When I was young, I heard the old folk answer to various ailments: feed a cold, starve a fever.
It turns out that you actually shouldn’t do that; bodies require energy and you should just eat and hydrate when you need to.
The saying, however, does apply to memetics.
Memes
The term ‘meme’ was coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, a way to analogize incorporeal ideas to genes.
In the book, Dawkins lays out the fundamental forces that create evolution:
variation, or the introduction of new change to existing elements;
heredity or replication, or the capacity to create copies of elements;
differential "fitness", or the opportunity for one element to be more or less suited to the environment than another.
He then argues that this applies to ideas as much as it does to genes. Think about it - ideas change as people add or subtract things to them, and they change in transmission all the time (have you ever played a game of telephone, where a sentence is whispered from person to person down a line and inevitably mangled in the process?).
Ideas replicate as well. When you tell someone something, when a child is taught something in school or by a parent, when a person reads the paper or watches the news: those are all cases of an idea being replicated, no different (in principle) from a cold being passed from person to person through sneezing.
Lastly, some ideas are better suited to some environments than others. Leftist politics tends to do very well in universities nowadays, but less well in for-profit businesses. Santa Claus is an idea that does very well with families in America but less well with military-age men in Lebanon. And so on.
So we can apply the same science, the same conceptual toolkit, to ideas that we can to genetics.
Colds vs. Fevers
In utterly non-medical terms, a cold is a nonthreatening disease you catch that lasts for about a week. It causes some combination of a runny nose, congestion, a sore throat, and maybe some other relatively minor symptoms. Most people get at least one or two a year.
A fever is a more dangerous disease, although it usually isn’t life-threatening. It doesn’t last as long as a cold but feels worse. It causes your temperature to rise and can lead to behavioral changes (irritability, irrationality, faintness).
As diseases caused by viruses, most of us deal with colds and fevers pretty regularly. Take some ibuprofen or Advil or whatever, a decongestant, maybe some cough drops, and get some sleep. Nothing to worry about.
But just as there’s an analogy between genes and memes, I think there’s an analogy to be made with colds and fevers, and it has to do with memetic viruses.
Memetic Viruses
Some ideas spread quickly, some spread slowly, and some never spread at all.
And then there’s the ideas that spread like wildfire, like pandemics. Ideas that take the world by storm.
These can be thought of as memetic viruses.
If you’ve ever heard of what is technically ‘critical theory’ being referred to as the ‘woke mind virus’, you’re familiar with the idea. One minute things are normal, and the next this new idea appears to be everywhere. Of course, ‘wokeness’ is far from the first idea to spread like a virus; Christianity did too.
So what are the memetic equivalents of colds and fevers?
Memetic Colds
A memetic cold is an idea that spreads from person to person, like any memetic virus, lasting for about a week in its host. It causes the person to talk about the idea but not be obsessed with it; it’s a common occurrence, nothing to worry about unless you have an already-compromised immune system.
A memetic cold, in other words, is an average news cycle. An event happens, the news covers it, you think about it for a few days to a week, and then you move on. It doesn’t change your deeply-held views or cherished beliefs. There’s little risk of radicalization. It’s a passing interest, a temporary talking point. It’s whatever happens to be the gossip around the water cooler (for those who still work in offices, is water cooler gossip still a thing?).
A cold is generally an unpleasant experience. A memetic cold doesn’t have to be unpleasant, but it’s characterized by an external idea taking up space in your mind that doesn’t really have a whole lot to do with you, on a day-to-day basis. It’s just there, causing your metaphorical nose to run and your metaphorical throat to be sore, until the week has come and gone and it’s just a bade memory.
The cure to memetic colds is, as the saying goes, to just feed yourself like normal. Don’t go down a rabbit hole, don’t stop consuming news or learning new things, just carry on, and it’ll go away on its own.
Memetic fevers, on the other hand…
Memetic Fevers
A memetic fever is inflammatory. It inflames, makes you hot and bothered. It’s all you can think about while you have it, a delirium and obsession that sweeps over you and burns everything else away.
A memetic fever, in other words, is outrage. It’s a heady thing - literally, in the memetic case. But you feel it in your body - you feel hot and heavy and achy, you feel a need to correct some kind of imbalance or fix some sort of problem. The issue with memetic fevers is that, unlike normal fevers, they can last a lot longer. Years, in some cases. They’re also highly contagious - when you’re outraged about something, one of the most tempting next steps is to tell everyone you know (especially on social media). Something Is Wrong In The World, and this injustice must be answered!
There’s a lot that could be said about a memetic fever. It tries to warp you until you’re more focused on spreading the fever than you are on actually taking care of yourself and your own life. It feels like the only thing in the world worth talking about, at least for a little while. It can make you pretty unpleasant to be around.
But instead of diving in to all of that, I’ll bring up the cure: while a memetic cold should be fed with new information and perspectives, a memetic fever should be starved.
A memetic fever feeds on new information; a combination of cherry-picking and confirmation bias makes sure that your default diet of information supports and inflames your existing fever. Your existing social network, if it has the same fever, will only reinforce your own. When we talk about echo chambers or silos, this is what we mean.
So if you want to break a memetic fever, starve it. Stop consuming new information, stop spending time in social environments where people have this fever, unplug and disconnect until you’re no longer hearing about the things that inflame you.
Do they still exist? Probably. But being outraged about them is unlikely to help solve anything, and it’s unlikely to be healthy in the long run.
For an actual first-person account of catching a memetic fever and then starving oneself to break it, I’d recommend checking out this post:
Conclusion
While you shouldn’t actually ‘feed a cold, starve a fever,’ you should feed memetic colds and starve memetic fevers. One’s physical diet needs consistent nutrition; one’s informational diet can benefit from the occasional fast.