In 1976 the biologist Richard Dawkins published a seminal book on evolutionary gene-theory, the Selfish Gene. Now a household name, Dawkins explored how our DNA’s ultimate drive is to replicate itself, and sometimes this drive for replication outweighs the desires of the ‘vehicle’ – us. Many of us intuitively understand now that some of our genetic, built-in desires, such as our reproductive needs, are not intrinsically useful to us. An individual with a short miserable life span and a hundred children is more genetically successful than one with a long happy life span and zero, and in one generation there will be a hundred miserable little shits having a hundred more, go figure. Genes destructive to the host may proliferate freely if they manifest after one’s reproductive years – their immortality is ensured, even if the vehicle is temporary. This essay isn’t going to be a biology lesson, but understanding gene theory informs the real point – memes.
Our concept of the meme is coloured largely by internet jokes, and these jokes are memes, but the concept delves far deeper than that. Memes are, essentially, culture, and the name derives from the greek Mimeme, for ‘Imitation’. Like genes, they thrive on their ability to replicate – far beyond, in some cases, its use to individuals who spread it. Chain emails, for example, threaten people with consequences unless they further spread the chain. They are virtually useless yet greatly replicable, and so the meme perpetuates itself onward and onward. Cognitive scientist Keith Stanovich categorized memes into four categories:
- Memes that thrive because they are helpful to the people that store them.
- Memes that thrive because they are good fits to pre-existing genetic predispositions.
- Memes that thrive because they facilitate the replication of the genes that make good hosts for that meme.
- Memes that thrive because of the self-perpetuating properties of the memes themselves.
The first is obvious – a meme that tells you whether certain plants are poisonous will tend to do well, and bad memes about poisonous plants will generally eradicate themselves along with their hosts. The second and third are also quite intuitive – some memes will be well suited to those genetically predisposed to, say, paranoia or trust, and memes that encourage reproducing and educating your children in the meme (present in most cultures) will also do well for themselves. Today I want to explore the concept of the meme through the lens of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. 1984’s authoritarian surveillance state has, of course, been a convenient go-to for critics of left-wing and right wing governments alike, but rather than making tired comparisons to contemporary politicians, I’d like to explore the insidious power that a self-perpetuating idea itself, rather than a cynical wielder of it, can manifest upon any society.
Orwell describes a society where its citizens are constantly monitored and judged by their orthodoxy to ‘the Party’ and its ideology, ‘Ingsoc’. An orthodox man must be capable of incredible self-deception, he must be able to discard facts readily – he must believe the party to be infallible, yet immediately accept at any moment when the party changes its mind. Those who cannot are purged, and those who wield the most knowledge of this deception – the higher echelons of the Party – seem the most uniquely capable of embracing cognitive dissonance. The simultaneous acceptance of two contradictory ideas was referred to as ‘doublethink’, and the Party trained its adherents in it relentlessly. To the Party, one’s thoughts are just as important, in fact more important, than one’s actions. Thinking in a way which contradicts the Party is heresy, rival thoughts are zealously hunted and erased. The past is purged, forged and re-forged both in memory and documentation – all according to the party dictum, “He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.” Entire institutions, including that which Winston, the protagonist, belongs to, are devoted to this control of the past by destroying and forging documents. Language is restructured into ‘Newspeak’, a simpler form of communication intended to make ideas diverging from Ingsoc impossible, largely by the control, or outright elimination, of certain words and definitions. Syme, one of Winston’s colleagues and an editor of the Newspeak Dictionary, proudly reports that the literature of the past, such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Byron, have been purged and reforged in Newspeak versions, often contradictory to what they used to be.
Eventually, Winston attempts a rebellion against the Party and is captured. As he is punished for his ‘thought-crime’ of unorthodoxy, he learns from his torturer the Party’s sole ideology – power. Not just power over acts but thoughts, complete power over our perception and – as a consequence – our reality. Even those in power are slaves to the collective Party and its ideology – the ultimate goal is the perpetuation of the meme indefinitely, even if every man should suffer. It is not the power of the individual or the ruler that Ingsoc seeks to perpetuate, but the power of the ideology. A thought-criminal is not being tortured as punishment for behavior or his unorthodox thoughts, but to be broken and purged of them. Winston’s interrogator describes the breakdown of individuality, that each human being must be a cell of a greater entity: “The first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual … Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death? The Party is immortal.” The meme of Ingsoc, the party ideology, had created a way to cultivate a ruling class of humans capable of discarding all rational thought whenever required. The individual host made no difference, he was irrelevant beyond his capacity to perpetuate the Party, a reproductive cell. Indeed, it was assumed that most Party members would eventually be purged and replaced, even at the highest levels – even Big Brother himself, the supposed leader, may have been a legend, or a victim of the self-policing nature of the Party. The ideology set about destroying, piece by piece, root and branch, every human instinct that could contradict it. It is revealed that the Party does not exist for some high minded concept of human flourishing, there is no greater good or socialist ideal. The Party, the ideology itself, exists explicitly for power, to perpetuate itself indefinitely – humans are merely its vehicles.
