So in the last installment of my series ‘The War for our Minds’, we explored memes and memetic warfare, how respectable military entities (USMC, US Navy, Nato,…) are in all seriousness studying memes as its own specific avenue and tool for fighting wars. We see it all around us, too.
We looked at what memes were, but now we will take a closer look at how they work.
In Part 5, I wrote:
“A meme is not the vaccination itself, which would be the narrative, the reasoning and proof and explanations that would lead a person to change their mind or to be reassured that they are on the right track. A meme, then, is but the booster shot that refreshes and reinforces an already known reality.”
That is the starting point. Memes don’t change perception or ideas, they reinforce ideas people already have, or they expose new ideas that deviate from the known baseline. Think about my example of the Uncle Sam recruiting poster: “I want you for US Army!” Not a single person who was pacifist and not patriotic, would enlist because of that memetic poster. But it would bring a person who already had ideas of patriotism or duty to actually go enlist.
In recent examples, memes were created to depict Trump as a Nazi. They failed, miserably. The reason? They had no base in truth. Trump is not a Nazi, nor a neo-Nazi. Not even a distant sympathizer with such ideas. Such a meme, then, wildly misses the mark.
A meme, by itself, does not contain the full information package, the narrative, that the composer of the meme wanted to convey. It only has a summary, a highly condensed version of it, indeed, a ‘booster’. If the narrative isn’t accepted yet, the meme has much less power, as its referent remains obscure and unknown.
Without a proper narrative in place, a story, with arguments and facts to support it, memes fail. But once successful, memes are much easier to remember than the full narrative, and much easier to share. That is their power. They boost the story, and from the outside seem to replace the narrative (while nothing could be further from the truth). People who know the narrative, in different shades ranging from fully aware of each and every detail, to subconscious general agreement or alignment, will instantly recognize the meme, and the meme will strengthen key elements from the story, boosting it, reminding people of the pillars of the narrative. As such, they strengthen the narrative.
But it is very important to notice this: a meme doesn’t NEED a narrative to be effective. Simply referring to truth is enough. A ‘normie’ might see a certain meme, for example, and while this person has no idea about the narratives that circulate among the red-pilled or the ‘Awake’, he or she can still recognize the truth behind the meme. (I’ll give an example later in this article).
Or to use a different visual: memes are the air support in the culture war. From the old blind bombs, over surgical strike capable missiles, to MOABs, they can take out enemy positions, have them duck for cover, and allow your own troops to advance.
But just as the US Military and NATO did in the 1990s war in former Yugoslavia, they think that an air campaign is all you need. You CANNOT win a war just from the air, you need actual boots on the ground. They do the actual conquering, they gain terrain.
Memes by themselves are pointless. Yet they are treated as if they are a danger in and of themselves. The EU had a study, last year, titled “It’s not funny anymore. Far-Right extremists’ use of humor”.
In it, they talk about how humor has been used with some success to counter the authority of extremist groups. They continued: “Thus, the potential of humour as a means of persuasion and disengagement is acknowledged by a variety of actors. Yet, much less attention has been paid to how humour is utilised by extremist groups and subcultures as a means of recruitment.”
No, absolutely not. While earlier they seemed to indicate that they understood that this was about narratives, they here continue as if humor (and thus, memes) can stand on their own.
This is what they had admitted earlier in that study:
“In doing so, we trace the strategic dissemination of far-right narratives and discuss how extremists conceal their misanthropic messages in order to deny ill intention or purposeful harm.”
This is a good approach. It is about NARRATIVES, in the first place. NOT about ‘memes’ or ‘humor’ or anything like that. Those are just the weapons, the methods, and not the goal or intent. Remember what all the military think tank and researchers admitted when writing about Cognitive Warfare? That such warfare is IDEOLOGICAL. I am still not ready to tackle that topic in proper depth (and will defer again to a later article), but suffice for now this: it is easier to attack the memes and humor of a group, than their ideology, while masking that you are engaging in an ideological battle. The EU is still supposed to be a democratic union of its member states (at least, in theory), united to support their mutual economic interest, with NATO protecting their military interests. As such, they are supposed, again in theory, to be more neutral when it comes to ideology. The elites are doing all they can to move the whole EU more leftwards, but until recently had to do so more covertly. Too many would revolt, and disagree with membership in a Union that is ideologically too outspoken on the left.
