the advent of memetic theory has brought with it a terrible understanding, because it exposed idea systems for the inhuman monsters they are. i think this awareness is increasingly more than theoretical. social media lays the situation bare, and once you start to notice it, it’s hard not to. it’s everywhere.

and with that comes despair. that you are nothing more than a powerless vessel or a pawn of these forces so much vaster than you are. that your mind is a meme machine and nothing more. and suddenly your own self is alien to you.

the good news is that individuals can be empowered against this. you can resist rhetorical tides that are yanking you around. you can, yourself, filter out the bad and false and pass along only the good and true. and in this way, you take it back. your mind becomes yours again.

it seems like it would be, but this is not, at root, an epistemic question.

oh sure, the epistemic matters. you want to get the answer right. but it doesn’t matter if you’re fundamentally not asking the right question. it doesn’t matter if the reason you write, speak or reblog something is narcissistic, envious, resentful, petty. sure, people might get some things propositionally right for the wrong reason. but it will twist what they say, and eventually it will twist them. it’s a devil’s bargain.

cultivating this virtue is no easy task. it’s the work of years, a work of slowly and gradually becoming aware of yourself. but it’s possible.

the individual is critical, is absolutely necessary, because the individual is the vector for the meme. however, this does still leave the question of the collective. it’s in the collective that the monsters emerge, and we can’t fight collective monsters with individual virtue alone, if only because we can’t trust people to cultivate that virtue individually. if it were possible, it would have happened already. instead, it seems forces conspire to push everyone in the opposite direction.

but there is one thing that can help. there is one class of weapons at our disposal that has a chance in hell against the enemy.

to avoid getting devoured by eldritch abominations, you need a grand narrative.