The true horror of 1984’s dystopian government is not, in fact, that Big Brother selfishly sits in his palace, exploiting his people for his own gain. Members of the Party do not sit sipping wine as an aristocratic upper class, above the rules that govern the rest. This, while terrible, is more understandable travesty to us, who have seen it time and time again throughout history. In a way, it is relatably human, to be governed by the selfish instead of a mere concept. The higher echelons of the Party in Orwel’s dystopia are just as heavily controlled, if not more, than the ‘Proles’ beneath them – constantly monitored, constantly self-regulating, each member policing the other. Even the highest authorities are frequently purged and replaced, when their orthodoxy to the Party – to the meme – is deemed wanting. Members live and die by their orthodoxy, their devotion to the perpetuation of the Party, an abstract, rather than Big Brother himself, who is merely symbolic of it. The Orwellian surveillance state is, at its core, a meme that developed the apparatus to regulate its hosts so thoroughly that none can free themselves of it. It is an ideology completely committed to the control not of just of behavior but of thought. The party is an organism, and like how our immune system attacks a virus, the meme’s white blood cells are its hosts, stamping out dissent. Rather than a tool wielded by the cynical powerful few, as we often imagine ideology to be, it instead wields a power and personality of its own. Richard Dawkins’ colleague N.K. Humphrey summed up the concept of a meme as such: “‘… memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn’t just a way of talking—the meme for, say, “belief in life after death” is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.”
French philosopher Michelle Foucault spent much of his works examining the cultures in which we swim, in order to establish that often the ideas we take most for granted are merely the ones we are most deeply immersed in, rather than being the most ‘true’. In his work Discipline and Punish he uses the institution of the modern prison to examine this. He notes how our modern system of punishment has gone away from inflicting punishment upon the body, and instead towards exerting control over behavior.
“If the penality in its most severe forms no longer addresses itself to the body, on what does it lay hold? The answer of the theoreticians – those who, about 1760, opened up a new period that is not yet at an end – is simple, almost obvious. It seems to be contained in the question itself; since it is no longer the body, it must be the soul. The expiation that once rained down upon the body must be replaced with a punishment that acts in depth on the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations.”
Foucault goes on later in his book to examine the concept of the Panopticon, a theoretical prison in which the cells are arranged around a tower from which the guards can see out but the prisoners cannot see in. By design, prisoners could never be sure whether they were being watched, and so must behave as if they are. This ‘unequal gaze’ exerts power upon those being observed. You’ll recall earlier that the Orwellian interrogator noted the party’s true ideology was ‘Power’, and Foucault identifies power as ‘Regimes of truth’, essentially the accepted forms of knowledge which can control our behavior, with ‘truth’ being the dominant narrative of our time. For example, the scientific method and our trust in the scientific disciplines constitutes a ‘regime of truth’ a dominant thought that influences the way we view, categorize and behave in the world. Ingsoc establishes its own regime of truth, one that it can fabricate and refabricate at will, in order to govern its parasitized hosts.
1984 is an extreme example of a meme taking hold, but to a degree it is inherent in any idea that governs human behavior. According to Stanovich’s categories, the Party would occupy the fourth class, a meme that spreads merely by virtue of its own self-perpetuating behavior, such as embedding the capacity for self-deception and the eradication of rival ideas. Yet as it shapes the world around it, it also comes to inhabit the other classes as well. It cultivates the ideology in children, to the point where children frequently report their parents to the authorities. Eventually, within this world, genuine adherence to Party orthodoxy would come to occupy the first category – to do so correctly is to survive, to fail is to die, just as surely as eating a poisonous plant. While it can be easy to believe that holders of beliefs that are distasteful to us are doing so out of maliciousness or cynical self-interest, closer examination often shows that complex ideologies – such as political and religious ones – are built on a large framework of interrelated ideas in which the holder is immersed. How one perceives the world is often grounded within the ideology itself, and it can often result in self-referential thinking and cognitive dissonance of its own. While George Orwell examines a hyperbole of authoritarian regimes such as fascist Germany and the Soviet Union, one can identify the means by which a meme ensures its own survival in any society, not just totalitarian governments.