But now we see member states being punished, even as those same member states are at the forefront of helping countless refugees from Ukraine: Poland and Hungary. Their crime? They opposed the gender madness and open border policies of the EU. And have to be punished for daring to counter the group think, for poisoning the ideological purity of the EU. The message is very clear: there is no place for conservative countries in the EU. Be leftist, or get no money (while still having to pay your dues, of course!).
So, this same leftist EU apparatus, embroiled in a war with Russia, with Ukraine as the unfortunate battle ground, is afraid of right wing ‘humor’. Finds it dangerous. They openly explain why, and it is highly insightful:
“While it is a truism that extremist movements are only successful if they speak the language of the masses, researchers and practitioners have been repeatedly overwhelmed by the new guises that extremist communication has adopted in the digital era. The playful and ironic re-articulation of white supremacism and ethnonationalism has largely been understood as an innovative strategy to appeal to broader audiences.”
And then:
““The most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule” civil rights activist Saul Alinsky wrote back in 1971 in his renowned book Rules for Radicals. This advice has been key to winning the hearts and minds of people, especially by progressive movements, as “through humour much is accepted that would have been rejected if presented seriously” (Alinsky (1971): Rules for radicals, p. 75). In recent years, Alinsky’s book experienced an unexpected renaissance in far-right circles.”
They admit that the ‘right’ is way behind the ‘left’ on this (meaning that the left has been doing this for much longer, already!). And now that their ideological opponents are catching on, they suddenly cry foul. When the left themselves, with the guidance of Alinsky, were using humor and satire and ridicule, that was, apparently, ok, because for the good cause. Now as the Right is using it, they sound the alarm.
Notice also the absolute hypocrisy: they decry ‘ethnonationalism’, while at the same time they are the largest supporters of Ukrainian ethnonationalism! Asserting the supremacy of the Ukrainian (and European) people over the orcish, murderous Russian hordes! Slava Ukraini! Allow me a chuckle, but they have to get their stories straight.
In other words: the end justifies the means for the Leftist elites ruling the EU/NATO (and it should be very familiar among US elite circles, as well!). Very often your crime is not as much in ‘what’ you did, but ‘against who’ (them). For example: A company refuses to bake a cake for a gay couple? Hell is unleashed upon them! Another company bans or demonetizes someone they disagree with, such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have been doing? They get praised as stunning and brave warriors for justice. In both examples a company refused to render their main service, but the bakery against a ‘protected group’, and the media company against a ‘deplorable’. The crime is not the refusal of service itself! No, the crime is opposing one of them.
But this study does uncover a great insight in humor (and memes). It describes the reasons why it is attractive, but this is true not just for ‘extremist groups’, but true in every instance of the use of memes and humor:
“In persuasive terms, humour is especially attractive for extremist groups given its effect on the following:
Emotions – Humour activates repressed emotions, releases inhibitions, and enables an immediate and spontaneous exchange of feelings.
Cognition – Humour stimulates and activates decision-making processes and changes in perspective and replaces rigid behaviour patterns with more flexible ones.
Communication – Humour reduces interpersonal barriers and increases both identification with one’s own group and demarcation from the outside group”
It helps to communicate on an emotional level, while also engaging the reason of the audience. I would disagree strongly with the description of ‘replacing rigid behavior with flexible behavior’. That is self-serving, for any change would affect a target (and it would be ‘rigid’ only in the degree it opposed that influence), to replace it with something else (i.e. something more flexible, even if that new ‘flexible’ behavior would be more repressive and rigid than the first).
But their last point is also very important: humor, and memes, are a rallying point, an identification. As the first Christians had to be careful whom they told about their beliefs, under very severe persecution, they used symbols to identify themselves. Innocent looking, the fish and anchor (really, some great examples of early memes!) made it very clear that they were Christian, and others could recognize that, and connect safely and discreetly.
