The Memefication of Thought

How memes corroded rationality

Ancient people would be puzzled by a lot of things about modernity (“wait wtf happened to Rome—and why aren’t people watching those exciting coliseum fights of slave vs. lion anymore??? Back in my day the youth weren’t playing TikTok on their phones all day—they were busy conquering Gaul”). But surely one of the most surprising things would be that we developed god-like technology that allows us to communicate with people on the other side of the world—which we then used to spend a sizeable portion of our time fighting about who should be situated where in strange cartoons.

Those who spend a lot of time on Twitter know how much Twitter fights devolve into battles over who is who in memes. For example, there is this famous meme, wherein the person on the left—who is universally agreed to be cringe and wrong—adopts some nice-sounding position, while the person on the right confidently denies it.

Everyone aspires to be the guy on the right—the chad who confidently and nonchalantly adopts an unpopular position. This has resulted in strange internet incentives wherein the fact that a position sounds crazy is seen as a virtue, and arguing for it is seen as unnecessary—the way the Ubermensch argues for their position is by being like the chad guy on the right. They simply assert the position, ideally as callously and inhumanly as possible.

Then there is the famous midwit meme:

The bellcurve is supposed to be an IQ bell-curve. The core idea of the meme: while there are a lot of really stupid people who adopt your position, and the people who adopt the other position feel superior to those dumbass hicks who have your position, your position is what the REALLY smart people believe. Thus, while acknowledging that the people on your side are mostly subliterate morons who can barely tie their shoes, you still get to feel superior. While your opponents aren’t dumb, they’re midwits who possess middling intelligence. The people on your side are the really intelligent people.

The meme is, of course, a grotesque oversimplification of reality designed solely to allow people to feel superior. There are smart people on all sides of every issue. Einstein was famously a pretty smart guy, and he was a socialist. Von Neumann was about as far from being a socialist as one can get, and he was also quite smart. There are even a few smart people who support tariffs. I have a friend like that.

Each of the memes I’ve mentioned displays the person who is wrong as being sad or angry or emotional in some other way. But people can be emotional and correct. If something is genuinely unjust or outrageous, being outraged about it is fitting—not indicative of vice. One’s resemblance to a hypothetical pastiche of crying meme characters is not particularly indicative of the correctness of their view.

Also—and this may come as a shock to some people—but the way smart people argue isn’t by devising memes that display the other person being low-IQ. Instead, they give arguments for their position. They don’t just call people who disagree dumb, they instead try to convince the people who disagree that their position is incorrect.

Another popular meme is this one:

It is pretty weird that a sizeable portion of internet debates seem to be about who most resembles a hypothetical cartoon dog—who you know is in the right because it has thick arms and abs. It’s similarly odd that the fact that someone resembles a hypothetical upset person with glasses is taken to be a disqualifying mark against their view.

I think the memefication of public discourse has been devastatingly corrosive to the quality of public rationality. And the public was never that rational to begin with!

Back in the day, social justice warriors would make big bingo cards full of things their critics said. That way, whenever anyone said anything that even slightly resembled something on their bingo card, they could ignore the person’s arguments and think “haha, I can now fill out this point on my bingo card—people on the other side really are just as stupid as I thought.” Scott Alexander wrote about this in an old post:

This tendency reaches its most florid manifestation in the "ideological bingo games". See for example "Skeptical Sexist Bingo", feminist bingo, libertarian troll bingo, anti-Zionist bingo, pro-Zionist bingo, and so on. If you Google for these you can find thousands, which is too bad because every single person who makes one of these is going to Hell.

Let's look at the fourth one, "Anti-Zionist Bingo." Say that you mention something bad Israel is doing, someone else accuses you of being anti-Semitic, and you correct them that no, not all criticism of Israel is necessarily anti-Semitic and you're worried about the increasing tendency to spin it that way.

And they say "Hahahahahhaa he totally did it, he used the 'all criticism of Israel gets labeled anti-Semitic' argument, people totally use that as a real argument hahahaha they really are that stupid, I get 'B1' on my stupid stereotypical critics of Israel bingo!"

You say "Uh, look, I'm not really sure what you're getting at. I recognize that there is real anti-Semitism and I am just as opposed to it as you are but surely when when see the state excusing acts of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank we..."

And they say "Hahahhaha G1, I got G1, he pulled the old 'I abhor real anti-Semitism' line this is great, guys come over here and look at what this guy is doing he's just totally parroting all the old arguments every anti-Semite uses!"

But the memeification of the internet works exactly the same way. Every time a person argues for a position you disagree with, you don’t actually have to think about why it’s wrong. Instead, you pattern match them to the crying person in the meme. However smart they sound, you know they are the midwit—and thus you have a blanket excuse to ignore everything they’re saying. Memes allow you to feel superior about ignoring the arguments of your opponents. They allow you to smugly write them off based on the shallowest of excuses. You don’t even have to refute them—you can just disregard what they say and feel smart.

The other thing that’s irritating about the memefication of argument and thought is that these memes reward idiocy. While everyone’s supposed to agree that the chad in the first meme is right and BASED, and the other guy is wrong and cringe, in fact the chad is reasoning poorly. He’s just asserting a controversial view without saying anything in support of it.

Now, there are lots of cases where it makes sense to believe crazy-sounding views. I believe a lot of things that most people would find crazy. I think insect suffering is the worst thing in the world! But if a view sounds crazy, you shouldn’t believe it unless you have a good reason to. The default should be rejecting ridiculous sounding views. If someone simply asserts “torture isn’t bad actually,” you obviously should not believe that—no matter how confident and chad-like they are in their assertion.

