The Destructive Power of Memes
How America’s Ministry of Propaganda is decentralized and highly active.
When I boarded the bus in rural Arkansas to go to a new school in the Seventh grade, I was extremely nervous. Raised as a military brat, this would be my first time attending school off-base, and I wasn’t sure I would fit in. I didn’t make it far down the school bus aisle before I felt someone’s hand on my shoulder. I turned to see four older boys, probably 9th graders. They forcefully lead me down the aisle, finally stopping at the back of the bus. I can still remember the eyes of the bus driver in the rearview mirror, watching as the leader of this group picked me up by my neck against the rear door and asked me:
“Are you a Ni**er?”
Years before that encounter, I remember walking the clinical and dark grounds of the Auschwitz concentration camp with my Grandfather as a 3rd grader. I had never seen him cry before that day. I had one question when we entered the gas chambers and saw the pictures of the bodies of murdered Jews. How?
How can a young child on a bus in rural Arkansas be so filled with hate, and how can an entire country be so willing to participate in an atrocity such as the holocaust?
My study of the reasons behind these two events sent me down an unexpected path. I emerged with compassion for those kids on that bus. I gained some insight into what was possibly happening in the minds of Germans in the 40s. I discovered that the same thing is happening now.
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Memes Are Propaganda
Propaganda defined is information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view. Sound familiar? Other characteristics of propaganda is a reliance on imagery and a few words to prompt an emotional response. The meme, as you know it today, and see on social media, is not just for fun. It’s more than just making a point, or causing someone to think.
Mein Kampf, Hitler’s great manifesto, was inspired by the work of Gustave Le Bon, “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.” Hitler wasn’t alone; this book heavily influenced Mussolini, Lenin, and the Bolsheviks as well. I understand why. Le Bon’s work is remarkably fascinating and instrumental in understanding how large groups of people think. (1)
In The Crowd, Le Bon says that when a group of people becomes swayed by a single ideal, they become a “Psychological Crowd.” This crowd then loses the ability to reason on the individual level. Instead, it acts on the emotions of the prevailing sentiment. They become a collective imagination that is entirely controlled by imagery. (2)
The key to this manipulation of the crowd, as told by Le Bon, and later echoed by Hitler’s Ministry of Propaganda, occurs by appealing “to the intuitive world of the great masses, not the understanding of the intellectuals.” (3) The aim of propaganda is explained well in the book “How Propaganda Works.” The Author Jason Stanley writes, “[Propaganda] appeals to the emotions in such a way that rational debate is sidelined or short-circuited; by promoting an insider/outsider dynamic.” (4)
I made the connection between propaganda and modern memes quickly when I learned that the Nazis were deliberate in their efforts to make sure that propaganda was primitive. It appealed directly to what Hitler described as man’s inner “Schweinehund.” (5)
That means Pigdog.
Our ability to laugh at an atrocity, dismiss rhetoric as just dumb, and then callously share with our friends, Hitler blamed on our inner Pigdog. He successfully used this knowledge to move an entire nation. They laughed their way willingly into a right-wing totalitarian state seeking to eliminate the world of a whole race of people.
The other day I asked for people to share with me internet memes that have made them angry. Some seemed innocuous. Some were downright racist. In what could be described as my most depressing day on Facebook, I was inundated with horribly racist, highly partisan, and unfortunately, humorous images that honestly left me shocked. Four separate people told me that they had no idea that the person who shared the meme was so racist. Many people defended the memes as just stupid or funny.
In the Nazi propaganda/meme world, if an image made you laugh, it was powerful. Propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels equated laughing with a feeling of superiority that would take root in the inner man. With enough repetition, it would lead them to follow a dark path willingly. (3) According to Le Bon, after enough repetition, the individual ceases to be an individual. They act in lockstep with the crowd. They cease to have the ability to choose their path. Humor and surprise are the tools of guaranteed repetition. Not trivially humor and surprise are the essences of what a meme is.
To be candid, we see this loss of individuality in the George Floyd riots. In the looting and violence. We see it in the rallies for Trump and the diehard devotion of his followers. We see it in the demands for socialism, in the cries for disbanding the police, in the movements for border walls, and the widespread bias against Trump manifested in anger. I have my bias towards some of the causes mentioned, and a bias against some of them. Our immediate reaction is to affirm the loss of individual rationality when it refers to the movements we despise. Likewise, we claim the higher rational ground for the ones in which we are involved. I am fighting my tendency to overlook my participation in the unthinking crowd as I am writing this. I can, nonetheless, see the unthinking crowd (that I am a part of) following an ideal on both sides. Most disturbingly, though, I see it on Facebook.
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Our Need to Belong
Imagine a meme that depicts George Floyd picking cotton in heaven passes the screen of a conservative-leaning person. Without rational thought, that person clicks “share.”