Today, the same happens. Seeing a MAGA hat or shirt, or Pepe the Frog, or any other such memetic image or phrase, creates an instant bond: they are with us! It is safe to talk with them about what I am passionate about!
Now, this idea to attack through humor is old. The left has used it to undermine society and institutions.
Look at George Carlin, for example. “In the bullsh*t department, no one holds a candle to religion!”, in an only very thinly veiled attack on Christianity. Now, criticism is always good. Even on religion. But it fits in this ideological attack. The Church is the major bulwark against the changes the left envisions, so it has to go. But, humor. Can’t be against a good joke about the clergymen, can you?
Now, back then (and still), there is a lot about the Church and the faith (or more precisely, the human beings making up the church and how well - or not- they put that faith into practice) that can be criticized. And a good amount of those jokes ring true, because they referred to actual issues. But today, the whole leftist agenda has so much ‘progressed’ (as a man’s man, I intend my puns, however bad they are), straight into woke territory, to the point that almost every connection with reality has been severed. As a result, woke comedy is deader than dead. Even leftist comedians have started complaining about the impossibility to tell even the most benign joke on college campuses, for example… And on TV, what happened with all those comedy based shows we used to have? Mostly gone, or unbearably sterile… Again: because they severed their link with reality and truth.
Here we need to make a quick side tour, and talk a little about lies and truth.
Lies come in many forms, and are told for myriads of reasons.
Lies can be classified by the reason they are told:
We tell ‘white lies’ to protect ourselves or the person we are lying to (“Oh, I love your gift!”, or “Nah, I’m doing fine, really!”). Or we tell lies to cover our own mistakes (“I didn’t do that!”). Others tell lies to undermine others (“Did you hear that John left the office late, taking Lisa in his car?”). Then there are those who tell lies to get attention or to boost their self-esteem. Or the bold-faced lie, a last ditch effort of the desperate (or the dumb), with cookie crumbs around their mouth insisting they did not eat the cookies… What about the fooling lies? Aimed at mere joking deception, in good nature. Those are just a few examples.
Interestingly, the bald-faced lie has a close relative, the ‘big lie’, which derives its power from the fact that people cannot fathom that such a grand lie would actually be told (think about the recent Covid scare: why would the government and CDC and FDA tell us lies of such magnitude? Impossible, right?).
Or we can classify them based on their method:
Lies of Omission. A lie of omission is often referred to as the “lie of choice,” as the person using this method can blame the interviewer for not asking the right question.
Lies of Denial. This type of lie will involve an untruthful person (or a truthful person) simply saying that they were not involved.
Lies of Fabrication. Fabrication is typically the most difficult type of lie for an individual to tell; the dishonest person needs to make up their “facts” as they are telling them, which of course makes it harder to remember later.
Lies of Minimization. Minimization involves attempts to distort the truth by making statements like “It was an accident” or “It was already damaged, though” in an attempt to minimize what they’ve done.
Lies of Exaggeration. This type of lie is similar to the lie of minimization in that there is a distortion of the truth; however, the subject will overstate what happened. For example, they might say something like, “Yeah, I am responsible for all the losses here.”
That list comes from an article on interview and interrogation training (notice that I gave the source, and the link: otherwise that would be plagiarism, passing of the writing of another as my own: both theft, and a distinct type of lie): the study of lies is big business. Knowing how to detect lies gives you a clear advantage in business or politics. As does knowing how to lie without being detected…
Another way to look at lies, is to check the level of truth in a statement.
It ranges from full truth (everything said is true, to the best knowledge of the speaker), to half-truths (where part of the truth is kept out, fabricated, minimized or exaggerated), or there is no truth present.
Such full lies are usually rather easy to spot. Without truth, a statement will very quickly fall flat. The more close to the truth a statement comes, the longer it will survive, and the greater the long term impact.
It is the half-truth that is more difficult to spot. And even harder, the lie by omission.
Now, lies are very effective, don’t get me wrong. Lies destroyed the life of General Flynn, for example. But there is an antidote: truth. Problem is, as the case of Gen. Flynn showed, that media and social media can seriously hamper the flow of information, and with that, the proper dissemination of the truth necessary to correct the lies that were told.