It’s particularly alarming because the views that have been most thoroughly associated with the chad in the first meme are ones that are unpopular because they sound vicious and reprehensible. Spend any time on right-wing Twitter and you’ll see a lot of memes like the following:

Completely neglecting the interests of people in other countries is crazy and reprehensible. But because it sounds based and can be nicely imputed to the chad in the above meme, lots of people seem to believe it even in the absence of any compelling argument. The replacement of thinking with memeing has given people an excuse not to think.

But even that is not the scariest thing.

Writing about ideological bingo cards, Scott Alexander wrote:

But this is still not the scariest thing.

Because if your opponent brings out the Bingo card, you can just tell them exactly what I am saying here. You can explain to the pro-Israel person that they are pattern-matching your responses, that you don't know what strawman anti-Zionist they're thinking of but that you have legitimate reasons for believing what you do and you request a fair hearing, and that if they do not repent of their knee-slapping pattern-matching Bingo-making ways they are going to Hell.

No, the scariest thing would be if one of those bingo cards had, in the free space in the middle: "You are just pattern-matching my responses. I swear that I have something legitimate to tell you which is not just a rehash of the straw-man arguments you've heard before, so please just keep an open mind and hear me out."

If someone did that, even Origen would have to admit they were beyond any hope of salvation. Any conceivable attempt to explain their error would be met with a "Hahahaha he did the 'stop-pattern matching I'm not a strawman I'm not an inhuman monster STOP FILLING OUT YOUR DAMN BINGO CARD' thing again! He's so hilarious, just like all those other 'stop-pattern matching I am not a strawman' people whom we know only say that because they are inhuman monsters!"

But surely no one could be that far gone, right?

Listen:

"I'm not racist, but..."

If you are like everyone else on the Internet, your immediate response is "Whoever is saying that is obviously a racisty racist who loves racism! I can't believe he literally used the 'I'm not racist, but...' line in those exact words! The old INRB! I've got to get home as fast as I can to write about this on my blog and tell everyone I really met one of those people!"

But why would someone use INRB? It sounds to me like what they are saying is: "Look. I know what I am saying is going to sound racist to you. You're going to jump to the conclusion that I'm a racist and not hear me out. In fact, maybe you've been trained to assume that the only reason anyone could possibly assert it is racism and to pattern-match this position to a racist straw man version. But I actually have a non-racist reason for saying it. Please please please for the love of Truth and Beauty just this one time throw away your prejudgments and your Bingo card and just listen to what I'm going to say with an open mind."

And so you reply "Hahahaha! He really used the 'look I know what I'm saying is going to sound racist to you you're going to jump to the conclusion that I'm a racist and not hear me out in fact maybe you've been trained to assume...' line! What a racist! Point and laugh, everyone! POINT AND LAUGH!"

The worst thing—the most severe kind of brain worm—is when you point out to a person that they’re just pattern matching your responses and not thinking them through. You point out that though you might sound sort of like people who they strongly dislike, you actually have a good reason for the things you believe, you’re not a goddamn character in a meme, and if they’d just have an open-mind they might see that their position is wrong. To which they would reply:

When people are this far gone, they are beyond persuasion. They are in the clutches of a very severe mind virus. When you try to argue them out of their false and poorly thought out beliefs, they pattern match that with the cringe guy in the meme and ignore you. Their mind has become a black hole, where the light of reason cannot reach. Rumor has it that if you open up the brain of the typical very-online right-wing Twitter person, all you’ll find is wojak memes and bell curve memes swirling around. They no longer think about issues—they just pattern match.

This was one of the things that irritated me about the recent Kitten affair. Kitten, for the record, is the name of a person, though if a real kitten began saying the things Kitten said, I should be deeply disappointed in that kitten’s powers of reasoning. If my salad at lunch were suddenly to deliver itself of such opinions, my only thought would be “what a very stupid salad.”

Kitten responded to my arguments for the importance of insects with a dunk—and then refused to argue about or consider the issue. Kitten’s followers seemed completely on board with this behavior. The general attitude seemed to be that having serious arguments about any position that seems weird—or, to use rightoid vocabulary, “gay and cringe”—when you first hear it is unnecessary. You can just sneer at it. You can just pattern match it with the crying angry guy in the middle of the midwit meme and blithely dismiss it.

You can do this even if the view is defended in detail by a decently smart person. Even if they go out of their way to say “look, I know when you first hear this position you’ll think it sounds insane, but there are a lot of good reasons not to trust that initial first impression.” Even if you can’t clearly articulate what’s wrong with the argument, so long as it sounds silly to you after reflecting for two seconds, you can simply ignore it. They are the midwit, you are the chad, and that’s all there is to it.

Such reasoning is an ideological cancer of the very deepest sort. It’s as close to invincible ignorance as one can get. How is a person supposed to change their mind if they find the very idea of changing their mind to be cringe—if they think engaging with arguments is indicative of being a midwit, and that the truly clever people with 145 IQs simply assert their views and don’t defend them?

My problem with the dunkers isn’t just that I find them annoying. It’s that I think they have really, in a deep sense, lobotimized themselves into adopting the cruelest and most callous positions imaginable wholly in the absence of arguments and are impossible to persuade. Surely that deep rotting of the mind is not worth the hilarity of a cheap dunk.