WOKE feminist EXPOSES left-wing anti-meme (NOT CLICKBAIT)
Some ideas are memetic: they're catchy, they spread widely and easily, people have a reaction to them that induce them to propagate them further. Others are anti-memetic: for whatever reason, they have naturally self-censoring tendencies that reduce their reach.
My grandmother was a late-in-life convert to Christianity, who dragged the rest of the family along for a bit. I was an earnest, credulous bookworm of eight or so, and I took the youth pastor at his word when he encouraged all of us to read more of the bible in our own time. As it turns out, the youth pastor is actually not thrilled when you do, and come back with inconvenient questions. Parts of the bible can be anti-memetic in some Christian circles.
A bit later, I found myself in very socially progressive circles. I was an earnest, credulous bookworm of eighteen or so, who took the community leaders at their word when they told us that it is important to read theory, but even more important to do direct work and listen to the oppressed when their viewpoints diverged from the theory (which was written by dead white men). This I spent my early career doing, first at a remove at domestic violence policy summits and deep inside the federal public service, and then more directly at food banks and homeless shelters. I care deeply about improving the world, and I learned much about the kinds of work that are required to bring about the healed one. However, I did not disclose much of my learnings at the anarchist potlucks and communist reading groups. I somehow knew that they would not make me especially popular.
One of my anti-memetic learnings is on how to get a loved one to leave an abusive relationship. I have a small gift with words that render this anti-meme a little easier to swallow, but I hardly expect it to be a smash hit with my readers or the internet writ large. I can tell you that the instructions for solving addiction, the kinds of homelessness that you see on the streets of large cities, and other urgent and difficult social problems are very similar.
If you think about it, isn't it really curious how the instructions for how to get your friends out of abusive relationships aren't in the water? It's not a common problem, but it's also not exactly an uncommon one.
Why precisely are the instructions anti-memetic? I dash off two reasons in my original post, but I can think of many:
First, it's incredibly depressing. It goes over like a lead balloon, unless all of your friends have a really strong stomach for dissecting really bleak realities. There aren't any fun discourse hooks inside the overton window, and you can't give this information out to people without coming off like a nag or a scold. Insofar as people are enticed by suppressed knowledge, they want bits and bobs that are fun to pass around, and give them status when they do. This is not that.
Second, it's fraught to convey. It's only because I grew up in the SJW trenches that I was able to write the piece as I did, elegantly pirouetting over every discursive land mine. Even many people with a lot of first-hand exposure would struggle to convey their experiences in a way that doesn't end up with unfortunate implications that they don't endorse. Words are hard, and you want to be really really careful here — perhaps more careful than one can realistically manage.
Third, it forces an unspeakable, taboo conclusion. Even the notoriously bullet-biting LessWrong commentariat refuses to say the obvious thing, which is: "wow, yeah, it's probably not worth it for most people to do this". This is because this is simply an opinion one is not allowed to have about supporting victims of abuse, and ummmmmm surely no one is foolhardy enough to force the issue, just to make some sort of annoying abstract point about the general epistemic landscape?
The conclusion threatens people's self-image as good people who would obviously help their friends escape from abusive relationships. Perhaps it's actually info-hazardous, in that if it spreads too far it would prevent people from charging into the process and then sunk cost fallacying themselves into slogging through it. If that is the case oops my bad. Good thing no one reads my blog.
Fourth, there is an attractive decoy set of instructions. The attractive decoy set of instructions (which everyone finds so intuitive they don't even need to double check on the internet just to be sure, and if they do double check and they find opposing information it just slides away because the correct answer is just obviously so intuitive) is that you just need to be your authentic self and tell your friend that you think they are in danger! from their abuser who fucking sucks and also you've never liked!
Because this attractive decoy exists, people are less likely to go looking for an answer; they think they already have one.
Fifth, the existence of the attractive decoy explanation means that you are considered more morally culpable if you follow the true set of instructions. If you are your authentic self and you tell your friend that you think they are being abused, and then they start freezing you out, no one will blame you for this. Your friends will very sophisticatedly and even-handedly be like "man, this is a situation that sucks all around :(". You might even get to feel righteous, or that you've successfully discharged your duty and no longer are obligated to feel guilty. It would be really nice, if you could stop feeling guilty.
Meanwhile, if you slog through all of the fucking bullshit you will need to to actually be there for your friend who is hurting and in danger, you will generally get no support from other people. They might even accuse you of being an enabler, or turn their backs on you. You might have a friend group who is amenable to being linked my previous blog post, and then come around, but even in that case what you did is make them feel really guilty, again, for not doing as much as they should to help their friend, and then you might be quietly pariahed for the kinds of reasons that strident vegans are sometimes quietly pariahed.
Sixth, the correctness of the true instructions is not intuitively obvious to most people. The true instructions are not a silver bullet. Even if you do all that, you might fail to save your friend regardless. So from the outside, it might seem like you have just done something arduous and stressful and honestly kind of morally injurious, for no real gain.
Okay, so why did I do all of that analysis?
I find that most discussions of anti-memes tend to focus on truths that are right-wing in nature. For example, Nadia Asparouhova writes in Antimemetics that her book, Working in Public, was "about the challenges of democracy, wrapped in the allegory of open source software." That is, because it was anti-memetic in the mid-2010s to question democracy's efficacy, the only way to get intelligent and sophisticated people to discuss the nature of this problem is to hide it within a spoonful of peanut butter.
But I suspect that the specific ways that the propagation of anti-memes are suppressed differ depending on the nature of the anti-meme in question, and I wish to give a worked example of one that is not in the typical dataset.