This is where Truth Social comes into play, and why Musk’s take-over of Twitter is such a huge deal. Yes, there are a lot of snowflakes on the left, so their emotive reactions are no surprise, but the wailing and complaining and tears about Twitter are for a very good reason: they just lost a major bulwark. The goal? Lying through omission, mostly, by snuffing out the conservative or the pro-Trump voices, or any criticism that got too close over the mark exposing them…
But notice how lies always have to rely on force to maintain them, unlike Truth. St. Augustine has a fantastic quote about that: “The Truth is like a lion. You don’t have to defend it. Let it loose. It will defend itself.”
This use of force to protect lies takes many forms. Demanding bipartisanship when you are weak, to coldly state “elections have consequences” when you are back in power as Obama did. Demanding free speech when your opinion is under criticism and you are losing terrain, but turning up ‘fact checkers’ and a ‘Ministry of Truth’ the moment you are in power, to force out the criticisms. Sending police officers to your door with a printout of your facebook and Twitter comments, is another example.
Or, now in full dictatorial territory: making the opposing position a thought crime, then into a legal crime, and ramp up the punishment into ever harsher sentences. Or by changing history books, as the 1619 Project is attempting to do.
Or, to bring back the example of January 6th, you create violence (or attempt to), and use that lie to support your other lies, but now under cover of ‘protecting the nation’ against ‘violent insurrectionists’.
What is really striking, is the incredibly high level of projection that can be seen. And it makes sense, the moment you realize that those lies and actions are designed to cover up for other lies.
Back to memes.
Memes are particularly well suited to destroy false narratives, as they pierce to the core elements, circumventing the well-crafted narrative. (It is easier to get a joke exposing hypocrisy, understanding it is exaggerated, than to listen to a full lecture on why there was hypocrisy, painstakingly detailing the 2 different positions taken simultaneously…)
Here is the example I promised at the beginning of this article. Everyone seeing this meme, will instantly recognize the truth about it, without needing to first hear the narrative. Even people not ‘red-pilled’ or ‘Awake’ might recognize it, as it reflects a truth that even they can observe and see. Suddenly, Ukraine is on the background (after Putin miraculously cured Covid and made it disappear from the continuous news cycle), and now abortion, women’s rights and the Supreme Court are the thing to be upset about. Normally, this shift takes more time, the topics spread out more. But now, in the span of a little over a month, they could see 3 different topics being presented in continuous focus!
It won’t change their mind, seeing that meme. But it will start a crack, bring in a dangerous question: “What is going on?”
Another meme, or a news story, perhaps a conversation with another person, will now be much more effective, as the realization of the truth that first meme pointed at, has brought doubt in the view of that person. (Or think about Hillary Clinton’s attempt to use the Met Gala as a launching platform to be back in the news, in a positive and polished way. But a single picture ruined that, completely! Who remembers what she said, when you can see how she lets black people, masked, serve her, unmasked!)
This works similar to humor and jokes in that regard, but with an important distinction: where a joke is more about pointing out that the emperor is naked (we have a Flemish saying: ‘laughing, the fool tells the truth’), a meme also has a reference to WHY/HOW (their link to the truth or narrative that they boost). Where both are fully combined, humorous memes are the most effective.
The focus on humor and jokes is not new. In the former Soviet Union, jokes were a massive thing. Often rather dark, those Soviet jokes are known as a mechanism of resistance. Over 200.000 of the Gulag prisoners were there because they got caught or ratted out for telling jokes…
“Two men in Moscow have been waiting for hours in line to buy bread. One man, Nikolai, gets upset, and says to his friend: “Yuri, I am sick of this. Waiting hours, for bread! I am going to kill Khrushchev!” And so he left. Not that long after, Nikolai comes back to his friend Yuri in the bread line. “Hey, Nikolai! Back already? That is quick! Is Khrushchev dead?” Yuri asked. “No. When I got to the Kremlin, the line of people wanting to kill him was even longer than this bread line, so I came back.””
