drive the Others further away
To define the lines of us versus them
My tribe against their tribe.
Aren’t we great aren’t they awful?
You wouldn’t use the word tribe,
Of course.
That sounds awfully primitive
And this is a high-tech forum.
Stories. Narratives.
If tribes is too primitive a term,
Maybe we should talk about our narratives.
We all buy into narratives.
Our narrative makes sense to us,
Makes us feel certain
About what life is about,
What we are about,
Who we are,
Why we are
Who we are against
Why we are against them.
We commit to our narratives:
Anything that contradicts it must be false
No matter how factual or truthful it appears.
Anything that confirms it must be true
No matter how flawed, poorly reasoned,
Ridiculously ironically nonsensical it is
If you actually think about it.
To question your narrative
Is to question your very sense of self.
It feels like killing yourself.
Not questioning your narrative, though,
Is intellectual suicide.
But questioning ruins the fun
Of knowing you’re right.
Questioning your own narrative
Means risking disagreement
With people who make you feel good about yourself.
Questioning your own narrative
Will rock your world.
At this point you are probably agreeing with me:
Those Others
need to question their narratives
Because They
are obviously deluded
In their narrative.
And They are
obviously wrong and need to
Rethink their
narratives.
And well they may need to.
But from the inside,
A false narrative looks awfully similar to a true one.
But tends to be more fiercely defended.
Do you know where the term meme comes from?
It’s from a militant atheist.
Does that bother you?
What is your narrative of atheists?
Does knowing one invented the concept of memes
Change your impression of them?
And do you ever stop to think about
The effect memes have on our society?
Our world?
Complex ideas that are matters of life and death
Are matters of personal and national identity
Of scientific and philosophic truth
Are reduced to a picture and a few words
Devoid of nuance, reflection, or subtlety.
All so we can get a few Likes and comments
From people who already agree with us.
All so we can create division and polarization
Instead of understanding.
In a way, your meme
Is dehumanizing.
You make the people who don’t share your narrative
Into the enemy
The Other
Things to be conquered
Or even eradicated.
You even dehumanize yourself.
You are no longer a person,
But one of Those People
Who post that kind of meme.
And all of this commentary
Doesn’t even begin to address
The fact that your meme
Makes absolutely no sense
If you actually think about it.
But I guess thinking
Was never the point,
Was it?
Maybe you should start thinking about the things you
post.
Because I’ve been thinking about them way too much.