Psychologically three things have happened:
1. After a slight instinctive laugh, the brain shuts down the medial prefrontal cortex, which allows you to think reflectively. When the sharer encountered the meme, it confirmed a thought he’s supposed to agree with as part of the conservative community. The meme is shared automatically, free from conscious thought. (6)
2. The friends of this person instinctively click “like” on the post after having a similar experience with the meme. Those “likes” trigger a serotonin release that makes the sharer feel like they belong to a likeminded group. (7) Studies even show that “likes” subconsciously cause us to accept the meme as accurate, even if we know it is not. (8) Feelings of heightened self-esteem and accomplishment when others interact with the meme lead to an addictive dopamine release. (9)(10) This person will probably do this again.
3. Our subject has become a part of a Psychological Crowd, often unwittingly. He now has little to no control over the impulsive mass behavior that promotes racial classes and feelings of superiority as long as he stays in the community. (11)
When I wrote the person that shared the meme in the above example, they responded that they just thought it was funny. “It’s not a big deal, right?” “I don’t care if it offends snowflakes.” I know this person not to be racist. He is, in reality, quite lovely. But he could not comprehend why I would bring up a stupid meme.
Questioning the sharing of a meme leads to confusion because the person never thought about it in the first place.
But still, the meme is painful for some, and it deepens the death of rational thought for others. We slip into a state that historically leads to an end that none of us want. We already find ourselves wondering, how did we get here? Then we scroll, share, and repeat.
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Memes are Weapons
“We develop a social identity with people who share our interests, and we naturally avoid contrary ideas. This leads to flawed ideologies based on emotion, stereotype, and prejudice rather than reason and evidence. These false beliefs are reinforced by propaganda that tells us that freedom or equality demands that we diminish the freedom or equality of others. Such beliefs are almost impossible to refute because different ideas threaten the believer’s ego and social relationships.” (12)
When we share a meme, we aim a weapon — hurting people that we would typically show love and care. We would never say half the things we share out loud, and if you are like me, you have probably thought nothing of it. It’s just funny, right? The hardest realization for us is that we are part of an online “Psychological Crowd,” doing the bidding of the ideology that we willingly partake. We are robotic and autonomous in our deviant behavior.
Over time, this weapon seeks to alienate us from our family, friends, and country. All in the name of patriotism. Nations do not fall because of calamity; they have routinely failed because of a change in cultural thought destabilizing society. Every time, this destabilization traces to an idea.
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Welcome to the Agency
So I go back to the boys that asked me if I was a “Nigger” on my first traumatic day of school in Arkansas. They somehow arrived at the belief that black people were inferior. An idea was implanted in their heads, most likely by their parents, and fueled by their friends. I heard them singing racist songs and telling racist jokes in the locker room. They showed me the oh so hilarious drawing of me hanging by my neck from a tree that said, “welcome to my family tree” under it. They didn’t understand why I didn’t laugh. The boys laughed and repeated the same tropes that they had been subjected to time and time again throughout the school year. Never stopping to think.
On that first day on the bus, with hands around my neck and fear in my veins, I timidly asked them, “Why?” I honestly wanted to know; why would they ask me such an odd question? Their response was, because “We don’t like your kind around here.” That was my first personal experience on the receiving end of racism.
If I could do it all over again, I wish I would have asked those boys one more time “Why?” Because at that point, the unthinking crowd would have to think. Though it surely wouldn’t have changed anything, it definitely would have been a start. Imagine:
“We don’t like your kind around here.” “Why?”
In my daydream, I can see them shuffling and not quite sure — but that is just a fantasy.
The forces that led those boys to that point are only a matter of conjecture, but we know that such actions are the product of ideas. We see it throughout history. Memes are ideas that are shared by someone utterly unaware of the impact of a single share. The reality is, we don’t have a centralized power putting up posters to enslave our minds. We don’t need one. You and I are all a part of the Ministry of Propaganda, doing our part. Welcome to the agency.
My challenge is this- When you see a meme that is grossly misleading, horribly racist, or merely rude, ask the sharer “Why.” And no matter the answer, keep asking the questions. Force the sharer to think. The unthinking crowd cannot exist without the suspension of reason (13), so we have to snap out of this hypnotized state, and it starts with you, the reader.
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Sources:
1. Gonen, Jay Y. (2013). The Roots of Nazi Psychology: Hitler’s Utopian Barbarism. University Press of Kentucky. p. 92.
2. http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/445/pg445-images.html
3. Walther Schulze-Wechsungen, Political Propaganda
4. Jason Stanley, How Propaganda Works
5. -Stanley Newcourt-Nowodworski, Black Propaganda in the Second World War
6. https://www.scientificamerican.com/…/why-we-are-wired-to-c…/
7. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5500317/
8. https://www.google.com/…/neuroscien…/meme-belief-120186/amp/
9. https://www.sciencedirect.com/…/psyc…/social-identity-theory
10. https://now.northropgrumman.com/this-is-your-brain-on-inst…/
11. https://medium.com/@netan…/the-dangers-of-memes-b1bb67e10083
12. Jason Stanley, How Propaganda Works
13. http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/445/pg445-images.html