Even during WWII, people would resist the Nazi occupation with humor. When met with German soldiers or officers, who greeted with the raised arm and a ‘Heil Hitler’, my great-uncle Leon during his forced labor time in Germany would happily reply ‘Alk ne liter!’, his dialect for ‘each a liter [of beer]!’. Subversive, but humorous. The Germans thought this simple Flemish man only mispronounced German, but was trying, as it sounded close enough to get away with it, so they were satisfied. And my great-uncle Leon? With a smile, he would go on his merry way.
So in short:
Memes are boosters of truth or a narrative. The closer its message is to that narrative, the more effective the meme. And the more truth that narrative contains, the more effective the overall campaign. (Or: memes are condensed ‘summaries’)
Memes themselves, on their own, cannot affect change. The underlying narrative does. Or the truth they refer to.
Memes are rallying points and markers. They identify groups and allow to set markers in discussions and debates online.
Memes are excellent counters to false narratives and misinformation. By their succinct nature, they don’t need long or complicated proof or argument to expose a lie or deception.
Memes that try to lie, are not effective. The referent of a meme is what drives the effect of it. If it has no connect to reality, the meme will come across as contrived and fake.
It is important to understand what memes are and how they work.
They are excellent tools in the information war, but they have to be properly understood to be really effective. One reason is that on the left, there is a basic assumption that prevents proper use of memes. Here I am entering the discussion on ideology, but this one part is too relevant here to leave out.
That assumption is this:
Humans are purely material beings, and are malleable. Meaning that there is no such thing as spirit or soul or ‘self’, and that intellect and emotion alike are merely the result of electric or chemical processes. Find the right formula of stimuli, and you can change and induce whatever thought or behavior you want, as it is simply a matter of scientific cause and effect, effectively chaining us, nothing more, however complex our lives (exterior and interior) appear to us.
The whole idea of ‘social engineering’ is largely based on that.
Now, to a degree, as we do have a material body, such impulses and techniques HAVE a certain effect. (Think about my article on Middle Grove, exposing that reality is not as simple as the much more famous ‘Robbers Cave’ experiment would suggest…) But is that really all there is to it?
Here is the issue: what if we are more than merely ‘matter’, but also have a ‘spirit’ or a ‘soul’, and the electric and chemical signal pathways are not the actual thinking, but simply the interface between our minds/souls and our bodies? This is largely the worldview of every religious person, whether or not they are aware of it. As a consequence, there is a higher emphasis on free will and freedom (and responsibility!), as something that cannot be captured in repeatable processes to affect change.
Which makes that you can fool them, by mimicking those natural pathways (or by lying or other deception), but only so far. There is a point where the ‘self’ of each person can take over, and ignore the stimuli, and make his or her own decision (just as in Robbers Cave). So if you put all your eggs in the materialistic basked, and try to concoct the perfect meme or other deceptive scheme to influence others, you will have some success, but ultimately will fall short.
For we are fearfully and wonderfully made.
If this long essay and study brings over 1 message, let it be this: however sophisticated the Cognitive or Memetic Warfare becomes, we are not slaves to it. But we have to claim that freedom, being aware of what is going on and who we are. And with Truth as a perfect antidote (it WILL set you free!), we have a fighting chance to resist any such attempts to influence us.
All is well.
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Addendum:
I am very much aware that there is a whole lot more to say about truth, about lies, about deception and influence. But since I was exploring this in light of memes, I think this suffices, without making this article too long. I look forward to reading your comments about any facets I didn’t highlight or ignored and that you think are important to consider!
Any chance we can stop calling Democrats (or ANY sizeable US group) "the left"? Democrats are liberals - or, too often, neoliberals - but they're not "left". (Not much "left" is left in the US.)
Also, ever wonder why we don't crow about "bringing capitalism" to other countries? We always claim we are "bringing democracy". Yet most of us equate the two. We act as if, given a choice, a democratically chosen economic system will inevitably be capitalist. Political systems (eg democracy, monarchy) and economic systems (eg capitalism, communism) are two different things. Capitalism isn't exclusive to democratic societies, and democracy isn't exclusive to capitalist ones.
👏 thank You Arn, God bless You and Your's 🙌