Memetic Index
It occurs to me that racism in America is, obviously, a macromemetic phenomenon, and that there might be an analogue to "herd immunity" as in covid-19 or any other infection disease.
By the way, a buddy recently told me that blood donation centers will now test your blood for covid-19 antibodies and tell you the result. I think I may go for it.
Like with disease, the actual disease moving through a population is part of it, but also the "average vulnerability" of a population. Americans are all racist in that we all have been inculcated with racist memes to the extent that even if we struggle to not deploy those memes all the time or without thinking, we still have no other set of memes that aren't racist. Obviously, otherwise racism would just disappear by itself.
I need to come up with a rigorous formulation of that statement, i.e., what does it mean to be a "non-practicing racist" as opposed to a "real racist"?
One odd phenomenon (if you don't know about macromemetics) is that scene in I think season 6 of The Sopranos where a Somanian guy on a bike crashes into the open door of one of AJ's hoodlum buddies on campus, they call him a racial slur, he protests that it doesn't apply to him, and they beat the crap out of him. I think that was not realistic, since the guy is Somali, he doesn't have the same American racist meme load, and so cannot resonate with those racist memes. I've seen this a lot -- the victim has to be able to resonate in order for it to be (memetic) oppression, otherwise it's simply memetic desolation.
Something of a digression, perhaps.
When does a meme cease to reliably produce a resonant response? In other words, the deployer (of a racist meme) opens a memetic loop which he/she hopes or anticipates will be closed by the deployment of some response meme from another individual assumed to be inurred of the same memetic inventory and so is capable of enacting such a response. Nota bene: the response may simply be to do nothing, e.g., tacit approval, which is common in the case of racist memes -- you don't have to agree; it is enough simply not to actively disapprove.
If an American racist knows a possible victim is from Africa and not the USA, they in principle know that this person may not understand the memetic inventory, and so will not respond as expected, say, with fear, shame, or, importantly, to receive sympathy or even defense from the surrounding people, since they either remain silent (whether they support the attacker or not), or they join in, or they stand ready to do so.
Back to the idea of herd immunity.
Okay, if we think of everybody in America as basically being "infected" (or inurred) with a large and complex system of memes to do with maintaining racism, it may be less interesting to think of them as "sick with a disease" and more along the lines of "vulnerable to infection."
The "spread of infection" concept, i.e., a memetic infection spreading out across a population to be newly infected (or injected), is a useful one in areas like sales and marketing, and possibly political consulting, political science, or economics. We want to sell a new kind of mousetrap that nobody's ever heard of, we want to inject this novel memetic system into a virgin population, how do we do it?
When you think about it, this process was done centuries ago in terms of racism, and refined over those centuries, in terms of the deliberate engineering and also the immunomemetically driven evolution of the system. Immunomemes work to prevent change to a memetic system, so that as many of the existing memes possible may continue to function.
So it's not so interesting to think of racism itself as a disease which is spreading, or which hundreds of millions of people need to be "cured from." I think herd immunity might be a more interesting way to look at it, and individual memetic deployments. This may also be an exercise in quantitative memetic analysis, which is exciting. I need to look at the maths behind herd immunity, and how that could be applied to memetic deployments (as opposed to injection).
If an "active racist" (I need to formulate some terms here) deploys a meme, and encounters an immunomemetic response instead of a resonant response, he's going to begin to face memetic starvation. If there are no agents to resonate with his racist memes, then his racist memes cannot be relied on for resonance, and he has to begin to consider not deploying them, or he needs to find a population which is willing to resonate with his racist memes. Unfortunately, (anti)social media provides a haven. If an active racist finds his IRL fellow racist agents drying up, he can turn to the 'net.
The quantity and geologic dispersity of racist agents on social media could be an index of the degree to which active racism is being strangled across the overall population, which may be a very interesting quantitative memetic index.
One point I wanted to raise, notwithstanding, is at what point does an "active racist" become unable or unwilling to deploy racist memes because he's likely to get no resonance or even immunomemetic response?,
It's probably a question of formulating the question. I wonder about Political Correctness. It's caused a lot of harm, for obvious reasons, but has it made it harder to eradicate racism? The rhetoric and hate speech around things like BLM (which racists refer to as "Bacon, Lettuce, and Mayonnaise"), kneeling at sporting events. It's turned from employing racial epithets and slurs to more passive-aggressive tactics like attacking the right to free speech and protest on flimsy and very unfairly applied pretenses (unarmed people of color go to jail or are murdered, while heavily armed white people who forcibly take over government wildlife preserves for no clear reason get off scot-free, and so on).
When the parasitic worm pokes his head out of the vein in your calf, you grab him and gradually pull him out by wrapping him with a stick, you don't just yank his head off and let the rest of him slip back inside you and carry on about his business. I wonder if that's what the PC movement has done, or if racist memes would've retreated as they appear to have done no matter what the course of treatment we undertook. It was reckless, self-important, and stupid, but we may have ended up where we are now any road.
Do we need to ban hate speech on social media? It's considered free speech now, and is going like wildfire on Facebook and elsewhere. The whole thrust is criticizing (read: "attacking") the BLM movement and other protests.
Anyway, is it possible to numerically model a memetic cohort, a memetic fabric where a memetic system like racism can be seen to be starved out like a disease like covid-19 when enough people become immune, even while a lot of people remain vulnerable to infection, or in this memetic perspective I'm proposing, remain susceptible to resonance, to deploying resonant memes?
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