Dawkins discusses another concept in The Selfish Gene, that of the Evolutionary Stable Strategy. Also broached in John Gribbin’s book Deep Simplicity, it is a basic exercise in game theory: It can be modelled in terms a simple game where you have two ‘types’, hawks and doves. Hawks are willing to fight for food, doves will posture but back down without a fight. In this game say that consuming food nets you 1 point, but losing a fight costs you 2 points (consider this the risk of injury and death). It seems reasonably clear that, as long as there is food to go around, the dove strategy is superior on average. Every encounter has, say, a 50/50 chance of gaining a point, and no threat of losing. Over 100 games, each dove on average will have 50 points. Problems arise if you have a society full of doves and introduce a single hawk. This hawk immediately has an immense competitive (and reproductive) advantage over the doves – it can have as much food as it wants at the expense of the doves to feed itself and its offspring, who are unable to contest the hawk for food. The hawk, in the course of 100 games, will net 100 points, and thrive in the gene pool. This success breeds more hawks, who continue to bully the doves. Imagine now that the hawks drive the doves to extinction – now, every fight has a 50% chance of losing 2 points or gaining 1. Over the course of 100 games, each hawk is likely to have lost points. In this game, usually neither side is driven extinct – in the end it will generally reach an equilibrium between the two points, a stable area where hawks and doves can both survive, but it’s important to note that they will both be less well off than if everyone was a dove. Anyone familiar with the Prisoner’s Dilemma, one of game theory’s most famous examples, will recognize this outcome. All participants, acting in their rational best interest, essentially penalize themselves so long as they can’t perfectly trust the other participants not to be a hawk and win more at their expense.
Consider the possibility, then, that in the ‘game’ of society, the nicest times to live in might not be stable configurations. When competing with hawks, it may be inevitable that oppressive, underhanded regimes may have a competitive advantage to monopolize power, especially as the technologies of oppression become more powerful. We are easier to monitor than ever. The ‘Telescreens’ placed by the Party into every individual’s homes to monitor and propagandize are adorable next to the capacity of our smartphones to surveil us and collect our data – not to mention our institutions’ capacity to examine it and shape our behavior by it. The tools are here already, ready for the right meme to cement its grasp and seize a competitive advantage. It may be unnerving to think that rather than this being a competition of humans, it is a competition of parasitizing ideas which ultimately do not care about humans beyond their effectiveness as a host. When our thoughts and behaviors are expertly moulded by advertisers to make money rather than the state to wield coercive power it may feel less explicitly dangerous, even if it does feel violating. We should, however, stop to examine these assumptions – we grow used to them, numbed by them, we prefer not to acknowledge how uncomfortable the surveillance placed upon us has grown, and the sophisticated methods used to target us and influence our behavior.
Neither Goerge Orwell, Michelle Foucault or the Panopticon’s inventor Jeremy Bentham lived to see the ascendancy of the internet and the smartphone, but we cannot dispute that in our society, despite our best efforts, we are always watched – or if we are not, there is always the potential we are being watched, even alone in our own homes. To completely abandon these technologies, so ingrained in the function of our society, is unrealistic, yet to play along can be similarly unpalatable. Few of us truly trust our devices not to be collecting our data, and few of us trust the companies collecting it to use it responsibly. As surveillance, analytical and military technology becomes more advanced, and those in power further utilize the data gathered by these private companies, this grasp may grow ever more inescapable. And what happens then, when a ruthless ideology sinks its claws into those in power?
Citations:
Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene: 40th Anniversary Edition. Fourth edition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016. – Amazon Link
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. REP edition. New York: Vintage, 1995. – Amazon Link
Gribbin, John. Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity. 1 edition. New York: Random House, 2005. – Amazon Link
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty Four. London: Penguin UK, 2008. – Amazon Link
Stanovich, Keith E. The Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin. 1 edition. University of Chicago Press, 2005. – Amazon Link